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By admitting your inadequacies, you show that you're self-aware enough to know your areas for improvement - and secure enough to be open about them.
Adam Grant
I'm a precrastinator. Yes, that's an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet? I just feel that a few months ahead of time.
Negative feedback can make people feel inferior.
When takers talk about mistakes, they're usually quick to place the blame on other people. Givers are more likely to say 'Here's the mistake I made; I learned the following from it. Here are the steps I'm taking to make sure I don't let people down in the future.'
Power frees us from the chains of conformity.
Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.
If we want people to vote, we need to make it a larger part of their self-image.
Tweeting has taught me the discipline to say more with fewer words.
I love discovering compelling new ideas and doing what I can to help spread the word about them.
When medical students focus on helping others, they're able to weather the slings and arrows of long hours and devastating health outcomes: they know their colleagues and patients are depending on them.
When making decisions about people, stop confusing experience with evidence. Just as owning a car doesn't make you an expert on engines, having a brain doesn't mean you understand psychology.
Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world.
In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.
As more women 'lean in' and we collectively continue to fight sexism, there's another barrier to progress that hasn't been addressed: Many men who would like to see more women leaders are afraid to speak up about it.
I spend a lot of my time trying to help leaders build cultures of productive givers.
Frenemies are worse than enemies, and it's not just in the workplace.
Once people take ownership over the decision to receive feedback, they're less defensive about it.
When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals', the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.
As a man, it is true that I will never know what it is like to be a woman. As an organizational psychologist, though, I feel a responsibility to bring evidence to bear on dynamics of work life that affect all of us, not only half of us.
Productive givers focus on acting in the long-term best interests of others, even if it's not pleasant. They have the courage to give the critical feedback we prefer not to hear, but truly need to hear. They offer tough love, knowing that we might like them less, but we'll come to trust and respect them more.
Teams need the opportunity to learn about each other's capabilities and develop productive routines. So once we get the right people on the bus, let's make sure they spend some time driving together.
The opposite of an underminer is a supporter. When colleagues are supportive, they go out of their way to be givers rather than takers, working to enhance our productivity, make us look good, share ideas, and provide timely help.
The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.
I want my children to know that we often become resilient for others.
In the workplace, many people become helicopter managers, hovering over their employees in a well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to provide support. These are givers gone awry - people so desperate to help others that they develop a white knight complex and end up causing harm instead.
I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.
If I had the day off and knew everyone else was voting, I wouldn't miss it. It would become a routine part of my responsibility as a citizen - like paying taxes, only less soul crushing.
Kids who evolve into creative adults tend to have a strong moral compass.
People often believe that character causes action, but when it comes to producing moral children, we need to remember that action also shapes character.
One of the signs of a bad coworker is a pattern of persistent undermining - intentionally hindering a colleague's success, reputation, or relationships.
Geniuses don't have better ideas than the rest of us. They just have more of them.
When a salesperson truly cares about you, trust forms, and you're more likely to buy, come back for repeat business, and refer new customers.
If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours.
Authenticity is a virtue. But just as you can have too little authenticity, you can also have too much.
When people are depending on us, we end up finding strength we didn't know we had.
When you're good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.
If you want to find out if someone's a taker, it's not actually that useful to know what they've accomplished. What you want to want to know is how they explain them.
When it comes to landing a good job, many people focus on the role. Although finding the right title, position, and salary is important, there's another consideration that matters just as much: culture.
If you don't hire originals, you run the risk of people disagreeing but not voicing their dissent.
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters.
In the eyes of many people, giving doesn't count unless it's completely selfless. In reality, though, giving isn't sustainable when it's completely selfless.
I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed.
I can't tell you that if you bring in a bunch of weird and different people, then a bunch of good things will happen. But I can tell you that if you hire a bunch of similar people and promote only the ones who are most similar, a bunch of bad things are likely to happen.
No one wants to hear everything that's in your head. They just want you to live up to what comes out of your mouth.
When trying to innovate, most people stop after 10-15 possibilities, failing to recognize that their first ideas are usually the most obvious ones.
Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
When I think about voting, I can skip it and still see myself as a good citizen. But when I think about being a voter, now the choice reflects on my character. It casts a shadow.
Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence.
Some people are selfish in all of their relationships. Those people are called sociopaths.
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