Once people take ownership over the decision to receive feedback, they're less defensive about it.
— Adam Grant
In life, there's no such thing as an unmitigated good.
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.
I spend a lot of my time trying to help leaders build cultures of productive givers.
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.
In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.
If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours.
Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world.
The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that's toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.
If we want people to vote, we need to make it a larger part of their self-image.
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.
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.
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.
To generate creative ideas, it's important to start from an unusual place. But to explain those ideas, they have to be connected to something familiar.
The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion - it's reality.
Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. They are people who stand out and speak up. Originals drive creativity and change in the world. They're the people you want to bet on.
Negative feedback can make people feel inferior.
Authenticity is a virtue. But just as you can have too little authenticity, you can also have too much.
I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.
Some people are selfish in all of their relationships. Those people are called sociopaths.
The culture of a workplace - an organization's values, norms and practices - has a huge impact on our happiness and success.
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.
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.
The mark of higher education isn't the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It's the skills you gain about how to learn.
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.
Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters.
Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence.
From a relationship perspective, givers build deeper and broader connections.
In the conversation about women in leadership, male voices are noticeably absent.
The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.
Agreeable people are warm and friendly. They're nice; they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada.
Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.
From a motivation perspective, helping others enriches the meaning and purpose of our own lives, showing us that our contributions matter and energizing us to work harder, longer, and smarter.
We have many identities, and we can't be authentic to them all. The best we can do is be sincere in our efforts to earn the values we claim.
I'm not a fan of being inauthentic.
If you want to be a generous giver, you have to watch out for selfish takers.
If an organization values innovation, you can assume it's safe to speak up with new ideas, leaders will listen, and your voice matters.
When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns.
Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it's easy to thwart.
We all have thoughts and feelings that we believe are fundamental to our lives but that are better left unspoken.
Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don't trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships - people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.
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.
Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be devastating.
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.
For women to achieve equal representation in leadership roles, it's important that they have the backing of men as well as women.
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 believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed.
Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me.
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.
