Some Notes from Adam Grant's "Originals"

What can I apply right now:

1. Unfamiliarity breeds contempt:
1. Exposures are most effective when they are short and mixed in with other ideas, to help maintain the audience’s curiosity
2. If you are making a suggestion to a boss:
1. 30-second elevator pitch on Monday
2. Revisit later in the week
3. Then ask for feedback next week
2. Power without status:
1. Managers appreciate when employees take the initiative to offer help, build networks.  But there is a form of initiative that gets penalised - speaking up with suggestions.
2. When people sought to exert influence but lacked respect, others perceived them as self-serving and difficult. They have not earned our admiration, so they do not have the right to tell us what to do.
3. Francis Ford Coppola once said, “The way to come to power is not always to merely challenge the Establishment, but first make a place in it and then challenge and double-cross the Establishment.”

Personally already doing a bit of:

1. Here’s why you should not buy Babble.
1. “Unbridled optimism comes across as salesmanship; it seems dishonest somehow,”
2. State the problems of your proposition way before selling the good things about your proposition.
3. By acknowledging its most serious problems, it made it harder for investors to generate their own ideas about what was wrong with the company.  As they find it harder to identify other concerns, investors start to think that nothing was seriously wrong with Babble.
2. Procrastination can help with creativity. 
1. In the middle of the tasks - where the final direction is not fixed yet, yet there are some materials to work on already.

Other Tips and stories from Originals:

1. Users who use Chrome and Firefox were more committed and better performers than Safari and IE users because they demonstrate more initiative to get these 2 browsers that were not installed.
2. They know in their hearts that failing would yield fewer regrets than failing to try
3. You got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince:  Edison has 1093 patents and not all were hits.
4. Nobel Peace Prize Winners are more dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists. Get involved in arts like music, crafts, and even performing (22 X).
5. Intuitions only serve you well in domains where you have a lot of experience.
6. Narcissism of Small Difference: Vegans should 3 X as much prejudice towards vegetarians as vegetarians did towards vegans.  In their eyes, if you cared about the cause, you will be all in.
7. In order to succeed, originals must become tempered radicals.  Need to believe in values that depart from traditions that go against the grain, and yet learn to tone done their radicalism by presenting their beliefs in ways that are more appealing to mainstream audiences.
8. It is hard to change people’s values - we ought to present our values as a means of pursuing theirs. It is hard to change people’s ideals. It is much easier to link our agendas to the familiar values that people are holding.
9. Cut our frenemies and convert our enemies
10. Our Best allies aren’t the people who have supported us all the way but the ones who started out against us and then came around to our side. Like Lincoln and Seward.
11. For Children,  In events that showcase their ability such as the skill domain, we should praise their efforts - “hard-working” instead  of “intelligent”.  In good behavior for the moral domain, we should praise the character instead of the behavior.  “Thank you for being a sharer” rather than “thank you for sharing”
12. If the audience view the new behaviour as safe, emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it. .You still can use "loss framing" for this.  They will miss out on all the good things if they don't do it. If the audience view the behaviour as risky, accentuate the bad things that will happen if they do not change.
13. When you are angry at others, you think of retaliation. When you are angry for others, we don’t want to just punish, we seek out to help. Keep the anger in people so that there is energy to move. But don’t get angry at people, it clouds your thinking and slow you down.