92+ Adam Grant Quotes to Drive Personal and Professional Growth

Adam Grant is an American professor, author, and organizational psychologist. He is a Wharton professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg. He is also the host of the TED podcast WorkLife. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Adam Grant on leadership, rethinking, learning.

Top 10 Adam Grant Quotes

1. Choosing a career isn’t like finding a soulmate. It’s possible that your ideal job hasn’t even been invented yet.
2. 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.
3. The most effective leaders score high in both confidence and humility.
4. A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools — and some of the most cherished parts of your identity.
5. Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.
6. Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart.
7. Practice makes perfect but it doesn’t make new.
8. I think of productivity as using your time to accomplish things of value to you and others.
9. Time confetti is an enemy of both energy and of excellence. If we want to find flow we need better boundaries.
10. People are remarkably open to criticism when they believe it’s intended to help them.

Adam Grant Short Quotes

• Once we hear the story and accept it as true, we rarely bother to question it.
• Talented people are attracted to those who care about them.
• Arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses.
• Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.
• Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts.
• Our identities are open systems, and so are our lives.
• Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity but it can be a valuable resource for creativity.
• When people are depending on us, we end up finding strength we didn’t know we had.
• Procrastination is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
• Knowledge is best sought from experts but creativity and wisdom can come from anywhere.

Adam Grant Quotes About Leadership

What distinguishes the greatest leaders of our time it’s that success is very rarely a goal for them; it’s a byproduct of other goals that they have. — Adam Grant

Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. — Adam Grant

Our companies communities and countries don’t necessarily suffer from a shortage of novel ideas. They’re constrained by a shortage of people who excel at choosing the right novel ideas. — Adam Grant

One of my big goals professionally is to get more leaders to stop acting on intuition and experience and instead be data-driven. — Adam Grant

Adam Grant Quotes About Learning

Changing your mind doesn’t make you a flip-flopper or a hypocrite. It means you were open to learning. — Adam Grant

Focusing on results might be good for short-term performance but it can be an obstacle to long-term learning. — Adam Grant

Collecting a teacher’s knowledge may help us solve the challenges of the day but understanding how a teacher thinks can help us navigate the challenges of a lifetime. — Adam Grant

Thinking again can help you generate new solutions to old problems and revisit old solutions to new problems. It’s a path to learning more from the people around you and living with fewer regrets. — Adam Grant

Evidence shows that in learning cultures, organizations innovate more and make fewer mistakes. — Adam Grant

At work and in life the best we can do is plan for what we want to learn and contribute over the next year or two and stay open to what might come next. — Adam Grant

Adam Grant Quotes About Work

It takes confident humility to admit that we’re in a work in progress. — Adam Grant

There’s a wealth of evidence that people want to do meaningful work. — Adam Grant

Every time we interact with another person at work, we have a choice to make: do we try to claim as much value as we can, or contribute value without worrying about what we receive in return? — Adam Grant

Our antidote to burnout is not necessarily less work. It could be more meaning. — Adam Grant

The fear of being judged as weak or naïve prevents many people from operating like givers at work. — Adam Grant

Adam Grant Famous Quotes And Sayings

Originality is taking the road less traveled. Championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better. But it doesn’t stop there: Originals are people who take the initiative to make their visions a reality. — Adam Grant

A good debate is not a war. It’s not even a tug-of-war… it’s more like a dance that hasn’t been choreographed. — Adam Grant

Conviction in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false positives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential. — Adam Grant

If we want to forecast whether the originators of a novel idea will be successful, we need to look beyond the enthusiasm they express about their ideas and focus on the enthusiasm for execution that they reveal through their actions. — Adam Grant

Givers reject the notion that interdependence is weak. Givers are more likely to see interdependence as a source of strength a way to harness the skills of multiple people for a greater good. — Adam Grant

The culture of a workplace – an organization’s values, norms and practices – has a huge impact on our happiness and success. — Adam Grant

Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world. — Adam Grant

If we communicate the vision behind our ideas the purpose guiding our products people will flock to us. — Adam Grant

Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality. — Adam Grant

Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. — Adam Grant

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. — Adam Grant

Originality brings more bumps in the road, yet it leaves us with more happiness and a greater sense of meaning. — Adam Grant

I think the foundation of creating psychological safety is making it acceptable and even encouraging for people to raise problems if they haven’t figured out a solution yet. — Adam Grant

Never give up doesn’t mean keep doing the thing that’s failing. It means don’t get locked into one narrow path and stay open to broadening your goals. — Adam Grant

My past self was Mr Facts – I was too fixated on knowing. Now I’m more interested in finding out what I don’t know. — Adam Grant

We live in a rapidly changing world, where we need to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking. — Adam Grant

It's ironic that when you go through a tragedy, you appreciate more. You realize how fragile life is and that there are so many things to still be thankful for. — Adam Grant

I think the worst way to be more productive is to set your sights on being more productive. What you want to do instead is to focus on a reason to be more productive. — Adam Grant

Listening well is more than a matter of talking less. It’s a set of skills in asking and responding. — Adam Grant

We don’t know how time and circumstances will change what we want and even who we want to be, and locking our life GPS onto a single target can give us the right directions to the wrong destination. — Adam Grant

To get real diversity of thought, you need to find the people who genuinely hold different views and invite them into the conversation. — Adam Grant

Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps. — Adam Grant

And they act in the face of risk, because their fear of not succeeding exceeds their fear of failing. — Adam Grant

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. — Adam Grant

If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours. — Adam Grant

If we create networks with the sole intention of getting something we won’t succeed. We can’t pursue the benefits of networks; the benefits ensue from investments in meaningful activities and relationships. — Adam Grant

If an organization values innovation, you can assume it’s safe to speak up with new ideas, leaders will listen, and your voice matters. — Adam Grant

Most of the jobs you get are more or less through word of mouth, or a recommendation. It’s really important to have a good reputation. — Adam Grant

Rather than looking outward in an attempt to predict the outcome, you turn inward to your identity. You base the decision on who you are – or who you want to be. — Adam Grant

Effective hiring screening and team building is not about bringing in the givers. It’s about weeding out the takers and if you can do that well you’ll be left with givers and matchers. — Adam Grant

Passions are developed, not just discovered. — Adam Grant

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. — Adam Grant

I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile. — Adam Grant

Original thinkers doubt the default. — Adam Grant

We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. — Adam Grant

Excellence is the product of high aspirations and low ego. — Adam Grant

For startups, there’s so much pivoting that’s required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you’re in bad shape. — Adam Grant

If you don’t hire originals you run the risk of people disagreeing but not voicing their dissent. — Adam Grant

What you need is a challenge network. I think of a challenge network as the group of your most thoughtful critics who are able to hold up a mirror so that you can see your blind spots and then know what you need to rethink. — Adam Grant

Highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability, and opportunity. — Adam Grant

There’s evidence that on average people are checking emails 74 times a day switching tasks every 10 minutes and that creates what’s been called time confetti where we take what could be meaningful moments of our lives and we shred them into increasingly tiny useless pieces. — Adam Grant

Foreclosing on one identity is like following a GPS that gives you the right directions to the wrong destination. — Adam Grant

Focus attention and energy on making a difference in the lives of others, and success might follow as a by-product. — Adam Grant

The more I help out, the more successful I become. But I measure success in what it has done for the people around me. That is the real accolade. — Adam Grant

People tend to have one of three 'styles' of interaction. There are takers, who are always trying to serve themselves; matchers, who are always trying to get equal benefit for themselves and others; and givers, who are always trying to help people. — Adam Grant

The most meaningful way to succeed is to help others succeed. — Adam Grant

If we want a better original idea, we must generate our own before we screen others' suggestions. — Adam Grant

Enemies make better allies than frenemies. — Adam Grant

When you're dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you're constantly on guard, grappling with questions of trust. — Adam Grant

Procrastinate strategically... Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity but it can be a valuable resource for creativity. — Adam Grant

When you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea. — Adam Grant

Dissenting opinions are useful even when they're wrong. So instead of speaking to highly agreeable audiences, target suggestions to people with a history of originality. — Adam Grant

Good guys are most likely to finish last, but also most likely to finish first. — Adam Grant

Being a giver is not good for a 100-yard dash, but it’s valuable in a marathon. — Adam Grant

Negative relationships are unpleasant but predictable. — Adam Grant

This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. — Adam Grant

Most people believe that great leaders are distinguished by their ability to give compelling answers. This profound book shatters that assumption, showing that the more vital skill is asking the right questions…. Berger poses many fascinating questions, including this one: What if companies had mission questions rather than mission statements? This is a book everyone ought to read—without question. — Adam Grant

Life Lessons by Adam Grant

1. Adam Grant's work emphasizes the importance of collaboration and generosity in the workplace, showing that helping others can be beneficial to everyone involved.
2. He also encourages people to embrace failure as an opportunity for growth, and to think outside the box in order to come up with creative solutions to problems.
3. Finally, he emphasizes the importance of taking risks and challenging yourself in order to reach your full potential.