Book Review | Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant & Sheryl Sandberg

I have just finished reading Originals by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg and overall it was a great book!

I found Adam Grant to write like devil's advocate in this book, upending our standard views about the world.

It's no wonder he sounds like that though, given that this book is about originality and originals usually do sound weird when you talk to them. You can't become a visionary/ original by taking things as is nor following common wisdom.

It's weird dilemma though, everybody thinks they are original. This is true to a certain extent, in the sense that we are all unique combinations of genes.

The differentiation comes from whether we conform to the rules of society or not. Majority of people live the life within the bounds defined by the society. Go to a good college, do a well-paying job, get married, have kids, etc.

Now, maybe you expect me to say that we should ignore this pre-defined path and do whatever we please. No.

Nowadays, the anti-norm culture is so strong that it has become the norm. I see a lot of people my age where they question the fundamental structures of society like marriage, having kids, and doing a corporate job.

People think they are being unique by rejecting these time-tested concepts. However, they are conforming to the rules of the anti-culture movement, and being a conformist, albeit to a different camp.

Being unique or original doesn't matter. The most important thing is you use your brain to think about things, question the world order, and decide by yourself whether things make sense. If marriage at an early age makes sense, and go follow it. Not because society suggests it. Or, don't not get married at an early age just because you want to defy the rules.

As long as you are the decision maker for your behavior all is good.

Another aspect is that not all originality is good. You can be a reckless driver. That's original becuase majority of people follow rules when they drive.

A lot of young people who claim to be original have this kind of originality where their originality is not existent in the first place, or it is a destructive type of originality.

The important thing is you use your originality to make the world a better place and fulfill your potential along the way.

Review

While above was mostly my views about originality, now let me talk about some of the main arguments in this book.

Originals drive the world forward:

Most of the progress in human history came from challenging the status quo and thinking out of the box.

It was brave and intelligent people like Galileo, Kepler, Einstein, and Mandela that moved the world forward in their respective areas.

Below are some of the learnings from the book which can help you be original and get support for your original ideas:

• Question the default.
• Triple the number of ideas you generate.
• Immerse yourself in a new domain.
• Procrastinate strategically. When you’re generating new ideas, deliberately stop when your progress is incomplete. By taking a break [...] you’re more likely to engage in divergent thinking and give ideas time to incubate.
• Seek more feedback from peers.
• Balance your risk portfolio. When you’re going to take a risk in one domain, offset it by being unusually cautious in another realm of your life. Like the entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs while testing their ideas
• Highlight the reasons not to support your idea.
• Make your ideas more familiar. Reactions typically become more positive after ten to twenty exposures to an idea, particularly if they’re short, spaced apart by a few days, and mixed in with other ideas.
• Motivate yourself differently when you’re committed vs. uncertain. Committed: Focus on the progress left to go—you’ll be energized to close the gap. Uncertain: Think of the progress you’ve already made. Having come this far, how could you give up now?
• If you’re nervous, it’s hard to relax. It’s easier to turn anxiety into intense positive emotions like interest and enthusiasm.
• Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator. Talking about victim makes you more empathetic, increasing the chances that you’ll channel your anger in a constructive direction.
• Realize you’re not alone. Even having a single ally is enough to dramatically increase your will to act. Find one person who believes in your vision and begin tackling the problem together.
• Remember that if you don’t take initiative, the status quo will persist.

Favorite Quotes from The Book

As for all book reviews, I listed my favorite quotes in this book:

• The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.
• “On matters of style, swim with the current,” Thomas Jefferson allegedly advised, but “on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
• Ultimately, the people who choose to champion originality are the ones who propel us forward. After spending years studying them and interacting with them, I am struck that their inner experiences are not any different from our own. They feel the same fear, the same doubt, as the rest of us. What sets them apart is that they take action anyway. They know in their hearts that failing would yield less regret than failing to try.
• Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.
• It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it—but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.”
• If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.”
• “We find that entrepreneurs are significantly more risk-averse than the general population,”
• As we gain knowledge about a domain, we become prisoners of our prototypes.
• “It’s never the idea; it’s always the execution.”
• “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”
• “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,”
• “I’m from a very large family—nine parents,” comedian Jim Gaffigan jokes. “When you’re the youngest of a big family, by the time you’re a teenager, your parents are insane.”
• “Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.”
• “Proper revolutions are not cataclysmic explosions,” Popovic observes. “They are long, controlled burns.”
• Adler argued that because firstborn children start life as only children, they initially identify with their parents. When a younger sibling arrives, firstborns risk being “dethroned” and often respond by emulating their parents: they enforce rules and assert their authority over the younger sibling, which sets the stage for the younger child to rebel.
• “A person whose liking for us increases over time will be liked better than one who has always liked us,”
• Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at age forty-nine using a “trial-and-error method,” scholars note, and “discovered his pliable plot as he went along, writing without a definite resolution or plan in mind.” Twain himself commented, “As the short tale grows into the long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite different one.”
• To sustain our originality as we age and accumulate expertise, our best bet is to adopt an experimental approach. We can make fewer plans in advance for what we want to create, and start testing out different kinds of tentative ideas and solutions. Eventually, if we’re patient enough, we may stumble onto something that’s novel and useful.

Hope you enjoyed this review. Give this book a try and let me know what you think.