The 20-Year-Old Perspective: Originals by Adam Grant
For Whom: Innovators, inventors, problem-solvers, leaders, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and anyone who likes to come up with something new.
By Whom: Adam Grant, Professor of Psychology at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
After reading his 2021 book, Think Again, I felt Adam Grant had somehow hit the magical balance between the two warring factions of the Psychology writing world: academia and storytelling. On the academia side, scientists like Daniel Kahneman spend ages telling us about their life’s work, engaging every little nuance and idiosyncrasy and putting everyone who isn’t an expert in experimental psychology to sleep. On the storytelling side, writers like Malcolm Gladwell spin a vivid narrative of the world through anecdotes of documentary-inspiring events, while glancing at the science through the speeding window of a bullet train. Adam Grant, in my experience with Think Again and now Originals, seems to hit my perfect balance of these two archetypes.
Originals is a book about ideas, the people that think them up, and how we can change ourselves and others to getting ideas that can have a real impact on the issues we face. Grant introduces several points of through throughout the entire lifetime of an idea, from its inception to implementation to its re-inception. Stories of entrepreneurial geniuses explained in more down-to-earth tones, examinations of the fates of companies like Polaroid in its inability to adopt novel ideas, and one neat one about a guy who swam in the waters of the North Pole. All of it is wrapped up with a nice little bow by the “Actions for Impact” section at the end, which as I mentioned in my review of Think Again, as something I wished every author of a self-help, psychology, or business book should be mandated to do.
I do believe there are some caveats, though. Grant doesn’t seem to address this directly, but a good number of these examples and anecdotes either come from or are heavily implied to be tailored to a technology audience. As a Human-Computer Interaction undergraduate in Seattle with a detailed history of hackathon engagement, I can’t really be the one complaining, but it would be great to either introduce some of the ideas about ideation from fields other than retail and technology. For instance, how does a military come up with new military strategy?
Another thing is the timing. Because it’s an inevitability that ideas will change and evolve over time, even some of the ideas in this very book are being updated as time goes on, by Grant himself nonetheless (it’s the part about strong opinions, loosely held — Grant states in Think Again that his thinking has changed towards a model of some opinions, need more evidence). The explosion of information and, in response, problems that need solving, have created an environment in the early 21st century where new ideas are constantly being tested and retested at a rate faster than at any point in human history. As accessibility to information increases, more people will join the fray as inventors and innovators, and while Originals may describe how ideas come about now, I would love to see a comparison between this book and a sequel, 50 years into the future. Looking forward to the release of Unoriginals, in 2066.
4.5/5.
