Top Quotes: “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” — Adam Grant
Introduction
“original, n. A thing of singular or unique character; a person who is different from other people in an appealing or interesting way; a person of fresh initiative or inventive capacity.”
“To get Firefox or Chrome, you have to demonstrate some resourcefulness and download a different browser. Instead of accepting the default, you take a bit of initiative to seek out an option that might be better. And that act of initiative, however tiny, is a window into what you do at work.
The customer service agents who accepted the defaults of Internet Explorer and Safari approached their job the same way. They stayed on script in sales calls and followed standard operating procedures for handling customer complaints. They saw their job descriptions as fixed, so when they were unhappy with their work, they started missing days, and eventually just quit.
The employees who took the initiative to change their browsers to Firefox or Chrome approached their jobs differently. They looked for novel ways of selling to customers and addressing their concerns. When they encountered a situation they didn’t like, they fixed it. Having taken the initiative to improve their circumstances, they had little reason to leave. They created the jobs they wanted. But they were the exception, not the rule.”
“The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. I’ve spent more than a decade studying this, and it turns out to be far less difficult than I expected.
The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place. We’re driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of dejà vu. Déjà vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if we’ve seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse: we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems.
Without a vuja de event, Warby Parker wouldn’t have existed. When the founders were sitting in the computer lab on the night they conjured up the company, they had spent a combined sixty years wearing glasses. The product had always been unreasonably expensive. But until that moment, they had taken the status quo for granted, never questioning the default price. “The thought had never crossed my mind,” cofounder Dave Gilboa says. “I had always considered them a medical purchase. I naturally assumed that if a doctor was selling it to me, there was some justification for the price.”
Having recently waited in line at the Apple Store to buy an iPhone, he found himself comparing the two products. Glasses had been a staple of human life for nearly a thousand years, and they’d hardly changed since his grandfather wore them for the first time, Dave wondered why glasses had such a hefty price tag. Why did such a fundamentally simple product cost more than a complex smartphone?
Anyone could have asked those questions and arrived at the same answer that the Warby Parker squad did. Once they became curious about why the price was so steep, they began doing some research on the eyewear industry. That’s when they learned that it was dominated by Luxottica, a European company that had raked in over $7 billion the previous year.’
“Understanding that the same company owned LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban and Oakley, and the licenses for Chanel and Prada prescription frames and sunglasses all of a sudden, it made sense to me why glasses were so expensive.” Dave says. “Nothing in the cost of goods justified the price.” Taking advantage of its monopoly status, Luxottica was charging twenty times the cost. The default wasn’t inherently legitimate; it was a choice made by a group of people at a given company.”
“Child prodigies, it turns out, rarely go on to change the world. When psychologists study history’s most eminent and influential people, they discover that many of them weren’t unusually gifted as children. And if you assemble a large group of child prodigies and follow them for their entire lives, you’ll find that they don’t outshine their less precocious peers from families of similar means.”
“Most prodigies never make that leap. They apply their extraordinary abilities in ordinary ways, mastering their jobs without questioning defaults and without making waves. In every domain they enter, they play it safe by following the conventional paths to success. They become doctors who heal their patients without fighting to fix the broken systems that prevent many patients from affording health care in the first place. They become lawyers who defend clients for violating outdated laws without trying to transform the laws themselves. They become teachers who plan engaging algebra lessons without questioning whether algebra is what their students need to learn. Although we rely on them to keep the world running smoothly, they keep us running on a treadmill.”
“When achievement motivation goes sky high, it can crowd out originality: The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure. Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success. As psychologists Todd Lubart and Robert Stemberg put it, “Once people pass an intermediate level in the need to achieve, there is evidence that they actually become less creative.””
“Don’t day jobs distract us from doing our best work? Common sense suggests that creative accomplishments can’t flourish without big windows of time and energy, and companies can’t thrive without intensive effort. Those assumptions overlook the central benefit of a balanced risk portfolio: Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another. By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses. When Pierre Omidyar built eBay, it was just a hobby; he kept working as a programmer for the next nine months, only leaving after his online marketplace was netting him more money than his job. “The best entrepreneurs are not risk maximizers,” Endeavor cofounder and CEO Linda Rottenberg observes based on decades of experience training many of the world’s great entrepreneurs. “They take the risk out of risk-taking.””
“Some years earlier, two entertainers got together to create a 90-minute television special. They had no experience writing for the medium and quickly ran out of material, so they shifted their concept to a half-hour weekly show. When they submitted their script, most of the network executives didn’t like it or didn’t get it. One of the actors involved in the program described it as a “glorious mess.”
After filming the pilot, it was time for an audience test. The one hundred viewers who were assembled in Los Angeles to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the show dismissed it as a dismal failure. One put it bluntly: “He’s just a loser, who’d want to watch this guy?” After about six hundred additional people were shown the pilot in four different cities, the summary report concluded: “No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again.” The performance was rated weak.
The pilot episode squeaked onto the airwaves, and as expected, it wasn’t a hit. Between that and the negative audience tests, the show should have been toast. But one executive campaigned to have four more episodes made. They didn’t go live until nearly a year after the pilot, and again, they failed to gain a devoted following. With the clock winding down, the network ordered half a season as replacement for a canceled show, but by then one of the writers was ready to walk away: he didn’t have any more ideas.
It’s a good thing he changed his mind. Over the next decade, the show dominated the Nielsen ratings and brought in over $1 billion in revenues. It became the most popular TV series in America, and TV Guide named it the greatest program of all time.
If you’ve ever complained about a close talker, accused a partygoer of double-dipping a chip, uttered the disclaimer “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” or rejected someone by saying “No soup for you,” you’re using phrases coined on the show. Why did network executives have so little faith in Seinfeld?”
“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.” Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.
At Upworthy, the company that makes good content go viral, two different staff members wrote headlines for a video of monkeys reacting to receiving cucumbers or grapes as rewards. Eight thousand people watched it when the headline was “Remember Planet of the Apes? It’s Closer to Reality than You Think.” A different headline led to fifty-nine times more views, enticing nearly half a million people to watch the same video: “2 Monkeys Were Paid Unequally, See What Happens Next.” Upworthy’s rule is that you need to generate at least twenty-five headline ideas to strike gold.”
“Neither test audiences nor managers are ideal judges of creative ideas. They’re too prone to false negatives; they focus too much on reasons to reject an idea and stick too closely to existing prototypes. And we’ve seen that creators struggle as well, because they’re too positive about their own ideas. But there is one group of forecasters that does come close to attaining mastery: fellow creators evaluating one another’s ideas. In Berg’s study of circus acts, the most accurate predictors of whether a video would get liked, shared, and funded were peers evaluating one another.
When artists assessed one another’s performances, they were about twice as accurate as managers and test audiences in predicting how often the videos would be shared. Compared to creators, managers and test audiences were 56 percent and 55 percent more prone to major false negatives, undervaluing a strong, novel performance by five ranks or more in the set of ten they viewed.”
“Berg wanted to boost the chances that people would correctly rank a novel, useful idea first, as opposed to favoring conventional ideas. He randomly assigned half of the participants to think like managers by spending six minutes making a list of three criteria for evaluating the success of new products. This group then made the right bet on a novel, useful idea 51 percent of the time. But the other group of participants was much more accurate, choosing the most promising new idea over 77 percent of the time. All it took was having them spend their initial six minutes a little differently: instead of adopting a managerial mindset for evaluating ideas, they got into a creative mindset by generating ideas themselves.”
“If you’re the proud owner of several designer handbags, the less time you have to inspect them, the more accurate your judgments. Experienced handbag owners were 22 percent more accurate when they had just five seconds than when they had thirty seconds. When you’ve spent years studying handbags, intuition can beat analysis, because your unconscious mind excels at pattern recognition. If you stop and take the time to think, it’s easy to lose the forest in the trees.
If you don’t know anything about handbags, however, your intuition isn’t going to help you. In dealing with unfamiliar products, you need to take a step back and assess them. Non-experts make sounder judgments when they conduct a thorough analysis.”
“As Medina gained respect for these efforts, she accumulated what psychologist Edwin Hollander called idiosyncrasy credits — the latitude to deviate from the group’s expectations. Idiosyncrasy credits accrue through respect, not rank: they’re based on contributions. We squash a low status member who tries to challenge the status quo, but tolerate and sometimes even applaud the originality of a high-status star.”
Lead with Weakness
“Most of us assume that to be persuasive, we ought to emphasize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. That kind of powerful communication makes sense if the audience is supportive.
But when you’re pitching a novel idea or speaking up with a suggestion for change, your audience is likely to be skeptical. Investors are looking to poke holes in your arguments; managers are hunting for reasons why your suggestion won’t work. Under those circumstances, for at least four reasons, it’s actually more effective to adopt Griscom’s form of powerless communication by accentuating the flaws in your idea.
The first advantage is that leading with weaknesses disarms the audience. Marketing professors Marian Friestad and Peter Wright find that when we’re aware that someone is trying to persuade us, we naturally raise our mental shields. Rampant confidence is a red flag — a signal that we need to defend ourselves against weapons of influence. In the early days of Babble, when Griscom presented at the first two board meetings, he talked about everything that was going right with the business, hoping to excite the board about the company’s momentum and potential. “Every time I would say something emphasizing the upside, I would get skeptical responses,” he recalls. “Unbridled optimism comes across as salesmanship; it seems dishonest somehow, and as a consequence it’s met with skepticism. Everyone is allergic to the feeling, or suspicious of being sold.”
At the third meeting of the board, Griscom reversed his approach, opening with a candid discussion of everything that was going wrong with the company and what was keeping him up at night. Although this tactic might be familiar in a debate, it was highly unconventional for an entrepreneur. Board members, though, responded much more favorably than they had in previous meetings, shifting their attention away from self-defense and toward problem solving.”
“By acknowledging its most serious problems, he made it harder for investors to generate their own ideas about what was wrong with the company. And as they found themselves thinking hard to identify other concerns, they decided Babble’s problems weren’t actually that severe.”
“This explains why we often undercommunicate our ideas. They’re already so familiar to us that we underestimate how much exposure an audience needs to comprehend and buy into them.”
“Liking continues to increase as people are exposed to an idea between ten and twenty times, with additional exposure still useful for more complex ideas. Interestingly, exposures are more effective when they’re short and mixed in with other ideas, to help maintain the audience’s curiosity. It’s also best to introduce a delay between the presentation of the idea and the evaluation of it, which provides time for it to sink in. If you’re making a suggestion to a boss, you might start with a 30-second elevator pitch during a conversation on Tuesday, revisit it briefly the following Monday, and then ask for feedback at the end of the week.”
Procrastination
“Shin proposed that when you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea. As a result, you consider a wider range of original concepts and ultimately choose a more novel direction.”
“In 1927, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik demonstrated that people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. Once a task is finished, we stop thinking about it. But when it is interrupted and left undone, it stays active in our minds.”
“I was stunned to find that the “dream” idea was not written into the speech at all. It didn’t appear in the draft by Jones, nor did King include it in his script.
During the address, King’s favorite gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson, shouted from behind him, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin!” He continued with his script, and she encouraged him again. Before a live crowd of 250,000, and millions more watching on TV, King improvised, pushing his notes aside and launching into his inspiring vision of the future. “In front of all those people, cameras, and microphones,” Clarence Jones reflects, “Martin winged it.”
Along with providing time to generate novel ideas, procrastination has another benefit: it keeps us open to improvisation. When we plan well in advance, we often stick to the structure we’ve created, closing the door to creative possibilities that might spring into our fields of vision. Years ago, Berkeley psychologist Donald MacKinnon discovered that the most creative architects in America tended to be more spontaneous than their technically skilled but unoriginal peers, who rated themselves higher in self-control and conscientiousness. In a study of pizza chains that I conducted with Francesca Gino and David Hofmann, the most profitable stores were run by leaders who rated themselves as the least efficient and prompt. Similarly, when strategy researchers Sucheta Nadkarni and Pol Hermann studied nearly two hundred companies in India, the firms with the highest financial returns were the ones whose CEOs rated themselves the lowest on efficiency and promptness.
In both cases, the most successful organizations were run by executives who admitted that they often wasted time before settling down to work and sometimes failed to pace themselves to get things done on time. Although these habits could impede progress on tasks, they opened leaders up to being more strategically flexible. In the Indian companies, multiple members of each company’s top management teams rated their CEOs on strategic flexibility. The CEOs who planned carefully, acted early, and worked diligently scored as more rigid: once they formulated a strategy, they stuck to it. The CEOs who tended to delay work were more flexible and versatile — they were able to change their strategies to capitalize on new opportunities and defend against threats.””
“Great originals are great procrastinators, but they don’t skip planning altogether. They procrastinate strategically, making gradual progress by testing and refining different possibilities. Although the memorable lines about the dream were improvised, King had rehearsed variations of them in earlier speeches. He had spoken of his dream nearly a year earlier, in November 1962 in Albany, and in the ensuing months he referred to it frequently, from Birmingham to Detroit. During the year of his “dream” speech alone, it is estimated that he traveled over 275,000 miles and delivered over 350 speeches.”
Organization
“In a clever experiment, Stanford researchers Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath randomly assigned people in groups of three to listen to the national anthem “O Canada” under different conditions of synchrony. In the control condition, participants read the words silently while the song played. In the synchronous condition, they sang the song out loud together. In the asynchronous condition, they all sang, but not in unison: each person heard the song at a different tempo.
The participants thought they were being tested on their singing. But there was a twist after singing, they moved into what was supposedly a different study, where they had a chance to keep money for themselves or cooperate by sharing it with the group. The few minutes they spent singing shouldn’t have affected their behavior, but it did. The group that sang together shared significantly more. They reported feeling more similar to each other and more like a team than participants in the other conditions.
In seeking alliances with groups that share our values, we overlook the importance of sharing our strategic tactics. Recently, sociologists Wooseok Jung and Brayden King of Northwestern University and Sarah Soule of Stanford University tracked the emergence of unusual alliances between social movements like coalitions between environmental and gay-rights activists, the women’s movement and the peace movement, and a marine base and a Native American tribe. They found that shared tactics were an important predictor of alliances. Even if they care about different causes, groups find affinity when they use the same methods of engagement. If you’ve spent the past decade taking part in protests and marches, it’s easy to feel a sense of shared identity and community with another organization that operates the same way.
Lucy Stone recognized that common goals weren’t sufficient for a coalition to prosper, noting, “People will differ as to what they consider the best methods & means.” Stanton, for her part, pointed to the difference in methods as the ‘essential issue’ dividing the two associations. Stone was committed to campaigning at the state level; Anthony and Stanton wanted a federal constitutional amendment. Stone involved men in her organization; Anthony and Stanton favored an exclusively female membership. Stone sought to inspire change through speaking and meetings; Anthony and Stanton were more confrontational, with Anthony voting illegally and encouraging other women to follow suit.
The suffragists who formed alliances with the temperance activists were more moderate in their methods, which helped the two groups find common ground. At the same time that women were organizing local WCTU clubs, Lucy Stone introduced suffrage clubs. Both groups had extensive histories with lobbying and publishing. They began to work together to lobby and speak in front of state legislatures, publish articles and distribute literature, and hold public suffrage meetings, rallies, and debates.””
“In a series of experiments, when people with extreme political views were asked to explain the reasons behind their policy preferences, they stuck to their guns. Explaining why gave them a chance to affirm their convictions. But when asked to explain how their preferred policies work, they became more moderate. Considering how led them to confront the gaps in their knowledge and realize that some of their extreme views were impractical.
To form alliances, originals can temper their radicalism by smuggling their real vision inside a Trojan horse. U.S. Navy lieutenant Josh Steinman had a grand vision to open the military up to outside technology by creating a Silicon Valley hub. Steinman knew he would face resistance if he presented a radical, sweeping proposal for rethinking the navy’s entire approach to innovation, so he led with a more tempered pitch. He presented some new technology for doing real-time updates in the air to Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations. Intrigued, Admiral Greenert asked what would come next, and Rear Admiral Scott Steamey threw a softball question at Steinman, inquiring about how the military should think about the technical future. “That’s when we threw the strike,” Steinman recalls. “Sir, the future is going to be about software, not hardware, and we need an entity of the U.S. Navy in Silicon Valley.”
A few months later, after other junior officers made similar cases about the importance of software, the NO gave a speech advocating for the idea, which also circulated around the Pentagon. Not long afterward, the secretary of defense announced an embassy in Silicon Valley. Steinman leveraged what psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the foot-in-the-door technique, where you lead with a small request to secure an initial commitment before revealing the larger one. By opening with a moderate ask instead of a radical one, Steinman gained allies.
Coalitions often fall apart when people refuse to moderate their radicalism. That was one of the major failures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a protest against economic and social inequality that began in 2011. That year, polls showed that the majority of Americans supported the movement, but it soon fell apart. Activist Srdja Popovic marvels that its extreme positioning alienated most of its potential allies. Its fatal error, he argues, was naming the movement after the radical tactic of camping out, which few people find attractive. He believes that had the group simply relabeled itself “The 99 Percent,” it might still exist. The Occupy name “implied that the only way you could belong was if you dropped everything you were doing and started occupying something,” Popovic writes. “Occupying is still just a single weapon in the enormous arsenal of peaceful protest and, more to the point, one that tends to invite only a certain type of dedicated person. . . . Movements, which are always fighting uphill battles, need to draw in more casual participants if they are to succeed.” “The 99 Percent” is inclusive: it invites everyone to get involved and to use their own preferred tactics. By tempering the brand of the movement and broadening its methods, it might have been possible to gain the support of more mainstream citizens.”
“When Stanton and Anthony had formed their own association, instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, they refused to moderate their extreme stance that anyone who supported suffrage was a friend. Forming another alliance that cast a dark cloud over the movement, Stanton joined forces with Victoria Woodhull, an activist who became the first woman to run for the American presidency, but undermined the suffrage movement with a radical agenda. Woodhull, whose past included time as a prostitute and a charlatan healer, advocated for sexual freedom, proclaiming that she had an “inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please.”
Suffrage opponents used Woodhull’s position as evidence that the movement was really about sexual promiscuity rather than voting rights. Members withdrew in large numbers from Anthony and Stanton’s organization, to the point that they couldn’t even gather sufficient attendance for a convention. Even supportive legislators advised suffragists to put their quest for the vote aside. Suffragists remarked that Woodhull’s campaign “is the most efficient agent employed to frighten people from our ranks” and “set the cause back twenty years.””
“What happened when the undermining colleague was also supportive at times? Things didn’t get better; they got worse. Being undermined and supported by the same person meant even lower commitment and more work missed. Negative relationships are unpleasant, but they’re predictable: if a colleague consistently undermines you, you can keep your distance and expect the worst. But when you’re dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you’re constantly on guard, grappling with questions about when that person can actually be trusted. As Duffy’s team explains, “It takes more emotional energy and coping resources to deal with individuals who are inconsistent.””
“We regard someone who began as a rival and then became an enthusiastic supporter as an authentic advocate. “A person whose liking for us increases over time will be liked better than one who has always liked us,” Aronson explains. “We find it more rewarding when someone’s initially negative feelings toward us gradually become positive than if that person’s feelings for us were entirely positive all along.”
While we’ll have an especially strong affinity toward our converted rivals, will they feel the same way toward us? Yes — this is the second advantage of converting resisters. To like us, they have to work especially hard to overcome their initial negative impressions, telling themselves, I must have been wrong about that person. Moving forward, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of changing their minds yet again, they’ll be especially motivated to maintain a positive relationship.
Third, and most important, it is our former adversaries who are the most effective at persuading others to join our movements. They can marshal better arguments on our behalf, because they understand the doubts and misgivings of resisters and fence-sitters. And they’re a more credible source, because they haven’t just been Pollyanna followers or “yes men” all along. In one of Aronson’s studies, people were most persuaded to change their opinions by those who had started out negative and then become more positive. And more recently, corporate executives were subtly influenced by board members who argued with them initially and then conformed — which signals that their “opinion appears to stand up to critical scrutiny.”
“When Stone walked around hanging up posters announcing abolition speeches, young men often followed her and ripped them down. Stone asked them if they loved their mothers. Absolutely. Did they love their sisters? Of course. She explained that in the South, men their own age were sold as slaves, and would never see their families again. As Kerr explains, “She then invited them to attend the evening’s lectures as her ‘special guests.’ Such street recruits proved useful allies, able to defuse other trouble-makers.””
“Willard saw suffrage as “a weapon of protection . .. from the tyranny of drink.” Likening the ballot to “a powerful sunglass,” she promised to use it to “burn and blaze on the saloon, till it shrivels up and in lurid vapors curls away like mist.” Protecting the home was a familiar goal for the WCTU members. Now, suffrage could be used as a means to a desirable end: if temperance advocates wanted to fight alcohol abuse, they needed to vote.”
“Once suffragists presented the home protection framing, the odds of joining forces with the WCTU in that state increased significantly, as did the odds that a state would eventually pass suffrage. Ultimately, Willard’s leadership enabled women to gain full voting rights in several states and school board election voting rights in nineteen states. This argument was particularly effective in the West. Before the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution gave women full voting rights, 81 percent of the Western states and territories passed suffrage laws, compared with only two in the East and zero in the South.
It’s highly unlikely that Frances Willard would have started the women’s suffrage movement. Justin Berg’s research suggests that if women had begun with the familiar goal of protecting their homes, they might never have considered the vote. Radical thinking is often necessary to put an original stake in the ground. But once the radical idea of voting was planted, the original suffragists needed a more tempered mediator to reach a wider audience.
Frances Willard had unique credibility with the temperance activists because she drew upon comfortably familiar ideas in her speeches. She made heavy use of religious rhetoric, quoting regularly from the Bible. Frances Willard was the quintessential tempered radical. “Under Willard, nothing seemed radical,” writes Baker, even “as she was moving toward more progressive causes.” Her actions offer two lessons about persuading potential partners to join forces. First, we need to think differently about values. Instead of assuming that others share our principles, or trying to convince them to adopt ours, we ought to present our values as a means of pursuing theirs. It’s hard to change other people’s ideals. It’s much easier to link our agendas to familiar values that people already hold.”
Birth Order
“We assume that younger scientists will be more receptive to rebellious ideas than older scientists, who become conservative and entrenched in their beliefs with age. But remarkably, birth order was more consequential than age. “An 80-year-old laterbor was as open to evolutionary theory as a 25-year-old firstborn,” Sulloway writes, arguing that evolutionary theory “only became a historical reality because laterborns outnumbered firstborns 2.6 to 1 in the general population.”
Overall, laterborns were twice as likely as firstborns to champion major scientific upheavals. “The likelihood of this difference arising by chance is substantially less than one in a billion,” Sulloway observes. “Laterborns have typically been half a century ahead of firstborns in their willingness to endorse radical innovations.” Similar results emerged when he studied thirty-one political revolutions: laterborns were twice as likely as firstborns to support radical changes.”
“In one study, people ranked their siblings and themselves on school achievement and rebellion. High academic achievers were 2.3 times as likely to be firstborn as lastbom. Rebels were twice as likely to be lastborn as firstborn.”
“Comedians with siblings were 83 percent more likely to be born last than chance would predict. The odds of that many great comedians being lastborn by chance are two in a million.
When I turned to specific lastborn comedians, I found that their older siblings usually filled more conventional achievement niches. Stephen Colbert is the youngest of eleven; his older siblings include an intellectual property attorney, a congressional candidate, and a government lawyer. Chelsea Handler’s five older siblings are a mechanical engineer, a chef, an accountant, a lawyer, and a nurse — all careers where it’s possible to obtain education certifications and stable salaries. Louis C.K.’s three older sisters are a doctor, a teacher, and a software engineer. All five of Jim Gaffigan’s older siblings are managers: three bank executives, a department store GM, and an operations manager. Mel Brooks’s three older brothers were a chemist, a bookstore owner, and a government official.”
“Psychologist Robert Zajonc observed that firstboms grow up in a world of adults, while the more older siblings you have, the more time you spend learning from other children. Had Jackie Robinson been the first child, he would have been raised primarily by his mother. But with five children to feed, Mallie Robinson needed to work. As a result, Robinson’s older sister, Willa Mae, reflected, “I was the little mother.” She bathed him, dressed him, and fed him. When she went to kindergarten, she convinced her mother to let her bring her baby brother to school with her. A three-year-old Jackie Robinson played in the sandbox all day for a year, with Willa Mae poking her head out the window periodically to make sure he was okay. Meanwhile, Robinson’s older brother Frank was ready to defend him in fights.
When older siblings serve as surrogate parents and role models, you don’t face as many rules or punishments, and you enjoy the security of their protection. You also end up taking risks earlier: instead of emulating the measured, carefully considered choices of adults, you follow the lead of other children.”
“Years ago, researchers found that from ages two to ten, children are urged by their parents to change their behavior once every six to nine minutes. As developmental psychologist Martin Hoffman sums it up, this “translates roughly into 50 discipline encounters a day or over 15,000 a year!”
When the Holocaust rescuers recalled their childhoods, they had received a unique form of discipline from their parents. “Explained is the word most rescuers favored,” the Oliners discovered:
It is in their reliance on reasoning, explanations, suggestions of ways to remedy the harm done, persuasion, and advice that the parents of rescuers differed most. ..Reasoning communicates a message of respect. … . It implies that had children but known better or understood more, they would not have acted in an inappropriate way. It is a mark of esteem for the listener; an indication of faith in his or her ability to comprehend, develop, and improve.
While reasoning accounted for only 6 percent of the disciplinary techniques that the bystanders’ parents used, it accounted for a full 21 percent of how the rescuers’ parents disciplined their children. One rescuer said her mother “told me when I did something wrong. She never did any punishing or scolding she tried to make me understand with my mind what I’d done wrong.” This rational approach to discipline also characterizes the parents of teenagers who don’t engage in criminal deviance and originals who challenge the orthodoxies of their professions. In one study, parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of less than one rúle and tended to “place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules,” psychologist Teresa Amabile reports.
If parents do believe in enforcing a lot of regulations, the way they explain them matters a great deal. New research shows that teenagers defy rules when they’re enforced in a controlling manner, by yelling or threatening punishment. When mothers enforce many rules but offer a clear rationale for why they’re important, teenagers are substantially less likely to break them, because they internalize them.”
“Reasoning does create a paradox: it leads both to more rule following and more rebelliousness. By explaining moral principles, parents encourage their children to comply voluntarily with rules that align with important values and to question rules that don’t. Good explanations enable children to develop a code of ethics that often coincides with societal expectations; when they don’t square up, children rely on the internal compass of values rather than the external compass of rules.”
“After children shared some marbles with their peers, a number of them were randomly assigned to have their behavior praised: “It was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” Others received character praise: “I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person.”
Children who received character praise were subsequently more generous. Of the children who were complimented for being helpful people, 45 percent gave craft materials to cheer up kids at a hospital two weeks later, compared with only 10 percent of the children who were commended for engaging in helpful behavior. When our character is praised, we internalize it as part of our identities. Instead of seeing ourselves as engaging in isolated moral acts, we start to develop a more unified self-concept as a moral person.
Affirming character appears to have the strongest effect in the critical periods when children are beginning to formulate strong identities. In one study, for example, praising character boosted the moral actions of eight-year-olds but not five-year-olds or ten-year-olds. The ten-year-olds may already have crystallized self-concepts to the degree that a single comment didn’t affect them, and the five-year-olds may have been too young for an isolated compliment to have a real impact. Character praise leaves a lasting imprint when identities are forming.
But even among very young children, an appeal to character can have an influence in the moment. In an ingenious series of experiments led by psychologist Christopher Bryan, children between ages three and six were 22 percent to 29 percent more likely to clean up blocks, toys, and crayons when they were asked to be helpers instead of to help. Even though their character was far from gelled, they wanted to earn the identity.
Bryan finds that appeals to character are effective for adults as well. His team was able to cut cheating in half with the same turn of phrase: instead of “please don’t cheat,” they changed the appeal to “Please don’t be a cheater.” When you’re urged not to cheat, you can do it and still see an ethical person in the mirror. But when you’re told not to be a cheater, the act casts a shadow; immorality is tied to your identity, making the behavior much less attractive. Cheating is an isolated action that gets evaluated with the logic of consequence: Can I get away with it? Being a cheater evokes a sense of self, triggering the logic of appropriateness: What kind of person am I, and who do I want to be?
In light of this evidence, Bryan suggests that we should embrace nouns more thoughtfully. “Don’t Drink and Drive” could be rephrased as: “Don’t Be a Drunk Driver.” The same thinking can be applied to originality. When a child draws a picture, instead of calling the artwork creative, we can say “You are creative.” After a teenager resists the temptation to follow the crowd, we can commend her for being a non-conformist.”
“Polaroid fell due to a faulty assumption. Within the company, there was widespread agreement that customers would always want hard copies of pictures, and key decision makers failed to question this assumption. It was a classic case of groupthink — the tendency to seek consensus instead of fostering dissent.”
“If assigning a devil’s advocate doesn’t work, what does?
The researchers formed another set of groups with two managers who favored Peru. For the third member, instead of assigning a devil’s advocate to argue for Kenya, they picked someone who actually preferred Kenya. Those groups selected 14 percent more articles against the majority preference than for it. And now, they were 15 percent less confident in their original preference.
While it can be appealing to assign a devil’s advocate, it’s much more powerful to unearth one. When people are designated to dissent, they’re just playing a role.”
“To overcome fear, why does getting excited work better than trying to calm yourself down? Fear is an intense emotion: You can feel your heart pumping and your blood coursing in that state, trying to relax is like slamming on the brakes when a car is going 80 miles per hour. The vehicle still has momentum. Rather than trying to suppress a strong emotion, it’s easier to convert it into a different emotion — one that’s equally intense, but propels us to step on the gas.”
“When we’re not yet committed to a particular action, thinking like a defensive pessimist can be hazardous. Since we don’t have our hearts set on charging ahead, envisioning a dismal failure will only activate anxiety, triggering the stop system and slamming our brakes. By looking on the bright side, we’ll activate enthusiasm and turn on the go system.
But once we’ve settled on a course of action, when anxieties creep in, it’s better to think like a defensive pessimist and confront them directly. In this case, instead of attempting to turn worries and doubts into positive emotions, we can shift the go system into higher gear by embracing our fear. Since we’ve set our minds to press forward, envisioning the worst-case scenario enables us to harness anxiety as a source of motivation to prepare and succeed. Neuroscience research suggests that when we’re anxious, the unknown is more terrifying than the negative. As Julie Norem describes it, once people have imagined the worst, “they feel more in control. In some sense, they’ve peaked in anxiety before their actual performance. By the time they get to the event itself they’ve taken care of almost everything.””
“The people who had been recognized for making original contributions to their communities shared many more stories that started negatively but surged upward: they struggled early and triumphed only later. Despite being confronted with more negative events, they reported greater satisfaction with their lives and a stronger sense of purpose. Instead of merely enjoying good fortune all along, they endured the battle of turning bad things good and judged it as a more rewarding route to a life well lived. Originality brings more bumps in the road, yet it leaves us with more happiness and a greater sense of meaning.”
Social Movements
“Around the world, resistance movements have helped people overcome fear by turning on the go system with small actions that signal the support of a larger group. When Popovic trained the Egyptian activists, he shared a story from 1983 of how Chilean miners had mounted a protest against the country’s dictator, Pinochet. Instead of taking the risk of going on strike, they issued a nationwide call for citizens to demonstrate their resistance by turning their lights on and off. People weren’t afraid to do that, and soon they saw that their neighbors weren’t, either. The miners also invited people to start driving slowly. Taxi drivers slowed down; so did bus drivers. Soon, pedestrians were walking in slow motion down the streets and driving their cars and trucks at a glacial pace. In his inspiring book Blueprint for Revolution, Popovic explains that prior to these activities:
People were afraid to talk openly about despising Pinochet, so if you hated the dictator, you might have imagined that you were the only one. Tactics like these, Chileans used to say, made people realize that “we are the many and they are the few.” And the beauty was that there was no risk involved: Not even in North Korea was it illegal for cars to drive slowly.
In Poland, when activists objected to government lies dominating the news, they knew that simply turning off their televisions wouldn’t show their fellow citizens that they were ready to stand in protest. Instead, they put their TV sets in wheelbarrows and pushed them around the streets. Soon, it was happening in towns throughout Poland — and the opposition eventually won power. In Syria, activists poured red food-coloring in fountains around the squares of Damascus, symbolizing that citizens would not accept the bloody rule of their dictator, Assad. Instead of facing the terror of standing out as lone resisters, people were able to see themselves as members of a group. It’s easier to rebel when it feels like an act of conformity. Other people are involved, so we can join, too.
In Serbia, Otpor! found an ingenious way to activate the go system. The country was in such dire straits that excitement wasn’t an easy emotion to cultivate. Popovic and his friends were able to transform fear into another strong positive emotion: hilarity. Flouting the solemn, resolute demeanor of great moral leaders like Gandhi, Otpor! used humor to attract allies and subvert enemies. They sent birthday presents to Milosevic: a one-way ticket to the Hague to be tried for his war crimes, handcuffs, and a prison uniform. To celebrate the lunar eclipse, they invited downtown shoppers to gaze into a telescope, which showed an eclipse of Milosevic’s face. Later, Otpor! produced a commercial with Milosevic’s image on a T-shirt. “I’ve been trying to clean this stain for ten years,” a woman said, standing next to a washing machine. “Believe me, I’ve tried everything. But now there is a new machine. It has a great program which … permanently cleans this and similar stains.””
“As the image gained popularity, fear slowly faded. It’s hard to be afraid of speaking up when you’re laughing at the target of your rebellion.”
“If you want people to modity their behavior, is it better to highlight the benefits of changing or the costs of not changing? According to Peter Salovey, one of the originators of the concept of emotional intelligence and now the president of Yale, it depends on whether they perceive the new behavior as safe or risky. If they think the behavior is safe, we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it — they’ll want to act immediately to obtain those certain gains. But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn’t work. They’re already comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change aren’t attractive, and the stop system kicks in. Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don’t change. Taking a risk is more appealing when they’re faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t. The prospect of a certain loss brings the go system online.”
“To channel anger productively, instead of venting about the harm that a perpetrator has done, we need to reflect on the victims who have suffered from it. Management researchers Andrew Brodsky, Joshua Margolis, and Joel Brockner find that focusing on the victims of injustice spurs us to speak truth to power. In one experiment, adults witnessed a CEO overpaying himself and underpaying a star employee. When they were prompted to focus on the employee who was treated unfairly, they were 46 percent more likely to challenge the CBO’s payment decision.
In the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., frequently called attention to victims of violence and injustice. “We are not out to defeat or humiliate the white man,” he pronounced in a 1956 speech defending the Montgomery bus boycott, but to “free our children from a life of permanent psychological death.” Focusing on the victim activates what psychologists call empathetic anger — the desire to right wrongs done unto another. It turns on the go system, but it makes us thoughtful about how to best respect the victim’s dignity. Research demonstrates that when we’re angry at others, we aim for retaliation or revenge. But when we’re angry for others, we seek out justice and a better system. We don’t just want to punish; we want to help.”
“Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation?”
