Adam Grant

The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

People who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They’re freaks of nurture.

Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. Personality is your predisposition—your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.

Of all the factors that have been studied, the strongest known force is a sense of progress.

Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize.

When you plant a Moso bamboo seed, you can water it for many months or even years without seeing a single sprout. It looks like nothing is happening until one day it bursts through the surface. Then, in just a few weeks, it shoots up over twenty feet. What you couldn’t see is that underground, the seed was sprouting roots and storing energy. It was growing, slowly but surely, beneath the surface.

If perfectionism were a medication, the label would alert us to common side effects. Warning: may cause stunted growth.

Impostor syndrome says, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.’ Growth mindset says, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s only a matter of time until I figure it out.’

Redefine success. The most meaningful form of performance is progress. The ultimate mark of potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but the distance you’ve traveled—and helped others travel.

If a handful of people hadn’t been cajoled into taking original action, America might not exist, the civil rights movement could still be a dream, the Sistine Chapel might be bare, we might still believe the sun revolves around the earth, and the personal computer might never have been popularized.

‘I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world,’ E.B. White once wrote. ‘This makes it difficult to plan the day.’

Becoming originals is not the easiest path in the pursuit of happiness, but it leaves us perfectly poised for the happiness of pursuit.

Don’t try to calm down. If you’re nervous, it’s hard to relax. It’s easier to turn anxiety into intense positive emotions like interest and enthusiasm. Think about the reasons you’re eager to challenge the status quo, and the positive outcomes that might result.

Whether you’re generating or evaluating new ideas the best you can do is measure success on the kind of yardstick that batters use in baseball. As Randy Komisar puts it, ‘If I’m hitting .300, I’m a genius. That’s because the future cannot be predicted. The sooner you learn it, the sooner you can be good at it.’

Idiosyncracy 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.

Whether you’re generating or evaluating new ideas the best you can do is measure success on the kind of yardstick that batters use in baseball.