Adam Grant opens Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, published in 2016, not with King but with a business case about web browsers. Researchers had found that employees who used Firefox or Chrome to fill out job applications performed better and stayed longer than those who used Internet Explorer or Safari — not because the browsers were better tools, but because choosing a non-default browser was a proxy for a specific kind of temperament: someone willing to question the status quo rather than accept the default as correct. The person who asks “why am I using this browser?” is the same person who asks “why are we doing this process?” And that person, the data suggested, was exactly who organizations needed.
What Originals Actually Are (and Aren’t)
Grant is careful about what he means by “originals.” Not geniuses. Not natural disrupters. Not born with radical-idea DNA. People who have developed the habit of questioning defaults and the willingness, sometimes with great anxiety, to act on alternatives they’ve identified. Two features distinguish them from people who merely have good ideas.
First, originals take action on their ideas. Sounds obvious, but Grant’s research suggests it’s the rarest component. Most people have ideas for better processes, better products, better ways of doing things. The vast majority of these ideas never leave the person’s head. Originals are the people who take the idea from internal to external — who turn a private criticism of the status quo into a public proposal, a project, a company, or a campaign. The transmission mechanism from idea to action is the most important variable in whether the world gets the benefit of someone’s unconventional thinking.
Second, originals maintain their conviction when it’s socially costly. This is where Grant’s research gets most interesting. The conventional narrative of the original is someone so confident in their unconventional idea that they push through resistance without wavering. The data Grant presents tells a different story: the most effective originals are often deeply uncertain — sometimes terrified — and proceed anyway. The conviction isn’t in the absence of doubt; it’s in the decision to act despite doubt, because the alternative (staying quiet, accepting the default) feels worse than the risk of being wrong in public.
The Procrastination Paradox
One of Originals’ most counterintuitive findings involves procrastination. The intuitive model of the creative original is someone who attacks new ideas with immediate, sustained energy — who turns creative impulse into output without hesitation. Grant’s research suggests the opposite: moderate procrastinators produce more creative output than either early starters or chronic procrastinators.
The mechanism, as Grant explains it, is that procrastination creates a longer incubation period during which ideas can be refined, combined, and reconsidered before they’re committed to. The early starter closes options quickly — a draft, a plan, a structure exists before the problem has been fully explored. The moderate procrastinator allows the problem to marinate, turning it over unconsciously during the delay, often producing a richer synthesis when they finally sit down to work. The chronic procrastinator, of course, never quite finishes — the incubation period extends past the deadline for action.
The sweet spot is deliberate delay in the early stages of creative work — not avoidance, but strategic non-closure of options until the problem has been sufficiently explored. Da Vinci, Grant notes, spent sixteen years painting the Mona Lisa. Not continuously — he’d set it aside for months, return to it, see it with fresh eyes, make changes. The finished work benefited from the delays. The cultural assumption that speed of execution reflects quality of thinking is, at minimum, incomplete.
This connects to the broader question of how deliberate creative processes should be — a theme explored in our content on building productive creative habits.
The Risk Paradox: Originals Are Not Reckless
The image of the original as a fearless risk-taker who bets everything on their unconventional vision is one of the most persistent and least accurate myths in the innovation literature. Grant’s data presents a different picture: the most successful originals are often highly risk-averse in their personal financial and professional lives even while being highly unconventional in their ideas.
The Wharton research on entrepreneurship that Grant cites found that entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs while developing their ventures had dramatically higher survival rates than those who quit to go all-in. The all-in narrative is better storytelling, but it’s worse strategy. The day-job founder has financial stability that allows better, less desperate decisions. Income funds experimentation without requiring each experiment to succeed. A fallback position prevents the anxiety of total financial commitment from distorting judgment about when the venture is actually ready to scale.
The pattern extends to how originals manage ideational risk. The person with one unconventional idea and no alternatives is not an original — they’re a zealot. The person who generates many unconventional ideas and selects among them based on evidence is the effective original. More ideas means more shots at one that’s actually good, and it means the selection can be based on quality rather than sunk cost. Originals, Grant argues, are distinctive not primarily in the quality of their individual ideas but in the quantity — they simply generate more candidates from which the best ideas can be selected.
Timing and Strategy: When to Voice Dissent
Timing is important. Research on organizational dissent consistently shows ideas are most receptively received when they’re framed as improvements to an existing commitment rather than as challenges to a foundational direction. “I see a better way to achieve what we’ve already committed to” gets heard more readily than “our fundamental approach is wrong.” Both may be correct. Only one gets a fair hearing in most organizational contexts.
The sequence of advocacy matters too. Grant cites research showing that opening with the weakest version of an argument — acknowledging the limitations of a position before they’re raised as objections — actually increases persuasive impact by signaling intellectual honesty. The audience expects the advocate of an unconventional idea to be a zealot who ignores counter-evidence. When the advocate explicitly names the limitations of their own argument, the signal sent is one of a careful thinker who has actually weighed the evidence — exactly the credibility needed to make an unconventional argument compelling.
The Resilient Wisdom Framework: The Originals Development Cycle
Stage 1: Default Questioning. The practice of asking, systematically and habitually, why things are done the way they’re done. Not rebelliously — with genuine curiosity about whether the current approach is actually optimal or merely familiar. The browser research finding translates into a general posture: the person who asks “why am I using this tool/process/approach?” rather than accepting the default is building the habit of mind that generates original ideas.
Stage 2: Proliferative Ideation. The development of multiple alternative responses to identified defaults. Not the first idea — the tenth, the twentieth. Grant’s research on the volume-quality relationship in creative output is consistent with creativity research generally: quality of output correlates with volume of output because more candidates means better selection, not because producing a lot makes someone better at the activity. The original with twenty ideas has a better chance of having one excellent idea than the original with one.
Stage 3: Delayed Commitment. The strategic use of procrastination — allowing ideas to incubate before committing to a direction, maintaining multiple options open longer than feels comfortable, resisting the closure-seeking that organizations and individuals impose on creative processes prematurely. The Goldilocks zone here is moderate delay with eventual commitment — not indefinite avoidance masquerading as incubation.
Stage 4: Risk-Calibrated Action. Moving unconventional ideas from internal to external at the appropriate pace and with appropriate risk management. Keeping the day job. Testing before scaling. Building the safety architecture that allows experimentation to happen at the cost of small failures rather than catastrophic ones. The originals who bet everything and win are celebrated; the ones who bet everything and lose are forgotten. The ones who bet carefully and build iteratively are the ones whose unconventional ideas are most likely to actually reach the world.
Stage 5: Strategic Advocacy. The communication of unconventional ideas in ways optimized for actually changing minds rather than for cathartic expression. This means timing (when is the audience most receptive?), framing (is this an improvement or a challenge to existing commitments?), pre-acknowledgment of limitations (what are the weakest points of the argument and should they be named first?), and coalition-building (who else needs to be convinced, and in what sequence?).
Speaking Up: The Psychology of Voice in Organizations
Some of the book’s most interesting empirical material concerns why people with valuable unconventional ideas fail to voice them — the organizational and psychological barriers to speaking up that prevent organizations from benefiting from the original thinking already existing within them.
The primary barrier is not fear of punishment, as the conventional analysis suggests. Grant cites research showing that in most modern organizations, the expected cost of speaking up is substantially lower than employees believe it to be. The real barrier is something more subtle: the belief that speaking up won’t make a difference. The employee who believes management won’t take their idea seriously, won’t act on it, and may actually resent the implication that current practices are inadequate — this employee is making a rational decision not to speak, but based on a distorted model of what will actually happen if they do.
The implication for organizational leaders is specific: demonstrating receptivity to unconventional ideas is more important than demonstrating absence of punishment. The signal that unlocks voice is not “you won’t be punished for speaking up” but “your ideas will actually change things.” This requires leaders to actually implement ideas that come from below — to close the feedback loop in ways that make the cost-benefit calculation of speaking up obviously positive.
For individuals navigating organizations, Grant offers a counterintuitive prescription: establish a track record as a team player and someone with the organization’s interests at heart before using it to launch unconventional ideas. The person perceived as an insider who cares about the mission has much higher persuasive credibility for unconventional proposals than the person perceived as a critic or an outsider. The strategic sequence is: demonstrate loyalty, establish credibility, spend that credibility on the ideas that matter most.
Coalition Building and the Temptation of Ideological Purity
Grant addresses one of the most practically important and psychologically difficult aspects of driving change: the temptation to demand ideological purity from potential allies, and the way this temptation undermines the coalitions unconventional ideas need to actually succeed.
The history of social movements, political campaigns, and organizational transformations consistently shows that change coalitions welcoming imperfect allies — people who agree on the goal but may have different reasons for pursuing it, or who agree on ninety percent of the agenda — are more effective than coalitions maintaining ideological purity at the cost of breadth. The original who demands allies share all of their commitments and none of their reservations is optimizing for personal validation rather than for achieving the change being advocated.
The practical prescription is to seek allies whose resistance to the unconventional idea is lowest — not whose convictions are highest. The person who agrees ninety percent is a better alliance candidate than the person who agrees one hundred percent, because they’re more credible to the audience that needs persuading, they may have seen weaknesses in the idea that the most committed supporters have missed, and they’re available in larger numbers than the fully committed. For more on building effective coalitions for change, see our content on leadership and influencing systems.
Where the Book Excels and Where It Struggles
The weakness is in the predictable Grant structural tic: counterintuitive finding, well-documented case study, qualified nuance, actionable prescription, repeat. This formula works extremely well in individual chapters but creates a cumulative reading experience that starts to feel formulaic. By the fifth or sixth counterintuitive reversal, the reader is anticipating the structure rather than discovering new information.
More substantively, the book has a somewhat academic blind spot around the selection effects in its case studies. The originals who succeeded in challenging defaults and driving change are well documented and compelling. The originals who had equally valuable unconventional ideas, attempted similarly brave advocacy, and were ignored, marginalized, or destroyed by the organizations and cultures they challenged are less well represented. The probability of success for any given act of originality is left somewhat opaque, which tends to make the approach feel more reliable than it actually is in adversarial or highly conservative organizational contexts.
“The most original people are not the ones who are most confident. They’re the ones who are least willing to let doubt become an excuse for inaction. Fear and doubt are not eliminated in the original — they’re outweighed by the discomfort of staying silent.” — Grant’s reframing of what makes originals distinct
Practical Applications
- Build a “question the default” practice. For one week, every time a task is about to be done the way it’s always been done — a standard process, a familiar procedure, a conventional format — pause and ask: why this? Is there an alternative that would work better? A better alternative won’t turn up every time. But the habit of asking produces the raw material for originality that unreflective default-following never generates.
- Generate more ideas to select better ideas. Working on a creative problem with one idea in hand? Generate ten. Not ten versions of the same idea — ten genuinely different approaches to the problem. Then select among them. The quantity of candidates is a better predictor of the quality of the best candidate than any amount of effort poured into a single idea prematurely selected and defended.
- Experiment with strategic procrastination. For the next significant creative project, build in a deliberate incubation period before committing to a final direction. Not indefinite delay — a specific two-or-three-day pause after initial ideation, before closure, during which other things get done and the problem sits open in the background. Track whether the work produced after the incubation period is better than the work that would have come without it.
- Pre-acknowledge the weaknesses of unconventional arguments. Next time advocacy for an unpopular idea is needed, open with the two or three strongest objections to the position and address them before they’re raised. This signals intellectual honesty, removes the objections from the listener’s arsenal (since they’ve already been acknowledged and addressed), and creates the impression of someone who has actually weighed the evidence — the credibility needed for unconventional arguments to get a fair hearing.
- Build credibility before spending it on unconventional advocacy. Identify the domain where challenging the status quo matters most. Before launching the challenge, invest time in demonstrating understanding of and support for the organization’s or community’s core goals. The credibility built as a team player and mission-aligned contributor is what gets spent when the unconventional argument gets made. Build the account before making the withdrawal.
Key Lessons from Originals
- Originals are not fearless — they act despite fear. The distinction matters for how originality gets cultivated. Waiting to feel confident before acting on unconventional ideas means waiting for a feeling the evidence suggests most originals never fully experience. The relevant question is not “am I confident enough?” but “is the discomfort of inaction greater than the discomfort of action?”
- Procrastination can be a creative strategy, not a failure of discipline. The moderate procrastinator who allows ideas to incubate before committing produces better creative output than the early closer who locks in prematurely. Distinguishing productive incubation from avoidance requires honest self-assessment, but the distinction is real and important.
- Risk management and originality are compatible, not opposed. The most successful originals are not reckless. They maintain financial and professional safety architecture that allows their unconventional ideas to be tested without catastrophic cost to failure. The entrepreneurial failure rate would be lower and the innovation output would be higher if the “quit everything and bet it all” narrative were replaced by the “keep your day job, build iteratively” narrative that the data actually supports.
- Coalition-building beats ideological purity in driving change. The unconventional idea that stays unconventional because its advocate demands perfect alignment from all allies will remain unconventional. The one that builds the broadest possible coalition of imperfect but genuine supporters will change things.
- Voice requires credibility, and credibility requires investment. Speaking up effectively is not just about the quality of the idea — it requires the credibility of the speaker. That credibility is built through demonstrated competence, demonstrated alignment with the organization’s or community’s goals, and a track record of being worth listening to. The investment in credibility before the advocacy is not compromise — it’s strategy.
Common Questions About Originals Summary
No. Grant is arguing that the capacity for originality — questioning defaults, generating alternatives, acting on unconventional ideas — is more widely distributed than the exceptional-genius narrative suggests, and that many people who have this capacity aren’t using it because of identifiable, removable barriers. He’s not prescribing originality for everyone. He’s identifying the conditions under which more of the originality already existing in the population becomes productive.
What does the research say about birth order and originality?
Grant reviews the birth order literature and finds that later-born children show consistently higher rates of challenging authority and advocating unconventional positions — apparently a consequence of needing to differentiate from older siblings who have claimed the status-quo-conforming role. The practical implication for individuals is limited (birth order can’t be changed), but the organizational implication is interesting: teams deliberately constructed to include people from different birth positions may have better access to both conventional and unconventional thinking than those that accidentally select primarily first-borns or primarily later-borns.
How does Originals apply to parenting?
Grant has a substantial parenting section addressing how to raise children who question defaults appropriately. The key insight is that parental moral framing matters more than reward and punishment systems. Parents who explain the reasons behind expectations — “we don’t lie because it damages trust and trust is foundational to relationships” — raise children with more developed moral reasoning than those who issue rules without reasoning (“because I said so”). The child who understands why a rule exists can apply that reasoning to novel situations; the child who only knows the rule will default to it when the rule doesn’t quite fit.
What’s the role of doubt in creative processes?
Grant distinguishes productively between self-doubt and idea-doubt. Self-doubt — “am I capable of doing this?” — is generally paralyzing and should be addressed directly. Idea-doubt — “is this the best approach to the problem?” — is productive when it drives iteration and exploration rather than abandonment. The most effective creative process maintains idea-doubt through the incubation period and channels it into refinement rather than into closure or avoidance.
How does speaking up effectively differ across organizational hierarchies?
Significantly. Grant’s research shows the appropriate strategy for voicing unconventional ideas varies with position in the hierarchy. Junior employees have less credibility but also less to lose, and should generally err toward speaking up more than they do. Senior employees have more credibility but also more to lose from being wrong, and often err in the opposite direction — toward protective silence to preserve their status. The sweet spot in most organizational contexts is the mid-level employee with established competence credibility who hasn’t yet accumulated so much status that the cost of being wrong on a single issue is high. For more on navigating organizational dynamics, see our content on leadership and influence.
What does Originals say about the relationship between creativity and expertise?
Detailed and interesting. Grant reviews research showing that domain-specific expertise is necessary but not sufficient for originality within a domain — enough knowledge is needed to understand what’s wrong with the current approach before a better one can be proposed. But he also reviews research on the U-shaped relationship between expertise and creativity: very high levels of domain expertise can calcify into convention-protecting orthodoxy, reducing the freshness of perspective that produces genuine alternatives. The sweet spot is enough expertise to understand the domain without so much that seeing it from outside becomes impossible.
What is “vuja de” and how does it relate to originality?
Grant borrows this term from comedian George Carlin to describe the opposite of deja vu: encountering something familiar as if for the first time. While deja vu involves experiencing something new as already known, vuja de involves experiencing something already known as new — seeing the familiar with fresh eyes, questioning what’s been taken for granted. Cultivating vuja de is a practical technique for the default-questioning habit Grant identifies as foundational to originality: it involves deliberately approaching familiar situations as if encountering them for the first time, with genuine curiosity about why things are the way they are rather than acceptance of them as inevitable.
How does Originals relate to the broader resilience literature?
The connection is through psychological flexibility — the capacity to maintain function and adapt behavior in the face of changing circumstances and opposition. Originals who successfully challenge defaults require resilience in the face of social resistance, failed experiments, and the extended periods of uncertainty that advocacy for unconventional ideas inevitably involves. The psychological infrastructure for this resilience — the ability to maintain conviction without rigidity, to update positions when evidence demands while not abandoning them under mere social pressure — is the same infrastructure resilience research identifies as characteristic of psychologically strong individuals. See our content on building psychological resilience for more on this foundation.
Books Similar to Originals
Think Again by Adam Grant — Grant’s follow-up, addressing the epistemological infrastructure needed to hold unconventional positions under pressure. The rethinking practices of Think Again provide the internal architecture that makes the external advocacy of Originals sustainable.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen — The organizational-level analysis of why established organizations consistently fail to adopt unconventional ideas even when they’re clearly superior. The systemic context that makes individual originality so difficult and so necessary.
Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley and David Kelley — The IDEO founders’ practical guide to building creative capability in individuals and teams. More process-oriented than Originals, less research-grounded, but a good operational complement for readers who want more hands-on creativity development guidance.
Rebel Talent by Francesca Gino — Overlapping territory on rule-breaking and nonconformity in organizations, with more emphasis on the daily practice of unconventional behavior and its effects on organizational performance. Reads as a useful complement to Grant’s more historical and case-study-driven approach.
The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin — The phenomenological account of what it feels like to develop mastery through a process that requires consistently challenging one’s own current understanding — which is, from the inside, a form of originality applied to self-development rather than external challenges.
Real Talk on Originals
Originals is engaging, well-researched, and practically useful. Grant’s five-part Originals Development Cycle — question defaults, generate prolifically, delay commitment strategically, manage risk carefully, advocate strategically — is the most actionable synthesis of originality research available in popular form. The procrastination-as-strategy finding is counterintuitive and well-supported. The risk-calibration research is an important corrective to the bet-everything mythology. And the coalition-building and strategic advocacy sections are among the most practically useful pages in Grant’s bibliography.
Its formulaic structure and underrepresentation of failed originals are real limitations. But the core insight — that originality is a habit, not a gift, and that it’s more broadly accessible than the exceptional-individual mythology suggests — is important and, in this book, well-documented.
Read it as a practical guide to challenging the defaults in professional and intellectual life, not as a promise that unconventional ideas will triumph. The most honest reading of the data Grant presents is not “be original and you’ll succeed” but “don’t let fear of failure and social resistance stop you from putting unconventional ideas into the world, because the cost of silence is higher than the cost of being wrong.”
The Originality Tax: What Speaking Up Actually Costs
Grant’s research on the benefits of originality is compelling and well-documented. What the book underplays is the cost structure — the specific ways speaking up, challenging defaults, and advocating for unconventional ideas imposes real costs on real people in real organizational contexts. Being honest about these costs is not a reason to stay silent; it’s a prerequisite for making a rational decision about whether and how to incur them.
The primary cost of originality in most organizational contexts is relational capital. Every challenge to an existing approach implicitly criticizes someone’s previous decision. That person may be a peer, a manager, a founder, or an institution with a decades-long history of doing things the way they’ve always been done. Regardless of how diplomatically the challenge is framed, the recipient often experiences it as criticism of their judgment. The cumulative effect of being the person who consistently raises uncomfortable questions is a reputation as a difficult person — even when the questions are good ones, even when the organization benefits from them. Grant addresses this partially with the credibility-building prescription, but the cost doesn’t disappear entirely even with maximum strategic care.
The second cost is cognitive and emotional energy. Maintaining an unconventional position under sustained social pressure — when everyone around disagrees, when the organizational consensus runs against it, when the easy path is to update toward the group view — requires genuine psychological resources. Grant’s research shows originals often experience significant anxiety before and during acts of voice. Not a bug in their character; the accurate recognition that speaking up carries real costs. The question is not how to eliminate the anxiety but how to ensure the value of the contribution is worth the cost of incurring it.
The practical implication is not “don’t speak up” but “be selective about when to speak up, and price the cost honestly before incurring it.” The person who speaks up about every suboptimal practice in their organization will exhaust their relational capital quickly and produce diminishing returns on each subsequent act of voice. The person who reserves their originality capital for the highest-use opportunities — the issues where the organization most needs someone to challenge the default — will have both the credibility and the energy to make those challenges effective.
Originals and the Resilience Muscle
One underexplored dimension of Originals is its relationship to the broader resilience literature. The qualities Grant identifies as characteristic of effective originals — the willingness to act despite anxiety, the persistence through social resistance, the capacity to maintain conviction while acknowledging uncertainty — are identical to the qualities resilience researchers identify as characteristic of psychologically strong individuals.
The person who can bring an unconventional idea to a skeptical audience without being destroyed by the rejection that often follows is exercising exactly the psychological muscles that produce resilience in the face of other forms of adversity. The originals who most interest Grant are not people who experience no fear or rejection — they’re people who have developed the capacity to function effectively despite both. This is resilience with a specific application: resilience in the face of social pressure to conform and intellectual pressure to abandon unconventional positions.
The implication is that developing originality and developing resilience are substantially the same project. The practices that build the capacity for effective originality — learning to hold positions under pressure, developing comfortable familiarity with being wrong in public, practicing the recovery from failed advocacy — are the same practices that build the psychological robustness resilience research describes as the foundation of sustained high performance. Not separate development tracks; the same track with different labels. For more on building this integrated psychological capacity, see our content on mental toughness and psychological resilience. The physical foundations that support sustained creative and intellectual output are explored in our functional health and performance content.
Rating: 3.5/5 stars. Grant’s most entertaining book and a solid practical guide to originality and advocacy. Most valuable for people in organizational contexts who are sitting on unconventional ideas and looking for the strategic framework to develop and voice them effectively. Less transformative for readers who are already comfortable with nonconformity or who are looking for a deeper psychological or philosophical treatment of creativity.
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