Adam Grant

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  Give and Take

  Givers, takers and matchers are how the book sorts people by what they want out of an exchange. Some givers end up exploited and burned out while the rest do extraordinarily well, his site says, and the evidence is his own research at Wharton.

  Source: adamgrant.net: Give and Take
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  Hidden Potential

  The true measure of potential is not the height of the peak reached but how far someone climbed to get there, which is the line his site leads with. Character skills and the conditions for improvement carry the rest.

  Source: adamgrant.net: Hidden Potential
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  Insight

  Suggested to anyone hunting their own blind spots. What he took from Tasha Eurich's book is that genuinely self-aware people do not spend much time agonizing over why they are the way they are.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript
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  Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

  One of his most-gifted books, by Tavris and Aronson, which he describes as being about why our egos get in the way of just about everything and how to overcome that.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript
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  Option B

  Written with Sheryl Sandberg after her husband died suddenly. He had told her there were concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound, and the book pairs her account with his research on resilience.

  Source: adamgrant.net: Option B
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  Originals

  Championing new ideas and fighting groupthink is how his site sums the 2016 book up. It works through recognizing a good idea, speaking up without getting silenced, building a coalition of allies, and managing fear and doubt.

  Source: adamgrant.net: Originals
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  Quiet

  He has gifted Susan Cain's book more times than he can count, and started out sending it to introverts. The biggest fans, in his experience, turned out to be extroverts realizing what they were missing in the quiet people around them.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript
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  Think Again

  Rethinking and unlearning, he argues here, may matter more than the ability to think and learn in a world that keeps moving. The people worth seeking out are the ones who challenge how you reached a conclusion, not the ones who share it.

  Source: adamgrant.net: Think Again
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Repeatable, mostly free routines with a defined trigger and dose.

• Resistance trainingDoes it$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.

  Weights twice a week, he told Tim Ferriss in 2019, plus a target of three cardio days.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• TennisDoes it$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.

  Tennis is one of the three things he rotates through to hit that cardio target, with ultimate frisbee and the elliptical.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Attention managementDoes itFREE, no cost

  By his own account he is bad at time management and has gotten good at attention management. So he stays on one project until the ideas or the hours run out. Chronic lateness is the cost he accepts for it.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Challenge networkDoes itFREE, no cost

  People whose job is to tear his logic apart. Years before he had a name for it he was already doing this, and he formalized the practice after watching Bridgewater run it at company scale. Students see book chapters first and compete over who lands the most devastating criticism. He says he is not always as receptive as he would like to be, and keeps going back anyway.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Maker days and manager daysDoes itFREE, no cost

  Days for his own creative work and days for being available to other people, kept apart. He credits research on chunking generosity into a single helping day, and describes campus days of back-to-back office hours, then a day at home talking to nobody outside his family.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Reflected Best Self ExerciseDoes itFREE, no cost

  He first ran it in his first year of grad school, and learned that recognizing other people's strengths was one of his own. That would never have crossed his mind otherwise, he says. Every group he teaches now does it, and he suggests repeating it every couple of years.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Springboard divingDoes it$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.

  Back on a diving board in 2019, for the first time in more than a dozen years, having retired from the sport half a lifetime earlier. It hurt very badly the next morning, he said. Part of what started it was teaching his kid some technique.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Ultimate frisbeeDoes itFREE, no cost

  Games count toward the same three cardio days a week, and he lists frisbee first of the three, ahead of tennis and the elliptical.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• YesterboxDoes itFREE, no cost

  Picked up from a Tim Ferriss blog post about Tony Hsieh's system, and he found it genuinely useful. Answering all of yesterday's email today, he says, is what keeps the backlog from building.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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Daily practices held long enough to become default behavior.

• Batch processing emailDoes itFREE, no cost

  He will not answer a single message at random. Thirty, forty or a hundred go through in one sitting instead. On writing days he deliberately opens with a few easy replies, because a flashing cursor is a worse place to start than an inbox.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Falling asleep to podcastsDoes itFREE, no cost

  Narrative podcasts took over from reading and television at bedtime. He says he processes the material more deeply than reading it, falls asleep faster without a screen, and finds that shows he actually wants to learn from are the wrong pick.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Jotting ideas the night beforeDoes itFREE, no cost

  Research on creativity at low alertness made him reverse his order of work. Ideas go down on paper before bed, when thinking is fuzzier. The organizing waits for the morning, when he is fresh.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Mastery hobbiesDoes itFREE, no cost

  Talking to a recovery researcher on his own show, he said she was helping him justify his preference for mastery over relaxation. What recharges him, by his account, is something demanding. Word games, a run, a bike ride, a tennis match.

  Source: WorkLife: The science of recharging on weekends and vacations transcript

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• No meetings with strangersDoes itFREE, no cost

  Meetings with people he has no existing reason to meet are a categorical no. He says he will still answer a reasonable email from a stranger. His stated order is family first, students second, colleagues and friends third.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Phone calls after a workoutDoes itFREE, no cost

  The half hour after weights or cardio was going to waste, he found, because he was not back in work mode yet. Phone calls fill it now. The reasoning is that a conversation asks less of the focus that has not returned.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript

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• Saved answers to common requestsDoes itFREE, no cost

  Requests he gets constantly have an answer written up already. Strangers after career advice get a list of his favorite books, articles and podcasts. Authors asking for a foreword get his notes on promoting a book, and companies looking for speakers get other names.

  Source: WorkLife: How to say no transcript

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• Daily writingRecommendsFREE, no cost

  Outsourcing most writing to AI is a mistake, he wrote in his newsletter, because something valuable goes missing even when the output reads well. Writing hunches down is how ideas sharpen, on his argument. He counts the drafting as the thinking.

  Source: Granted: How to Pick a Job, Say No and Sorry, and Avoid AI Pitfalls

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• “I think I’m bad at time management, but I’ve gotten good at attention management. … And so what I try to do is I try to do one project or task at a time.”

  On Attention management

• “And so now what I’ll do is at night before I go to bed when I know I want to write the next morning, I still like to write when I’m fresh so that it actually makes sense, but the night before, I’ll actually start jotting down some ideas.”

  On Jotting ideas the night before

• “And then my last favorite routine, which is definitely on the new side, is actually to go to sleep listening to podcasts. For years I would read or watch TV going to sleep. But it’s so much more relaxing to not look at a screen.”

  On Falling asleep to podcasts

• “But I think a great member of a challenge network, I’ll tell you about mine, is somebody who pushes you because they believe in you. And they’re not going to settle for half-baked ideas or for something that’s not your very best work.”

  On Challenge network

• “Jotting down intuitions and spelling out hunches is how we develop and refine our ideas. Writing is where we do our best thinking.”

  On Daily writing