Adam Grant
Organizational psychologist · Think Again
Wharton organizational psychologist. He wrote Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, hosts the TED podcast ReThinking, and studies motivation, generosity and what it takes to change your mind. His day runs on attention, not on the clock. One project stays in front of him until it stalls. Whole days go to creative work or to other people. A standing group of people has the job of arguing with him.
- Entries
- 25
- Does
- 16
- Recommends
- 9
- Discusses
- 0
Books
8 books in this stack
- BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
Give and Take
Givers, takers and matchers are how the book sorts people by what they want out of an exchange. Some givers end up exploited and burned out while the rest do extraordinarily well, his site says, and the evidence is his own research at Wharton.
Source: adamgrant.net: Give and TakeVisit adamgrant.net (opens in a new tab)On record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it - BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
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 PotentialVisit adamgrant.net (opens in a new tab)On record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it - BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
Insight
Suggested to anyone hunting their own blind spots. What he took from Tasha Eurich's book is that genuinely self-aware people do not spend much time agonizing over why they are the way they are.
Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcriptView item: InsightOn record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it - BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
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 transcriptView item: Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)On record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it - BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
Option B
Written with Sheryl Sandberg after her husband died suddenly. He had told her there were concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound, and the book pairs her account with his research on resilience.
Source: adamgrant.net: Option BVisit adamgrant.net (opens in a new tab)On record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it - BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
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: OriginalsVisit adamgrant.net (opens in a new tab)On record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it - BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
Quiet
He has gifted Susan Cain's book more times than he can count, and started out sending it to introverts. The biggest fans, in his experience, turned out to be extroverts realizing what they were missing in the quiet people around them.
Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcriptView item: QuietOn record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it - BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
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 AgainVisit adamgrant.net (opens in a new tab)On record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it
Protocols
9 entriesStructured routines and practices with a defined method.
Weights twice a week, he told Tim Ferriss in 2019, plus a target of three cardio days.
Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcriptTennis 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 transcriptBy 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 transcriptPeople 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 transcriptDays 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 transcriptHe 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 transcriptBack 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 transcriptGames 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 transcriptPicked 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
Habits
8 entriesRecurring behaviors recorded in public statements.
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 transcriptNarrative 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 transcriptResearch 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 transcriptTalking 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 transcriptMeetings 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 transcriptThe 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 transcriptRequests 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 transcriptOutsourcing 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
In their own words
Checked word for word against the linked source
“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.”
The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript (opens in a new tab) · 20 Dec 2019 “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.”
The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript (opens in a new tab) · 20 Dec 2019 “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.”
The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript (opens in a new tab) · 20 Dec 2019 “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.”
The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript (opens in a new tab) · 20 Dec 2019 “Jotting down intuitions and spelling out hunches is how we develop and refine our ideas. Writing is where we do our best thinking.”
Granted: How to Pick a Job, Say No and Sorry, and Avoid AI Pitfalls (opens in a new tab) · 29 Jun 2025
Episodes from the feed
Show archive, ReThinking (opens in a new tab)Last fetched . A title without a link is an episode the feed publishes no page of its own for.
- How leaders build a collective identity with Vanessa Beasley (opens in a new tab) · 40m
- Dolly Parton is burning up, not burning out | from WorkLife with Adam Grant (re-release) (opens in a new tab) · 26m
- Is emotional regulation always a good thing? with Julie Bowen and Aliza Pressman (opens in a new tab) · 55m
- Improvisation as a life skill with Andrea Jones-Rooy and Justin Gregg (opens in a new tab) · 38m
- The psychology of rivalry and resilience with Maria Sharapova (opens in a new tab) · 41m
Stack notes are paraphrased. Anything in quotation marks is a short excerpt copied from the transcript it links to. Not medical advice. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by anyone listed. How this works.