Hidden Brain - You 2.0: Originals

Episode Date: August 21, 2018

What does it mean to be an original? As part of our summer series, You 2.0, we talk with psychology professor Adam Grant about innovators and the challenges they face. Adam gives his take on what makes an original, how parents can nurture originality in their children, and the potential downsides of non-conformity.

Hi there, Shankar here, we're in the middle of our summer series called U2.0. This week's episode comes from our early days of Hidden Brain. It looks at who comes up with great ideas, and what we can do to have more of them. Adam Grant was teaching his first class at the Wharton Business School when a student came up to him with an interesting proposition. He says, I've got this big idea. Three friends and I are going to start an online business, and we're going to disrupt an industry. Do you want to invest? But from what Adam could see, this group of friends wasn't doing so well and getting

that big idea off the ground. Six months go by, it's the day before launch, they still don't have a functioning website. The whole business is a website, that's literally all it is. And so I obviously passed on the investment. The name of the company? Warby Parker. They were just saying the most innovative company in the world by fast company and they're worth over a billion dollars, which is why my wife handles all her investments now. I'm Shankar Vedantanthan and this week on Hidden Brain, Originals, how to spot one, how to be one.

We bring you my conversation with Adam Grant. He's a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and he's the author of the new book, Originals, How Non-Conformist Move the World. I asked Adam what the Wabby Parker episode had taught him about the qualities of innovators. They often procrastinate, and that's how they incubate ideas. What parents can do to nurture originality in their kids, their parents focus more on values than rules.

And the downside of marching to the beat of your own drum. One of the risks is you have everybody marching in a different direction. Looking back now, Adam, looking back if you could go back and talk to the old Adam, what would you tell that Adam? I would say that I was totally wrong about what it takes to be original. I think of original people as the non-conformist who drive creativity and change in the world. And I would say they often procrastinate, and that's how they incubate ideas. They feel the same fears and doubts that the rest of us do. They just manage them differently. They hate taking risks.

And they have lots of bad ideas, and that's how they get to the good ones. I have to say though, it's possible that when someone sits in an idea for six months and they're an online company and they don't have a website ready to go the day before launch, it is also possible that they could turn out to be a gigantic failure. You're just trying to make me feel better

about my decision, right? Would you have invested? I would not. Yeah, I mean, of course, it's possible that they would fail, but what I should have paid attention to is they also met all these other characteristics that originalists tend to bring to the table. So a lot of times you see that originals are not the people with the deepest expertise, so the people with the broadest experience.

And what was so great about Niels' background is he had been selling glasses in the developing world and also giving them away to try to help people who couldn't see get their lives in a place where they could work. And he had all sorts of exposure to the fact that you can make glasses a lot more cheaply than the monopolies here in the Western world were doing it. They were also really good at questioning the status quo.

And this is a hallmark of being an original. A lot of people would just say, you know, glasses cost what they cost. Your doctor prescribes them and that's the end of it. And they had 60 years of combined experience wearing glasses. But suddenly one day, one of the founders Dave said, why do they cost so much?

Like they've been around for 800 years and they're still more than an iPhone? That doesn't make sense. And once they did research into it, they found out that they could do a lot to lower the price. And I think that was a sign that they were going to take off. In your book, you find that the writer and poet, T.S. Eliot, Google's co-founder, Larry Page, and the phone.

All have something in common. When they have an opportunity to dive headfirst into something, take a big risk, they actually hedge their bets and hesitate. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because that runs counter to the way we think that people who are true originals actually behave. It does. I think what happens is they are afraid of failing, just like you and I might be.

And at first, when they have a new idea, they're not sure if it's going to succeed. They have no idea whether they can support a livelihood based on it. So T.S. Eliot, poetry is not the most lucrative career. He works as a bank clerk to cover his bills and give himself the freedom to do something original as a poet. And I think Larry Page and Sergey were both in the position of saying, look, what we want to do is we have lots of great ideas. They were PhD students at Stanford at the time they came up with the idea for Google.

They were and they thought search was bad and they wrote an algorithm to do it better based on pages linking to other pages, being an indication that a page was popular. And they didn't see that as a career. They just kind of said, I know a better way to do this and they built it. And they weren't ready to make the leap. They had visions of, you know, continuing to just create knowledge. And finished that PhDs, as doubtless their parents would I wanted them to do. Yeah, I maybe still want them to do.

Great advantage of waiting to make that leap is you don't feel the pressure to rush it to market. If they were depending on this for their livelihood, they would have said, we need to get this search engine out there. We need to get it there now. And because they weren't doing that, it was much easier to say, you know, let's get this right. And again, I mean, when you look at what people are doing in basements and in garages, this is what countless people do.

I mean, they have a day job. They're working as an accountant. But they're playing in that garage or that basement and trying to build something new. Yeah, we're dead okay for a film night, right? He sold shoes out of the trunk of his car for seven years, working a day job as an accountant before he finally started Nike, and he learned a lot in those seven years that increased his chances to succeed. So what makes the switch between the point of which you're sort of saying I'm still tinkering versus I'm actually going. What happens to the people now who just procrastinate and think and plan and endlessly work in their garages and the people who say I'm going to work in my garage for the first two, three, four,

five, six years, but eventually I go out and test the waters. I think what happens is the fear of failing gets overtaken by the fear of failing to try. And so if you have a great surgeon or you believe that a film you're making is going to change the world, then at some point you shift from worrying about regretting, making a fool of yourself, to regretting, never taking a chance. And as you know, that's what psychologists consistently find about regret, that a lot of people are afraid in the moment of taking the risk, but that in the long run our biggest regrets are in actions, the chances we didn't take.

And I say, yeah, it might fail, but that's still better than failing to matter. One of the things that you find in the book that I found very intriguing is that very often, people who launch new ventures or new careers or new social innovations don't actually choose to do it themselves, but they are drafted by other people. Yeah, I was so surprised by this. Michelangelo got commissioned to paint the cysteine chapel and he's looking up at the ceiling thinking how in the world could I do that? And he's terrified, so he flees to Florence. And then he sort of gets coaxed back and talked into giving this a shot.

Martin Luther King doesn't want to lead the civil rights revolution. His first dream is to be a pastor and then a college president. And he shows up at a meeting and he's been voted unanimously to lead this movement and basically dragged into it. And so what you find is often people then rising to the occasion when they sort of placed at this position that's in some ways an unfamiliar position. It is, and I think this is sometimes what makes them so effective at these leadership roles or at innovating that they've spent months or years stewing on these ideas and they've hatched by the time that somebody pulls them into the spotlight.

And that leads to the question, when you have an organization and you want to try and get the best talent, maybe the thing to do is not sort of put a job at out and say who applies for it, but actually to be drafting people who might not on the surface seem like the ideal fit. I think there's something to be said for that, that, you know, originality is brewing in all sorts of unexpected places. And so often, as leaders, what we do is we stifle that as opposed to trying to unleash it.

And there's a lot that can be done to try to figure out, OK, who are the people that are in a position to bring really new ideas into this organization? And why aren't we hearing from them? Susan came, the quiet author, is fond of saying that there's zero correlation between who's the best talker and who has the best ideas. And that's a widely supported empirical finding. And I'd love to do a better job identifying that silent minority and giving them the floor.

You have to ask how this reflects on our political system, Adam, where the ability to speak and win a public debate is often integral to winning public office? Yeah, you know what I would love to see is a political system that's based more on skill in leading than it is on speaking. So what I want to know is what politicians are going to be the most effective decision-makers, who's going to come up with the best strategic vision, who has expertise in handling conflict? We don't see that right now. And I think we also look for people who want to step forward. We look for the person who puts up their hand.

We look for the person who says, I'm the most qualified person. And of course, it's nice to hear initiative. It's nice to hear drive, but that might not actually be the best person for the job. Yeah, the people that I'm most excited about for are the ones who have no interest in the job whatsoever. I don't know how we get them on the stage.

Right, because of course, having the most compelling speech doesn't necessarily qualify you to know what to do when there's a civil war in Syria. I want to vote for the candidate who is willing to contradict him or herself, right? And admit to being wrong because, you know, some people call that flip-flopping, I think if it is enlightenment. I mean of the people in your book whom you look at,

how many of them have that kind of evolution if you will, whether sort of try something, it doesn't work, they try something else, it doesn't work, and they're not actually rigid in their thinking, but they're actually open to being adaptable. I think that's one of the hallmarks of being original, is being flexible enough in your thinking to admit you know this was wrong or this was a bad idea right abraham linkin when he came into the presidency he was initially not going to abolish slavery he was afraid that it would destroy the union

and he agonized for six months over that decision for finally signed the emancipation proclamation he's a flip flopper, right? That's one of the most important acts in the history of this country. Thomas Edison, to go to the innovative domain. Edison worked on all sorts of failed inventions while he was trying to pioneer the light bulb.

He invented a talking doll so creepy that it scared not only kids, but adults too. A talking doll. A talking doll. I've had nightmares looking at the picture of this. And so it actually moved its mouth and words came out? It did. Yeah, this is a very early sort of free robot.

He tried to, you know, mine, he tried to mine iron with magnets. He tried to preserve fruit with failing techniques. And he had to be willing to admit that these ideas were not working out to move on to the ones that did. But one of the things that this implies is that what distinguishes the great from the ordinary is not necessarily that the great only have great ideas, but that the great simply have many more ideas than the ordinary. I think that's exactly the story, right? The greatest originals are the people who failed the most because they're the ones who tried

the most. If you study this across lots of different domains, it's not that originals have higher hit rates than their peers. It's just they generate more volume, which gives them more variety, and a better shot at something new. So Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, they were not on average in a typical composition better than their peers, but they generated over 600 each, and in some cases over a thousand different compositions and a few of those were true masterpieces. When you looked at the works of Shakespeare, you also found that at the very same time Shakespeare was writing some of his greatest masterpieces, he was also writing some of his greatest duds.

Yeah, have you heard of the Mary wives of Windsor? What about the Tumon of Athens? If Shakespeare were here today, he'd want us to know that around that time, he also wrote Hamlet and McBeth. So what explains this when the same person is sitting down and writing plays, or the same person is sitting down and doing inventions, how is it that they're producing genius and crap at the same time? One because a lot of us fall in love with our first ideas, and those are the most conventional. Often you have to weed out the familiar in order to get to the unusual, but a lot of people never get to those later ideas. A second thing is, it's just really hard

to judge your own ideas. Most of us are way too positive on the ideas we come up with. And oftentimes they need to put a bunch of ideas out in the world, they could feedback and find out what actually made sense. I'm wondering if the same thing is true of Shakespeare. If we actually sat Shakespeare down the year after he wrote

the Mary Wies of Windsor and Macbeth, is it possible that he might have told us, you know, Macbeth, it's okay, but the Mary Wieser Winsor, that's the masterpiece. You know, this is so common among originals. I can't tell you what Shakespeare would have said, obviously, because he didn't answer my interview request. But, you know, you see this with scientists all the time,

that frequently their least-sided works are the ones that they think are the greatest. And Beethoven. Beethoven was known as a great self-critic, and yet he was pretty far off the mark in predicting which of his pieces were going to be his biggest hits and his biggest flops. My guest today is Adam Grant. He's a professor at the Wharton School. Coming up, we talk about who gets the chance to be original and how parents can foster this quality in their kids. I want to look a little bit at perhaps what might be called the dark side of

originality, or maybe the dark side is not right the right word. It's more that the benefits of originality are not distributed equally in our society. Yeah, I think this is a great tragedy that we see both women and racial minority groups being less likely to speak up when they have original ideas. I'm Cheryl Sandberg and I wrote an op-ed about this last year called speaking wall female. We covered a bunch of evidence, including some of some studies that I ran, showing that when men spoke up, they were rewarded for it.

And when women spoke up, either they were barely heard, and usually some dude, like, sort of wanders in and steals credit for their idea, or they were judged as too aggressive and violating these communal, caring stereotypes we have of women. And I think those stereotypes lead a lot of women to hold back because they're afraid of backlash. And I think those stereotypes lead a lot of women to hold back because they're afraid

of backlash. And I think that we need many more organizations and I think people in the world to check their biases and be receptive to both women and minority groups bringing their ideas to the table. But you have to wonder how many great ideas are not being put on the table at all because people feel hesitant to talk about them. Yeah, I think we're missing out on the majority of the original ideas in the world, not because people aren't creative, but because there's a gap between the ideas you have and the ones

that you share. And if you go back to this idea about the volume of ideas, sort of creativity, relationship that we talked about earlier, you know, the history is obviously full of examples of men doing the majority of the original work in certain fields. And that's largely because they had the freedom to work on lots of ideas, whereas women were primarily working on childcare and they had a hard time getting their ideas heard. In the book you talk about the idea that birth order, whether you have older siblings or younger siblings, might play a role in your willingness to take chances.

Can you talk about that work? This is wildly controversial. I don't think I've ever seen another realm of social science with more competing results. But there are a series of studies suggesting that firstborns tend to be slightly more conventional achievers, whereas laterborns are more inclined to challenge the status quo and do things that are a little bit original. And get this. You look at over 300 pairs of brothers who played professional baseball.

And that way you get to do the test within families. And you see that younger brothers are more than 10 times more likely to attempt to steal a base than their older siblings. So why is that? I think that one factor that the popular explanation from Frank Zulloy is that it's about niche picking. That it's hard to stand out by being smarter or stronger than your older siblings.

They have a clear advantage academically and athletically. So what you do is you look for other ways to stand out, and one of those is to take risks or be creative. I think the other part of the story, though, is that parents tend to give more freedom to their later born children. What is the way you train people to be original? What is the way you encourage originality in a company and an organization and a family? Let's start with the family side of it.

If you study some of the America's most original architects and compare them with technically scaled but less creative peers, one of the things that happened in the families of the creative architects was their parents focused more on values than rules. And they would say things like, you know, excellence is important in this family. What kind of success do you want to achieve? Or we really care about our actions having an impact on others. What sort of mark would you like to make on the world around you? And when their kids grew up, they had a very clear set of guiding principles. They were willing to stand their ground when other people didn't agree with them. And they also thought a lot about not just creative self-expression, but saying, how can I do

something that's useful to other people? But why is it that rules-based behavior doesn't produce the same thing as values-based advice? When you focus on rules in a family, a lot of times kids learn to follow them, which means accepting the status quo and essentially becoming an excellent sheep. And when you go to values, kids actually have to think for themselves. What's, you know, this is funny as a parent, right? Because after reading this research, I'm constantly catching myself every time our kids misbehaves saying, new rule! And then realizing, nope,

we should be talking about what's the value behind this rule. Give me an example where that's happened recently. All right, so we're sitting at dinner, and one of our family values is respect. So we like for them to not get up from the dinner table before everyone's done eating. And they start to get up and it's like,

no, you must sit in your seat. And then I start to realize, well, what I need to say is, here's why that's And you know, they start to get up and it's like, no, you must sit in your seat. And then I start to realize, well, what I need to say is here's why that's important to us, right? It's not about having the rules, about saying, look, the reason we like to all sit in our seats is because we want everybody to share a nice family meal. And we think that's a great way to have, you know,

respect for each other. So I think when you talk about originality and creativity, there's a great hunger in our society to want to race people, to want to have employees, be original and be creative. Are there downsides to originality and creativity? Yeah, of course. A few years ago, Barry Schwartz and I wrote a paper on the too much of a good thing effect, where we basically argue that all strengths and virtues are like Goldilocks, where you can have too much as well as too little.

And there's no question that with originality that can be true. One of the risks is that you have everybody marching in a different direction. And pioneers need settlers, leaders need followers. If everybody's an original, then you don't have anyone to help implement your ideas. But I think the opposite is a greater risk. If everybody conforms, then we lose out on great ways to improve the world around us. And I don't want people to conform, which is basically saying, I will go along with your idea even though I don't believe in it.

I want them to think for themselves and sometimes decide that other people's ideas are worth following. Adam Graham, thank you so much for joining me on Hidden Brain today. Such a delight. This episode was produced by Cara McGurk-Allison with help from Neil Tevold. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Raina Cohen, Hath Shah, Thomas Liu, Laura Quarelle and Aditi Ban Lemoudi. Our supervising producer as Tara Boyle.

This week our unsung hero is Tracy Wall. Tracy is a former NPR colleague who worked with several of us here on the Hidden Brain team. She has been a great supporter of our work and her enthusiasm for storytelling is truly infectious. Thanks for being a great friend and colleague Tracy. If you're enjoying our U2.0 series, please share it with friends and family who could benefit from these stories. Next week we'll bring you our final episode in the series. It's about a simple, unflashy tool that we should all use more often. If those checklists had not been integrated to that level at the start of World War II, and it's reasonable to assume that many hundreds and probably thousands of lives would have been lost due to that.

I'm Sean Carvey-Danton, and this is NPR.