Grant: The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers (TED 2016)
Summary: Adam Grant argues that originals are not fearless geniuses but ordinary people who manage doubt and procrastination strategically — and that the habits we mistake for weakness (hesitating, having bad ideas, fearing failure) are often preconditions for creative breakthroughs.
Sources: Transcripts/Adam_Grant_2016_transcript.md
Last updated: 2026-05-07
Core argument
Originals are not rare mutants. They feel the same fear and doubt as everyone else; they just manage it differently. The three habits that distinguish them are counter-intuitive: they procrastinate strategically, they doubt their ideas rather than themselves, and they generate high volumes of output to find the few things that work.
Procrastination as incubation
“Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.”
Grant’s student Jihae Shin showed that moderate procrastinators were 16 percent more creative than precrastinators and chronic procrastinators alike. When a task is active in the back of the mind but not yet acted on, the brain continues to process it in non-linear ways. This is incubation, not laziness.
“You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking.” — Aaron Sorkin
Historical examples: Leonardo da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa on and off for 16 years; Martin Luther King Jr. was still revising his March on Washington speech in the audience and improvised “I have a dream” — a phrase not in the prepared text — because the speech was not yet fixed.
“Being quick to start but slow to finish can boost your creativity.”
Self-doubt vs idea-doubt
“Self-doubt is paralyzing. It leads you to freeze. But idea doubt is energizing. It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine.”
The key is not to eliminate doubt but to redirect it from oneself to one’s drafts. Instead of “I am not good enough,” the move is “my first draft is not good enough yet.” This reframe converts paralysis into iteration.
The browser study illustrates the same point: Firefox and Chrome users outperform Safari and Internet Explorer users at work — not because of the browser, but because choosing a non-default browser requires doubting the given option and looking for something better. Originals habitually doubt defaults.
“Vuja de is when you look at something you’ve seen many times before and all of a sudden see it with fresh eyes.”
Volume and the failure rate of first movers
“The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most.”
Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart produced hundreds of compositions to yield a small number of masterpieces. Edison’s light bulb coexisted with dozens of failed ideas, including a talking doll that frightened children. Warby Parker tested over 2,000 company names before landing on one.
On first-mover advantage:
“The first movers had a failure rate of 47 percent, compared with only 8 percent for the improvers.”
“To be original you don’t have to be first. You just have to be different and better.”
Facebook waited until after Myspace and Friendster; Google waited after AltaVista and Yahoo. Improving on an existing idea is less risky than starting from scratch.
Fear of inaction over fear of failure
“In the long run, our biggest regrets are not our actions but our inactions. The things we wish we could redo are the chances not taken.”
Originals fear failing to try more than they fear failing. They know you can fail by starting a business that collapses or by never starting at all. Elon Musk expected early SpaceX launches to fail — but regarded not trying as the bigger failure.