A small synopsis provided by TED for this talk by Wharton Professor – Adam Grant:
How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies “originals”: thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including embracing failure. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most,” Grant says. “You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.”
Adam Grant starts out by talking about some students looking for funding in their e-commerce company but they were doing it part time. He declined but they turned out to be the founders of Warby Parker. Their business is that they sell eye glasses online. They were recently recognized as the world’s most innovative company and valued at over a billion dollars.
Adam then starts talking about the “Originals” – the ones who can speak out, do things differently and are not afraid to fail and sometimes can also be mild procrastinators.
The procrastinators angle makes sense because (and I admit I am one) when we are in that mode, we come up most often with the right kind of creative and original thoughts. The people who are either doing ahead of time or really bad procrastinators don’t have this proper balance.
More from Adam Grant’s talk in his own words:
But there is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome users significantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users.
They also stay in their jobs 15 percent longer, by the way. Why? It’s not a technical advantage. The four browser groups on average have similar typing speed and they also have similar levels of computer knowledge. It’s about how you got the browser. Because if you use Internet Explorer or Safari, those came preinstalled on your computer, and you accepted the default option that was handed to you. If you wanted Firefox or Chrome, you had to doubt the default and ask, is there a different option out there, and then be a little resourceful and download a new browser. So people hear about this study and they’re like, “Great, if I want to get better at my job, I just need to upgrade my browser?”
No, it’s about being the kind of person who takes the initiative to doubt the default and look for a better option. And if you do that well, you will open yourself up to the opposite of déjà vu. There’s a name for it. It’s called vuja de.
Vuja de is when you look at something you’ve seen many times before and all of a sudden see it with fresh eyes. It’s a screenwriter who looks at a movie script that can’t get the green light for more than half a century. In every past version, the main character has been an evil queen. But Jennifer Lee starts to question whether that makes sense. She rewrites the first act, reinvents the villain as a tortured hero and Frozen becomes the most successful animated movie ever. So there’s a simple message from this story. When you feel doubt, don’t let it go.
What about fear? Originals feel fear, too. They’re afraid of failing, but what sets them apart from the rest of us is that they’re even more afraid of failing to try. They know you can fail by starting a business that goes bankrupt or by failing to start a business at all. They know that in the long run, our biggest regrets are not our actions but our inactions. The things we wish we could redo, if you look at the science, are the chances not taken.
