Zitat des Tages von Adam Grant:
Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters.
If an organization values innovation, you can assume it's safe to speak up with new ideas, leaders will listen, and your voice matters.
From a motivation perspective, helping others enriches the meaning and purpose of our own lives, showing us that our contributions matter and energizing us to work harder, longer, and smarter.
I can't tell you that if you bring in a bunch of weird and different people, then a bunch of good things will happen. But I can tell you that if you hire a bunch of similar people and promote only the ones who are most similar, a bunch of bad things are likely to happen.
I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed.
The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.
Being a nice person is about courtesy: you're friendly, polite, agreeable, and accommodating. When people believe they have to be nice in order to give, they fail to set boundaries, rarely say no, and become pushovers, letting others walk all over them.
Being a magician taught me how powerful the element of surprise can be. In each book, I've tried to work that in - an unexpected twist in a story that reveals an insight, a counter intuitive study that turns your beliefs upside-down.
Perhaps gaining power doesn't cause people to act like takers. It simply creates the opportunity for people who think like takers to express themselves.
Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality.
If you've ever had a coworker actively interfere with your productivity, try to make you look bad, steal your ideas, or give you false information, you've been the victim of undermining.
If we want people to vote, we need to make it a larger part of their self-image.
Complex tasks are often better handled in the back of our mind, and that's often true of creative tasks - when you have something complex to deal with in writing or research or responding to an email. I'll start working, put it aside, and sometimes I'll wake up the next morning with a solution, or I'll find one when I exercise.
To grow, people need to be challenged.
I love discovering compelling new ideas and doing what I can to help spread the word about them.
We all have thoughts and feelings that we believe are fundamental to our lives but that are better left unspoken.
Conformity is dangerous.
In the eyes of many people, giving doesn't count unless it's completely selfless. In reality, though, giving isn't sustainable when it's completely selfless.
I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.
The mark of higher education isn't the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It's the skills you gain about how to learn.
In the conversation about women in leadership, male voices are noticeably absent.
When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.
It's ironic that when you go through a tragedy, you appreciate more. You realize how fragile life is and that there are so many things to still be thankful for.
One of the signs of a bad coworker is a pattern of persistent undermining - intentionally hindering a colleague's success, reputation, or relationships.
Geniuses don't have better ideas than the rest of us. They just have more of them.
If I had the day off and knew everyone else was voting, I wouldn't miss it. It would become a routine part of my responsibility as a citizen - like paying taxes, only less soul crushing.
Negative feedback can make people feel inferior.
Frenemies are worse than enemies, and it's not just in the workplace.
When making decisions about people, stop confusing experience with evidence. Just as owning a car doesn't make you an expert on engines, having a brain doesn't mean you understand psychology.
I want my children to know that we often become resilient for others.
You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they're afraid to be punished if they don't. For startups, there's so much pivoting that's required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you're in bad shape.
Authenticity is a virtue. But just as you can have too little authenticity, you can also have too much.
By admitting your inadequacies, you show that you're self-aware enough to know your areas for improvement - and secure enough to be open about them.
Successful givers secure their oxygen masks before coming to the assistance of others. Although their motives may be less purely altruistic, their actions prove more altruistic, because they give more.
When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns.
Some people are selfish in all of their relationships. Those people are called sociopaths.