Originals — How Non-Conformists Move the World

The Reality of Creative Risk

We tell a particular story about original thinkers: they see what others miss, they’re fearless in the face of skepticism, they act decisively on their convictions. Adam Grant’s Originals challenges every part of that mythology with considerable research behind him.

Successful originals, Grant demonstrates, are not fearless. They feel the same doubt, anxiety, and imposter syndrome that stops most people from acting. What they do differently is find strategies for acting despite those feelings — strategies that Grant catalogs across psychology, history, and organizational science.

The Quantity Insight

The book’s most counterintuitive finding is about creative productivity. Grant examines the careers of creative geniuses across multiple fields and finds a consistent pattern: they didn’t just produce more masterpieces than their peers. They produced more of everything, including their most embarrassing failures. Einstein published poor papers. Shakespeare wrote bad plays. The rate of production drives the hit rate because creative quality is genuinely difficult to predict in advance — even by the creator.

The practical implication: if you want to produce original work, your first priority is volume. Curating in advance is a reliable recipe for stagnation.

Procrastination Reconsidered

Grant’s chapter on procrastination and creativity is among the book’s most surprising. The research suggests that moderate procrastination — beginning a project, then setting it aside before completing it — can actually enhance creative output by allowing divergent thinking to continue in the background. The completely done-in-advance and the completely last-minute show worse creative outcomes than the strategic in-between.

This is counterintuitive enough that Grant makes sure to distinguish strategic incubation from simple avoidance, and the distinction matters.

The First-Mover Myth

Among the book’s most useful corrections is its assault on the romance of being first. Common wisdom prizes the pioneer, but Grant marshals research suggesting that first movers actually fail far more often than the “improvers” and “settlers” who arrive later — by one study, a 47 percent failure rate for pioneers against just 8 percent for those who refine an existing idea. Facebook outlasted MySpace and Friendster; Google buried AltaVista and Yahoo. Being early often means absorbing the costs of educating a market and making the expensive mistakes that smarter latecomers learn from. This reframing dovetails with Grant’s defence of strategic procrastination — the idea that quick to start but slow to finish can be a creative virtue, letting ideas marinate rather than rushing a half-formed product to market. His signature example is Martin Luther King Jr., who was still revising the “I Have a Dream” speech the night before, and improvised its most famous passage at the podium. The lesson is liberating for anyone who has felt like a failure for not racing to be first.

Questioning the Defaults

At the heart of Originals is a simple disposition: the refusal to accept the world as it is simply because that is how it has always been. Grant calls the necessary mental move vuja de — the inverse of déjà vu, seeing something familiar as if for the first time and asking why it must be that way. Originals, in his telling, are people who treat defaults as choices rather than givens, whether that means an entrepreneur questioning an industry norm or an employee questioning a company policy. He explores how this disposition develops, touching on birth order (later-born children, he argues, are statistically more rebellious), on parenting that emphasises values over rules, and on the role of mentors and exposure to other ways of living. The throughline is reassuring and democratic: originality is not a rare gift of genius but a set of habits and choices that can be cultivated.

Speaking Up and Building Coalitions

The second half of Originals addresses how new ideas actually move through organizations and societies, and here Grant’s organizational psychology training is most evident. The most effective advocates for change, research suggests, are not the loudest voices but the ones who build coalitions through unexpected alliances, frame challenges as opportunities, and time their advocacy to match institutional receptivity. Grant is sharp on the delicate politics of dissent — how to voice a risky idea without being dismissed or punished, how movements recruit moderate allies rather than alienating them with purity, how to manage the fear that precedes any act of speaking up. These chapters turn the book from a study of individual creativity into a practical guide for anyone trying to change a system from within.

The Caveats and the Verdict

Originals shares the strengths and weaknesses of its genre. Written by Adam Grant — the Wharton organizational psychologist who became a publishing star with Give and Take and Think Again — it is briskly readable, studded with memorable studies, and framed by a foreword from Sheryl Sandberg that signals its Silicon Valley sensibility. Like Malcolm Gladwell, whom he resembles, Grant can be accused of selecting the anecdotes that flatter his thesis and of smoothing messy evidence into clean takeaways, and the self-help packaging sometimes competes with the analytical rigour. But the core findings are genuinely counterintuitive and well-grounded, and the book’s central message — that originality is a deliberate practice rather than an innate trait, and that the people who change the world are anxious, doubtful, and procrastinating just like the rest of us — is both encouraging and useful.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A research-rich examination of how originals actually think and act, full of counterintuitive findings that challenge the romanticized version of creative courage.