Originals Flashcards
Two Routes to Achievement
conformity and originality. Conformity means following the crowd down conventional paths and maintaining the status quo.
Originality is taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better.”
Originality Involves
introducing and advancing an idea that’s relatively unusual within a particular domain, and that has the potential to improve it
Originality itself starts with creativity: generating a concept that is both novel and useful. But it doesn’t stop there.
Originals are people who take the initiative to make their visions a reality. The Warby Parker founders had the originality to dream up an unconventional way to sell glasses online, but became originals by taking action to make them easily accessible and affordable.”
Why Chrome Users are Better Workers
They looked for novel ways of selling to customers and addressing their concerns. When they encountered a situation they didn’t like, they fixed it. Having taken the initiative to improve their circumstances, they had little reason to leave. They created the jobs they wanted. But they were the exception, not the rule
Theory of System Justification
people are motivated to rationalize the status quo as legitimate—even if it goes directly against their interests.”
People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.
Justifying the default system serves a soothing function.
If the world is supposed to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it. But acquiescence also robs us of the moral outrage to stand against injustice and the creative will to consider alternative ways that the world could work.”
Hallmark of Originality
is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.
turns out to be far less difficult than I expected.
The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place. ”
a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems
When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. ”
Child prodigies, it turns out, rarely go on to change the world.
When psychologists study history’s most eminent and influential people, they discover that many of them weren’t unusually gifted as children
The Achilles Heel of Prodigies
what holds them back from moving the world forward is that they don’t learn to be original. As they perform in Carnegie Hall, win the science Olympics, and become chess champions, something tragic happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new. The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies and beautiful Beethoven symphonies, but never compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to the codified rules of established games, rather than inventing their own rules or their own games. All along the way, they strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers.
they become the world’s most excellent sheep.
Those who do must make a painful transition” from a child who “learns rapidly and effortlessly in an established domain” to an adult who “ultimately remakes a domain.”
Most prodigies never make that leap. They apply their extraordinary abilities in ordinary ways, mastering their jobs without questioning defaults and without making waves. In every domain they enter, they play it safe by following the conventional paths to success. ”
When achievement motivation goes sky-high, it can crowd out originality
The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure. Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success.
Once people pass an intermediate level in the need to achieve, there is evidence that they actually become less creative.”
The drive to succeed and the accompanying fear of failure have held back some of the greatest creators and change agents in history.
Concerned with maintaining stability and attaining conventional achievements, they have been reluctant to pursue originality
If Michealangelo Had Imposter’s Syndrome…
He viewed himself as a sculptor, not a painter, and found the task so overwhelming that he fled to Florence. Two years would pass before he began work on the project, at the pope’s insistence.”
“We can only imagine how many Wozniaks, Michelangelos, and Kings never pursued, publicized, or promoted their original ideas because they were not dragged or catapulted into the spotlight. ”
As economist Joseph Schumpeter famously observed
originality is an act of creative destruction. Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat. ”
On matters of style, swim with the current,” Thomas Jefferson allegedly advised,
“on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
The Myth of the Risky Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit.
If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile.”
Keeping your Day Job
“This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects.
Balancing Risk Portfolio
When we embrace danger in one domain, we offset our overall level of risk by exercising caution in another domain. ”
“ Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another. By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses.”
“ Instead, successful originals take extreme risks in one arena and offset them with extreme caution in another. ”
The benefit of Calculated Risks
the adolescents who went on to start productive companies were only taking calculated risks.“Across all three studies, the people who become successful entrepreneurs were more likely to have teenage histories of defying their parents, staying out past their curfews, skipping school, shoplifting,“gambling, drinking alcohol, and smoking marijuana. They were not, however, more likely to engage in hazardous activities like driving drunk, buying illegal drugs, or stealing valuables.
But the most successful originals are not the daredevils who leap before they look. They are the ones who reluctantly tiptoe to the edge of a cliff, calculate the rate of descent, triple-check their parachutes, and set up a safety net at the bottom just in case.
The Myth of the Dominant Leader
When experts rated the presidents on the desire to please others and avoid conflict, Lincoln scored the highest of them all.
Before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln agonized for six months over whether he should free the slaves. He questioned whether he had the constitutional authority; he worried that the decision might lose him the support of the border states, forfeit the war, and destroy the country.”
Job Designing
jobs are not static sculptures, but flexible building blocks. We gave them examples of people becoming the architects of their own jobs, customizing their tasks and relationships to better align with their interests, skills, and values
“Instead of using only their existing talents, they took the initiative to develop new capabilities that enabled them to create an original, personalized job. As a result, they were 70 percent more likely than their peers to land a promotion or a transition to a coveted role. By refusing to stick with their default jobs and default skills, they became“happier and more effective—and qualified themselves for roles that were a better fit. Many of their limits, they came to realize, were of their own making
The Difference of Originals
he people who choose to champion originality are the ones who propel us forward. After spending years studying them and interacting with them, I am struck that their inner experiences are not any different from our own. They feel the same fear, the same doubt, as the rest of us. What“sets them apart is that they take action anyway. They know in their hearts that failing would yield less regret than failing to try.”
Idea Generation vs Idea Selection
Many ideas are generated. Its choosing which ideas created are useful.
Be Wary of Overconfidence
Overconfidence may be a particularly difficult bias to overcome in the creative domain. When you’re generating a new idea, by definition it’s unique, so you can ignore all the feedback you’ve received in the past about earlier inventions. Even if your previous ideas have bombed, this one is different.
To Close to the Source
When we’ve developed an idea, we’re typically too close to our own tastes—and too far from the audience’s taste—to evaluate it accurately. We’re giddy from the thrill of the eureka moment or the triumph of overcoming an obstacle.”
“But even when they do learn about“their audience’s preferences, it’s too easy for them to fall victim to what psychologists call confirmation bias: they focus on the strengths of their ideas while ignoring or discounting their limitations.”
If originals aren’t reliable judges of the quality of their ideas, how do they maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece?
They come up with a large number of ideas. Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.”
“In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. ”
. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,
“is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.”
In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window
the greater the spike in the odds of a hit.
the most prolific people not only have the highest originality
they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.*
It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it
—but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to“quality. “
Original thinkers,will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.
Many People Fail to Achieve Perfection
because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection. ”
our first ideas are often the most conventional—the closest to the default that already exists.
It’s only after we’ve ruled out the obvious that we have the great
“est freedom to consider the more remote possibilities.
Once you start getting desperate, you start thinking outside the box,”
“#24 will suck. Then #25 will be a gift from the headline gods and will make you a legend.”
Throwing Out Lines
“The best way to get better at judging our ideas is to gather feedback. Put a lot of ideas out there and see which ones are praised and adopted by your target audience. ”
Why to Be Wary of Obsession with Your Own Ideas
Conviction in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false pos“itives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential.
To Close to the Source
When we’ve developed an idea, we’re typically too close to our own tastes—and too far from the audience’s taste—to evaluate it accurately. We’re giddy from the thrill of the eureka moment or the triumph of overcoming an obstacle.”
“But even when they do learn about“their audience’s preferences, it’s too easy for them to fall victim to what psychologists call confirmation bias: they focus on the strengths of their ideas while ignoring or discounting their limitations.”
If originals aren’t reliable judges of the quality of their ideas, how do they maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece?
They come up with a large number of ideas. Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.”
“In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. ”
. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,
“is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.”
In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window
the greater the spike in the odds of a hit.
the most prolific people not only have the highest originality
they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.*
It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it
—but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to“quality. “
Original thinkers,will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.
Many People Fail to Achieve Perfection
because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection. ”
our first ideas are often the most conventional—the closest to the default that already exists.
It’s only after we’ve ruled out the obvious that we have the great
“est freedom to consider the more remote possibilities.
Once you start getting desperate, you start thinking outside the box,”
“#24 will suck. Then #25 will be a gift from the headline gods and will make you a legend.”
Throwing Out Lines
“The best way to get better at judging our ideas is to gather feedback. Put a lot of ideas out there and see which ones are praised and adopted by your target audience. ”
Why to Be Wary of Obsession with Your Own Ideas
Conviction in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false pos“itives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential.
How to avoid a False Negative
“In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail. When managers vet novel ideas, they’re in an evaluative mindset. To protect themselves against the risks of a bad bet, they compare the new notion on the table to templates of ideas that have succeeded in the past.
Be Wary of Expertise
the more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched they become in a particular way of viewing the world. ”
“expert bridge players struggled more than novices to adapt when the rules were changed, and that expert accountants were worse than novices at applying a new tax law. As we gain knowledge about a domain, we become prisoners of our prototypes.
The Value of Another Artist’s Perspective
there is one group of forecasters that does come close to attaining mastery: fellow creators evaluating one another’s ideas.”
“When artists assessed one another’s performances, they were about twice as accurate as managers and test audiences in predicting how often the videos would be shared.
Managers and Audiences Are Risk Averse
Compared to creators, managers and test audiences were 56 percent and 55 percent more prone to major false negatives, undervaluing a strong, novel performance by five ranks or more in the set of ten they viewed.”
When Looking For Feedback, Look to the Peer
They lack the risk-aversion of managers and test audiences; they’re open to seeing the potential in unusual possibilities, which guards against false negatives. At the same time, they have no particular investment in our ideas, which gives them enough distance to“offer an honest appraisal and protects against false positives.
To Evaluate New Ideas
Think Like a Creator. It can help us avoid false negatives.
All it took was having them spend their initial six minutes a little differently: instead of adopting a managerial mindset for evaluating ideas, they got into a creative mindset by generating ideas themselves. Just spending six minutes developing original ideas made them more open to novelty, improving their ability to see the potential in something unusual.”
Managers as False Negative Machines
Once you take on a managerial role, it’s hard to avoid letting an evaluative mindset creep in to cause false negatives.
Thinking like creators and then donning the manager hat dropped their forecasting accuracy to 41 percent.
If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative,
you have to not have the same bag of experience as everyone else does.
– Steve Jobs
A unique combination of broad and deep experience
Is critical for creativitiy
comparing every Nobel Prize–winning scientist from 1901 to 2005 with typical scientists of the same era, both groups attained deep expertise in their respective fields of study
But the Nobel Prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists.”
Interest in the arts among entrepreneurs, inventors, and eminent scientists obviously reflects their curiosity and aptitude.
People who are open to new ways of looking at science and business also tend to be fascinated by the expression of ideas and emotions through images, sounds, and words.*
it’s not just that a certain kind of original person seeks out exposure to the arts.
The arts also serve in turn as a powerful source of creative insight.”
Galileo “was able to appreciate the implications of the dark and light regions,” Simonton notes. He had the necessary depth of experience in physics and astronomy, but also breadth of experience in painting and drawing. Thanks to artistic training in a technique called chiaroscuro, which focuses on representations of light and shade, Galileo was able to detect mountains where others did not.”
Just as scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors often discover novel ideas through broadening their knowledge to include the arts
we can likewise gain breadth by widening our cultural repertoires.
The Benefit of Living Abroad
First, time living abroad didn’t matter: it was time working abroad, being actively engaged in design in a foreign country, that predicted whether their new collections were hits. The most original collections came from directors who had worked in two or three different countries.
Second, the more the foreign culture differed from that of their native land, the more that experience contributed to the directors’ creativity. An American gained little from working in Canada, compared to the originality dividends of a project in Korea or Japan.”
“But working in multiple countries with different cultures wasn’t enough. The third and most important factor was depth—the amount of time spent working abroad. A short stint did little good, because directors weren’t there long enough to internalize the new ideas from the foreign culture and synthesize them with their old perspectives. The highest originality occurred when directors had spent thirty-five years working abroad.”
intuitions are only trustworthy when people build up experience making judgments in a predictable environment.
There’s a stable, robust relationship between the patterns you’ve seen before and what you encounter today. But if you’re a stockbroker or political forecaster, the events of the past don’t have reliable implications for the present. Kahneman and Klein review evidence that experience helps physicists, accountants, insurance analysts, and chess masters—they all work in fields where cause-and-effect relationships are fairly consistent. But admissions officers, court judges, intelligence analysts, psychiatrists, and stockbrokers didn’t benefit much from experience.
because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable.
This makes“intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis.”
The Shackles of the Expert
The more successful people have been in the past, the worse they perform when they enter a new environment. They become overconfident, and they’re less likely to seek critical feedback even though the context is radically different.
If we want to forecast whether the originators of a novel idea will make it successful,
we need to look beyond the enthusiasm they express about their ideas and focus on the enthusiasm for execution that they reveal through their actions.”
the Warby Parker entrepreneurs weren’t hampered by existing prototypes or limited by evaluative mindsets.
Instead of assuming that their idea would work and going into full-on enthusiastic sales mode like Kamen did, they first sought extensive feedback from fellow creators and potential customers.
Since other companies could sell glasses online, the founders realized that branding would be critical to their success. To name the company, they spent six months generating ideas, building a spreadsheet with more than two thousand potential names. They tested their favorites in surveys and focus groups.
they brought passion for execution in spades.
Warbles
Warby Parker’s recent success is due to the way they involved peers in evaluating ideas. In 2014, they created a program called Warbles, inviting everyone in the company to submit suggestions“and requests for new technology features at any time. Before Warbles was introduced, they had received ten to twenty idea submissions per quarter. With the new program, the number of submissions jumped to nearly four hundred as employees trusted that the idea selection process was meritocratic. One of the suggestions led to the company’s overhauling how they conducted retail sales; another led to a new booking system for appointments. “Neil and Dave are really brilliant,” says Warby Parker’s chief technology officer, Lon Binder, “but there’s no way they can be as brilliant as two hundred people combined.”
Open Access Feedback
Warby Parker made the suggestions completely transparent in a Google document. Everyone in the company could read them, comment on them online, and discuss them in a biweekly meeting.
The technology teams have full discretion to sort through the requests and start working on the ones that interest them. It sounds like a democracy, but there’s one twist: to give employees some guidance on which suggestions represent strategic priorities for the company, managers vote the promising ones up and the bad ones down. To avoid false positives and false negatives, the votes aren’t binding. Technology teams can overrule managers by selecting a request that didn’t receive a lot of votes and work to prove its value.
They don’t wait for permission to start building something,”
“But they gather feedback from peers before rolling things out to customers. They start fast and then slow down.”
Leaders and managers appreciate it when employees take the initiative to offer help, build networks, gather new knowledge, and seek feedback. But there’s one form of initiative that gets penalized: speaking up with suggestions.”
the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two-year period.
two major dimensions of social hierarchy that are often lumped together
power and status. Power involves exercising control or authority over others; status is being respected and admired.”
people were punished for trying to exercise power without status. When people sought to exert influence but lacked respect, others perceived them as difficult, coercive, and self-serving.
Since they haven’t earned our admiration, we don’t feel they have the right to tell us what to do, and we push back.
The Downward Spiral of Attempting Moves at Power Without Status
When we’re trying to influence others and we discover that they don’t respect us, it fuels a vicious cycle of resentment. In an effort to assert our own authority, we respond by resorting to increasingly disrespectful behaviors.
Status Cannot Be Claimed
it has to be earned or granted.
Idiosyncrasy Credits
the latitude to deviate from the group’s expectations. Idiosyncrasy credits accrue through respect, not rank: they’re based on“contributions. We squash a low-status member who tries to challenge the status quo, but tolerate and sometimes even applaud the originality of a high-status star.”
Think of The Cost of Compliance
people rated male professors at top universities as having 14 percent more status and competence when they donned a T-shirt and a beard than when they wore a tie and were clean shaven. Most professors dress formally, and refusing to follow the norm usually carries a cost. Those who successfully buck convention signal that they’ve earned the idiosyncrasy credits to do as they please.”
When Presenting To Higher Status: The Sarick Effect
Griscom was presenting ideas to people who had more power than he had, and trying to convince them to commit their resources. Most of us assume that to be persuasive, we ought to emphasize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. That kind of powerful communication makes sense if the audience is supportive.
“But when you’re pitching a novel idea or speaking up with a suggestion for change, your audience is likely to be skeptical. Investors are looking to poke holes in your arguments; managers are hunting for reasons why your suggestion won’t work. Under those circumstances, for at least four reasons, it’s actually more effective to adopt Griscom’s form of powerless communication by accentuating the flaws in your idea.”
Advantages of the Sarick Effect
The first advantage is that leading with weaknesses disarms the audience.when we’re aware that someone is trying to persuade us, we naturally raise our mental shields. Rampant confidence is a red flag—a signal that we need to defend ourselves against weapons of influence
Unbridled optimism comes across as salesmanship; it seems dishonest somehow, and as a consequence it’s met with skepticism. Everyone is allergic to the feeling, or suspicious of being sold.”
“When I put up a slide that says ‘Here’s why you shouldn’t buy this company,’ the first response was laughter. Then you could see them physically relax. It’s sincere; it doesn’t smell, feel, or look anything like sales. They’re no longer being sold.”
When people only touted the pluses of their ideas, she quickly concluded that “this idea is full of holes; they really haven’t thought it through, and they’ve constructed their slide deck to keep me from figuring it out.
When people presented drawbacks or disadvantages, I would become an ally. Instead of selling me, they’ve given me a problem to solve.”
“Along with changing the frame of the interaction, being forthright about faults alters how audiences evaluate us. ”
“But people rated the critical reviewer as 14 percent more intelligent, and having 16 percent greater literary expertise, than the complimentary reviewer.
People think an amateur can appreciate art, but it takes a professional to critique it.
This is the second benefit of leading with the limitations of an idea: it makes you look smart.* Rufus Griscom first discovered this early in his career, which started in publishing. “There’s nothing more shameful than writing a review that’s too positive,
he demonstrated that he wasn’t snowed by his own ideas or trying to snow them; he was a shrewd judge of his shortcomings. He was smart enough to do his h“mart enough to do his homework and anticipate some of the problems that they would spot.
The third advantage of being up front about the downsides of your ideas is that it
makes you more trustworthy. When Griscom described the hurdles he faced in his own business, he came across not only as knowledgeable, but also as honest and modest.
“The job of the investor is to figure out what’s wrong with the company. By telling them what’s wrong with the business model, I’m doing some of the work for them. It established trust,” ”
“If I’m willing to tell them what’s wrong with my business, investors think, ‘There must be an awful lot that’s right with it.”
The Fourth advantage of Being Upfront With Your Downsides
is that it leaves audiences with a more favorable assessment of the idea itself, due to a bias in how we process information. To illustrate this bias, I often ask executives to judge how happy they are after thinking about the positive features of their lives. One group is tasked with writing three good things about their lives; another group has to list twelve good things. Everyone expects the twelve group to be happier: the more blessings you count, the better you should feel about your circumstances. But most of the time, the opposite is true. We’re happier after we list three good things than twelve
.
By acknowledging its most serious problems, he made it harder for investors to generate their own ideas about what was wrong with the company. And as they found themselves thinking hard to identify other concerns, they decided Babble’s problems weren’t actually that severe.
This is the core challenge of speaking up with an original idea. When you present a new suggestion, you’re not only hearing the tune in your head.
You wrote the song.
it’s no longer possible to imagine what it sounds like to an audience that’s listening to it for the first time.
This explains why we often undercommunicate our ideas. They’re already so familiar to us that we underestimate how much exposure an audience needs to comprehend and buy into them.
