The surprising habits of original thinkers | Adam Grant | TED

0:13 Seven years ago, a student came to me and asked me to invest in his company.

0:17 He said, "I'm working with three friends, and we're going to try to disrupt

0:21 an industry by selling stuff online." And I said,

0:24 "OK, you guys spent the whole summer on this, right?" "No,

0:26 we all took internships just in case it doesn't work out." "All right,

0:30 but you're going to go in full time once you graduate." "Not exactly.

0:34 We've all lined up backup jobs." Six months

0:38 go by, it's the day before the company launches,

0:40 and there is still not a functioning website.

0:43 "You guys realize, the entire company is a website.

0:45 That's literally all it is." So I obviously declined to invest.

0:53 And they ended up naming the company Warby Parker.

0:55 (Laughter) They sell glasses online.

1:00 They were recently recognized as the world's most

1:03 innovative company and valued at over a billion dollars.

1:05 And now?

1:06 My wife handles our investments.

1:10 Why was I so wrong?

1:13 To find out, I've been studying people

1:14 that I come to call "originals." Originals are nonconformists,

1:19 people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them.

1:23 They are people who stand out and speak up.

1:26 Originals drive creativity and change in the world.

1:29 They're the people you want to bet on.

1:31 And they look nothing like I expected.

1:34 I want to show you today three things I've learned

1:37 about recognizing originals and becoming a little bit more like them.

1:42 So the first reason that I passed on Warby

1:45 Parker was they were really slow getting off the ground.

1:49 Now, you are all intimately familiar with the mind of a procrastinator.

1:54 Well, I have a confession for you.

1:56 I'm the opposite.

1:57 I'm a precrastinator.

2:00 Yes, that's an actual term.

2:01 You know that panic you feel a few hours

2:03 before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet.

2:06 I just feel that a few months ahead of time.

2:09 (Laughter) So this started early: when I was a kid,

2:15 I took Nintendo games very seriously.

2:18 I would wake up at 5am, start playing and not stop until I had mastered them.

2:24 Eventually it got so out of hand that a local newspaper came

2:27 and did a story on the dark side of Nintendo, starring me.

2:31 (Laughter) (Applause) Since then, I have traded hair for teeth.

2:44 (Laughter) But this served me well in college,

2:52 because I finished my senior thesis four months before the deadline.

2:58 And I was proud of that, until a few years ago.

3:01 I had a student named Jihae, who came to me and said,

3:05 "I have my most creative ideas when

3:08 I'm procrastinating." And I was like, "That's cute,

3:10 where are the four papers you owe me?" (Laughter) No,

3:13 she was one of our most creative students,

3:15 and as an organizational psychologist, this is the kind of idea that I test.

3:20 So I challenged her to get some data.

3:22 She goes into a bunch of companies.

3:23 She has people fill out surveys about how often they procrastinate.

3:27 Then she gets their bosses to rate how creative and innovative they are.

3:31 And sure enough, the precrastinators like me,

3:33 who rush in and do everything early are

3:36 rated as less creative than people who procrastinate moderately.

3:40 So I want to know what happens to the chronic procrastinators.

3:43 She was like, "I don't know.

3:45 They didn't fill out my survey." (Laughter) No, here are our results.

3:51 You actually do see that the people who wait until the last

3:55 minute are so busy goofing off that they don't have any new ideas.

4:00 And on the flip side, the people who race in are in such a frenzy

4:05 of anxiety that they don't have original thoughts either.

4:09 There's a sweet spot where originals seem to live.

4:13 Why is this?

4:15 Maybe original people just have bad work habits.

4:18 Maybe procrastinating does not cause creativity.

4:22 To find out, we designed some experiments.

4:25 We asked people to generate new business ideas,

4:28 and then we get independent readers

4:30 to evaluate how creative and useful they are.

4:33 And some of them are asked to do the task right away.

4:36 Others we randomly assign to procrastinate by dangling Minesweeper

4:40 in front of them for either five or 10 minutes.

4:43 And sure enough, the moderate procrastinators are 16

4:47 percent more creative than the other two groups.

4:51 Now, Minesweeper is awesome, but it's not the driver of the effect,

4:54 because if you play the game first before you learn about the task,

4:58 there's no creativity boost.

4:59 It's only when you're told that you're going to be working on this problem,

5:03 and then you start procrastinating,

5:04 but the task is still active in the back of your mind,

5:07 that you start to incubate.

5:09 Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas,

5:12 to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.

5:16 So just as we were finishing these experiments,

5:18 I was starting to write a book about originals,

5:21 and I thought, "This is the perfect time to teach myself to procrastinate,

5:26 while writing a chapter on procrastination." So I metaprocrastinated,

5:32 and like any self-respecting precrastinator,

5:35 I woke up early the next morning and I

5:37 made a to-do list with steps on how to procrastinate.

5:39 (Laughter) And then I worked diligently toward

5:47 my goal of not making progress toward my goal.

5:52 I started writing the procrastination chapter,

5:54 and one day— I was halfway through— I

5:56 literally put it away in mid-sentence for months.

5:59 It was agony.

6:02 But when I came back to it, I had all sorts of new ideas.

6:06 As Aaron Sorkin put it, "You call it procrastinating.

6:09 I call it thinking." And along the way I discovered

6:13 that a lot of great originals in history were procrastinators.

6:17 Take Leonardo da Vinci.

6:19 He toiled on and off for 16 years on the Mona Lisa.

6:24 He felt like a failure.

6:26 He wrote as much in his journal.

6:30 But some of the diversions he took in optics transformed the way

6:33 that he modeled light and made him into a much better painter.

6:37 What about Martin Luther King, Jr.?

6:40 The night before the biggest speech of his life,

6:42 the March on Washington, he was up past 3am, rewriting it.

6:46 He's sitting in the audience waiting for his turn to go onstage,

6:50 and he is still scribbling notes and crossing out lines.

6:54 When he gets onstage, 11 minutes in, he leaves his prepared remarks

6:58 to utter four words that changed the course of history:

7:01 "I have a dream." That was not in the script.

7:07 By delaying the task of finalizing the speech until the very last minute,

7:11 he left himself open to the widest range of possible ideas.

7:15 And because the text wasn't set in stone, he had freedom to improvise.

7:20 Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity,

7:23 but it can be a virtue for creativity.

7:27 What you see with a lot of great originals is

7:29 that they are quick to start but they're slow to finish.

7:33 And this is what I missed with Warby Parker.

7:35 When they were dragging their heels for six months,

7:38 I looked at them and said, "You know, a lot of other companies are starting

7:42 to sell glasses online." They missed the first-mover advantage.

7:46 But what I didn't realize was they were spending all that time trying

7:49 to figure out how to get people to be comfortable ordering glasses online.

7:53 And it turns out the first-mover advantage is mostly a myth.

7:56 Look at a classic study of over 50 product categories,

7:59 comparing the first movers who created the market

8:02 with the improvers who introduced something different and better.

8:06 What you see is that the first movers had a failure rate of 47 percent,

8:10 compared with only 8 percent for the improvers.

8:15 Look at Facebook, waiting to build

8:16 a social network until after Myspace and Friendster.

8:21 Look at Google, waiting for years after Altavista and Yahoo.

8:24 It's much easier to improve on somebody else's idea

8:27 than it is to create something new from scratch.

8:30 So the lesson I learned is that to be original you don't have to be first.

8:35 You just have to be different and better.

8:38 But that wasn't the only reason I passed on Warby Parker.

8:41 They were also full of doubts.

8:43 They had backup plans lined up,

8:45 and that made me doubt that they had the courage to be original,

8:49 because I expected that originals would look something like this.

8:55 (Laughter) Now, on the surface,

9:00 a lot of original people look confident, but behind the scenes,

9:03 they feel the same fear and doubt that the rest of us do.

9:06 They just manage it differently.

9:08 Let me show you: this is a depiction

9:10 of how the creative process works for most of us.

9:16 (Laughter) Now, in my research,

9:21 I discovered there are two different kinds of doubt.

9:23 There's self-doubt and idea doubt.

9:25 Self-doubt is paralyzing.

9:26 It leads you to freeze.

9:28 But idea doubt is energizing.

9:30 It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine, just like MLK did.

9:35 And so the key to being original is just a simple

9:39 thing of avoiding the leap from step three to step four.

9:43 Instead of saying, "I'm crap," you say, "The first few drafts are always crap,

9:48 and I'm just not there yet." So how do you get there?

9:52 Well, there's a clue, it turns out, in the Internet browser that you use.

9:57 We can predict your job performance and your commitment

9:59 just by knowing what web browser you use.

10:03 Now, some of you are not going to like the results of this study— (Laughter)

10:08 But there is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome

10:11 users significantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users.

10:15 Yes.

10:17 (Applause) They also stay in their jobs 15 percent longer, by the way.

10:23 Why?

10:23 It's not a technical advantage.

10:25 The four browser groups on average have similar typing

10:28 speed and they also have similar levels of computer knowledge.

10:31 It's about how you got the browser.

10:34 Because if you use Internet Explorer or Safari,

10:36 those came preinstalled on your computer,

10:39 and you accepted the default option that was handed to you.

10:42 If you wanted Firefox or Chrome, you had to doubt the default and ask,

10:46 is there a different option out there,

10:47 and then be a little resourceful and download a new browser.

10:51 So people hear about this study and they're like, "Great,

10:54 if I want to get better at my job,

10:56 I just need to upgrade my browser?" (Laughter) No,

10:59 it's about being the kind of person who takes the initiative

11:02 to doubt the default and look for a better option.

11:05 And if you do that well, you will open yourself up to the opposite of déjà vu.

11:10 There's a name for it.

11:12 It's called vuja de.

11:13 (Laughter) Vuja de is when you look at something you've seen many

11:19 times before and all of a sudden see it with fresh eyes.

11:23 It's a screenwriter who looks at a movie script that can't

11:27 get the green light for more than half a century.

11:29 In every past version, the main character has been an evil queen.

11:34 But Jennifer Lee starts to question whether that makes sense.

11:37 She rewrites the first act, reinvents the villain as a tortured hero

11:41 and Frozen becomes the most successful animated movie ever.

11:45 So there's a simple message from this story.

11:47 When you feel doubt, don't let it go.

11:50 (Laughter) What about fear?

11:55 Originals feel fear, too.

11:57 They're afraid of failing, but what sets them apart from the rest of us

12:01 is that they're even more afraid of failing to try.

12:04 They know you can fail by starting a business that goes

12:07 bankrupt or by failing to start a business at all.

12:10 They know that in the long run,

12:12 our biggest regrets are not our actions but our inactions.

12:15 The things we wish we could redo,

12:17 if you look at the science, are the chances not taken.

12:21 Elon Musk told me recently, he didn't expect Tesla to succeed.

12:25 He was sure the first few SpaceX launches would fail to make it to orbit,

12:30 let alone get back, but it was too important not to try.

12:34 And for so many of us, when we have an important idea, we don't bother to try.

12:38 But I have some good news for you.

12:41 You are not going to get judged on your bad ideas.

12:43 A lot of people think they will.

12:45 If you look across industries and ask people about their biggest idea,

12:49 their most important suggestion,

12:50 85 percent of them stayed silent instead of speaking up.

12:55 They were afraid of embarrassing themselves, of looking stupid.

12:58 But guess what?

12:59 Originals have lots and lots of bad ideas, tons of them, in fact.

13:04 Take the guy who invented this.

13:07 Do you care that he came up with a talking doll

13:09 so creepy that it scared not only kids but adults, too?

13:13 No.

13:14 You celebrate Thomas Edison for pioneering the light bulb.

13:18 (Laughter) If you look across fields,

13:23 the greatest originals are the ones who fail the most,

13:26 because they're the ones who try the most.

13:28 Take classical composers, the best of the best.

13:31 Why do some of them get more pages in encyclopedias

13:34 than others and also have their compositions rerecorded more times?

13:38 One of the best predictors is

13:39 the sheer volume of compositions that they generate.

13:43 The more output you churn out, the more variety you get and the better

13:47 your chances of stumbling on something truly original.

13:50 Even the three icons of classical music— Bach, Beethoven,

13:53 Mozart— had to generate hundreds and hundreds of compositions

13:57 to come up with a much smaller number of masterpieces.

14:01 Now, you may be wondering,

14:03 how did this guy become great without doing a whole lot?

14:07 I don't know how Wagner pulled that off.

14:10 But for most of us, if we want to be more original,

14:13 we have to generate more ideas.

14:16 The Warby Parker founders, when they were trying to name their company,

14:20 they needed something sophisticated, unique,

14:22 with no negative associations to build a retail brand,

14:25 and they tested over 2,000 possibilities before

14:27 they finally put together Warby and Parker.

14:32 So if you put all this together,

14:33 what you see is that originals are not that different from the rest of us.

14:37 They feel fear and doubt.

14:39 They procrastinate.

14:40 They have bad ideas.

14:42 And sometimes, it's not in spite of those qualities

14:45 but because of them that they succeed.

14:48 So when you see those things, don't make the same mistake I did.

14:51 Don't write them off.

14:52 And when that's you, don't count yourself out either.

14:55 Know that being quick to start but slow to finish can boost your creativity,

14:59 that you can motivate yourself by doubting your ideas

15:02 and embracing the fear of failing to try,

15:04 and that you need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.

15:08 Look, being original is not easy, but I have no doubt about this: it's

15:13 the best way to improve the world around us.

15:16 Thank you.

15:17 (Applause)