The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 32 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Grant: Top Individual Salespeople Actually Tend to Make Worse Sales Managers
“And the better you are at individual sales, the worse you tend to be as a manager. Your teams actually achieve poorer performance.”
Grant: Independent idea generation produces more and better ideas than group brainstorming
“We have over 40 years of evidence that if you had a group of people, let's say five, brainstorming together, if instead you had let them come up with ideas independently, you get more ideas and also better ideas on average.”
Grant: Permitting Toxic Superstars Means Your Definition of Performance Is Broken
“If it's possible to be a toxic superstar, if it's possible to be a, you know, a high performer who's selfish, then your definition of performance is too narrow.”
Grant: Attention management drives productivity better than time management
“So I think that what I've tried to shift to is From time management to attention management. To say that the one thing I can really control is what I focus on. And I like to start every week with the people and projects that matter to me. And that way, when I'…”
Grant: Society does not need another leadership or self-esteem book
“We just don't need another leadership book. I, I'm pretty convinced. I don't think we need another self-help book either on self-esteem for that matter, right?”
Grant: Delaying difficult tasks fosters incubation and enhances creative insight
“In this research that Jihei Shin and I did, we found consistently that if you were putting off a task because it was hard and you hadn't figured it out yet, that that opened up opportunities to incubate. You were more likely to access remote knowledge. You wer…”
Grant: Founders trained to think scientifically generated 40x more revenue
“Over the next year, on average, the entrepreneurs who had been trained to think like scientists, randomly assigned, brought in more than 40 times the revenue of the control group. That is a staggering effect. And the major mechanism behind it is they were more…”
Grant: Celebrating failure is one of Silicon Valley's worst exports
“I think one of the worst exports of Silicon Valley to the rest of the world is the idea that we should celebrate failure.”
Grant: Federal funding is the most underappreciated driver of innovation
“Federal government investment innovation, in innovation is probably the single most underestimated and underappreciated driver of creativity and of entrepreneurship.”
Grant: VCs ignore critical innovation to focus on easy 10x returns
“The problem with venture capitalists is they tend to invest in the ideas that are easy to 10 X or more. And we often have to look to the government to invest in ideas like a COVID vaccine, right? That are probably not going to be as profitable.”
Chetty Study: Kindergarten Teacher Experience Predicts Adult Income
“What first got me thinking differently about character was this incredible study by Raj Chetty and colleagues, where they show that you can predict your income in your twenties by just looking at how many years of experience your kindergarten teacher had.”
Grant: Kindergarten Benefits Stem From Character Skills Over Early Cognitive Gains
“And it turned out that it was not so much an advantage of cognitive skills, you know, the early edge in math and reading, but rather a lasting gain in character skills. And there was a set of habits that you learned at age five that stuck with you, and then, A…”
Grant: Resilient Founders Invest Ego in Future Growth Over Present Comfort
“I think the difference is that the ones who especially manage to have repeat success and bounce back and forward from failure and keep getting better are the ones who invest their egos in their future growth as opposed to their present comfort.”
Grant: Imposter Syndrome Is Often a Sign of Hidden Potential
“This is one of the things I've come to believe about imposter syndrome is it's often a sign of hidden potential. If other people have higher expectations for you than you do of yourself, it means they've seen a capacity for growth in you. That's not visible to…”
Grant: Block Promotions for Staff Who Hoard Knowledge or Refuse Mentorship
“Well, I think the first thing you do is you disincentivize the worst taking behaviors. So you make it very clear that people cannot get promoted if they hoard knowledge, if they dump grunt work on others, if they refuse to mentor junior people.”
Grant: Asking for Advice Yields More Actionable Guidance Than Eliciting Feedback
“There's a growing body of evidence showing that if you want specific, useful tips, you should ask for advice rather than feedback.”
Grant: Focusing on Making Your Children Proud Unlocks Your Hidden Potential
“If instead you think about making your kids proud, it turns you toward realizing your hidden potential. And it also reminds you that part of that is, you know, is not just the success that you achieve, it's also the contributions that you make.”
Grant: The 'Reflected Best Self' Exercise Is Meaningful Across All Seniorities
“It is one of the only activities I've ever done that no matter how senior you are or where you come from is a moving, meaningful, and sometimes life-changing experience for the participants.”
Grant: Sunk-cost traps stem from ego rather than economics
“We think it's about some costs, but the most powerful drivers are not economic. They're emotional. It's ego and image. I don't want to look like a bad decision maker. I don't want to see a bad decision maker in the mirror.”
Grant: Founders move to being right faster by quickly admitting error
“I think one of the most basic truths of entrepreneurship, which is overlooked by almost every founder I've ever worked with or advised, is that the faster you are to recognize when you're wrong, the faster you can move toward being right.”
Grant: Framing policies as testable hypotheses prevents mutiny during business pivots
“That's a hypothesis. It's a hypothesis. It might be true. It might be false. Let's go and test it. And if it turns out that I'm wrong, I would love your feedback on other ways that we can value agents in a way that the industry just hasn't before. Before. And …”
Grant: I declined an opportunity to invest in Warby Parker
“I was definitely not ready to party when, you know, Warby Parker went from an idea that I had declined to invest in to a unicorn.”
Adam Grant: Schedule career checkups biannually to avoid analysis paralysis
“Schedule a career checkup put it in your calendar. Don't do it every day because then you're going to be stuck in analysis paralysis and you will never engage in that job. ... But if you do it twice a year, it's a great moment to pause and reflect and ask, Hav…”
Adam Grant: Organizations should cap core values at three to five
“The data would say we should have three to five core values. If you have more than that, then people can't remember them and they don't agree on, you know, what each one means and what the hierarchy of them is.”
Grant: Corporate innovation tournaments require strict parameters and timelines
“Crowdsourcing needs structure. In a well-designed innovation tournament, my colleagues Christian Tervish and Carl Ulrich have studied this. You need a focus call, right? You want to hear the save energy, reduce waste. The 200 grand is the cap. And then people …”
Grant: Managers sharing critical feedback out loud increases team psychological safety
“And one of the things we've studied is we've asked leaders and managers to actually share their own performance reviews with their teams, or to talk about some of the critical feedback they've received in the past, and how they're working to grow in those area…”
Grant: Focus on Acing Your Reaction When Receiving Harsh Feedback
“You can't change the first score. The best thing to do is to try to ace the second score. Which is to say, I want to try to get an A plus for how well I take the D minus.”
Adam Grant: Reoccurring organic ideas signal concepts worth developing
“Every once in a while, what I notice is I've had the same idea three or four times, and I didn't even remember it. And when I got excited about the same idea in, you know, different points in my life it signals to me that there's something interesting and wort…”
Grant: BlackBerry made only one product when valued over $70B
“It is insane to me that when they were valued at over seventy billion dollars, they still only made one product. They just had a bunch of variations on the Blackberry, which is a great way to, you know, to persist into obsolescence.”
Grant: Ctrip study showed working from home boosted productivity by 13.5%
“Nick Bloom at Ctrip in China showing that when you're randomly assigned to work from home, you're about 13 and a half percent more productive and half as likely to quit.”
Grant: Dow Chemical saved $110M annually from 575 tournament ideas
“Well, Dow ends up investing over a decade in 575 ideas. On average, they save the company a hundred ten million US dollars a year.”
Grant: I send self-deprecating emails whenever I am proven wrong
“And ever since then I have tried to do something whenever I find out that I might have been wrong. I write an email to someone, I just did this the day before yesterday and it says the subject line is, you were right, I was wrong, and then I go on to quote Hap…”