108: Adam Grant | Inside the Mind of Wharton’s Top-Rated Professor

Meikles & Dimes

Adam Grant is Wharton’s top-rated professor (going on 7 straight years) and has been recognized as the world’s #2 most influential management thinker.

Adam is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 6 books that have sold millions of copies and been translated into 45 languages: Hidden Potential, Think Again, Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves. His viral piece on languishing was the most-read New York Times article of 2021.

Adam hosts the TED podcasts Re:Thinking and WorkLife, which have been downloaded over 70 million times. His TED talks on languishing, original thinkers, and givers and takers have over 35 million views.

Adam’s speaking and consulting clients include Google, the NBA, Bridgewater, and the Gates Foundation. He has served on the Defense Innovation Board at the Pentagon, has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and has appeared on the television show Billions. He has more than 8 million followers on social media and features new insights in his free monthly newsletter, GRANTED.

Adam was tenured at Wharton while still in his twenties, and has received the Excellence in Teaching Award for every class he has taught. He curates the Next Big Idea Club along with Susan Cain, Malcolm Gladwell, and Dan Pink, as they raise money to provide books for children in under-resourced communities.

Adam earned his Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, completing it in less than 3 years, and his B.A. from Harvard University, magna cum laude with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa honors.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• Be careful about listening to other people's advice because they can only tell us what's worked for them. Adam learned this lesson accidentally from his mom who told him to not be a professor.
• When Adam’s mother advised him to not be a professor, Adam realized how badly he wanted to be a professor by noticing how strongly he pushed back against his mother’s advice.
• It’s common for people to think that the best thing they can do for the world is achieve success and then give back. But this is backwards. It’s through helping other people that we often achieve our greatest success.
• You don't have to wait until you've accomplished a great deal and accumulated a lot of status, power and wealth before you have something to contribute. Give back now.
• Other people’s emails are not your priority. They’re their priority. In other words, your inbox is other people’s priorities. But this also means that emails are an opportunity to do something meaningful for someone else.
• Adam’s mentor warned him that the danger of loving his work is that he might end up working all the time. It wasn’t until Adam had a child and was feeling a sense of compulsive workaholism on Saturday mornings, that he was able to step back and recalibrate his priorities.
• Sometimes we don’t really appreciate the lessons people share with us until we’ve made the same mistakes they’re warning us about.

Follow Adam:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdamMGrant

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adammgrant/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamgrant/

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