#399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything

Out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Can I ask you a personal question? Now I've seen an advocate.

What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over metal endoskeleton lead him very short.

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So join the 4.5 million people or more at this point who are saving an average of 40 hours per month by using Zapier now and for a limited time. Try Zapier free by going to our special link, zapier. Zapier.com Tim that's zapier.com Tim for your free 14 day trial. Check it out zapier.com Tim hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. My guest today has a bio that reads almost as unbelievable. Adam Grant Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton where he has been the top rated professor for seven straight years. It didn't always start out that way, and we're going to talk about the very beginning. He is an expert in how we can find motivation and meaning and lead more generous and creative lives. He is the number one New York Times bestselling author of four books that have sold more than 2 million copies and have been translated into 35 languages, give and take originals, option B and power moves. His books have been recognized as among the year's best by Amazon, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and the Wall Street Journal, and been praised by J. J. Abrams, Richard Branson, Bill and Melinda Gates, Malcolm Gladwell, and many, many others. Adam hosts the TED podcast work life. That's one word, work life. Capital W, Capital L. And his TED talks have been viewed more than 20 million times. His speaking and consulting clients include Google, the MBA, the Gates foundation, among others. He has been recognized as one of the world's top ten most influential management thinkers, fortunes 40 under 40, and a World Economic Forum young global leader, and has received distinguished scientific achievement awards from the American Psychological association and the National Science Foundation. Adam writes for the New York Times on work and psychology and serves on the Department of Defense Innovation Board. He received his BA from Harvard and his PhD from the University of Michigan, and he is a former magician and junior Olympic springboard diver. Adam, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Tim. Great to be here.

And this is one of those pictures from the bio that if I were creating a character in a novel, I feel that my editor would encourage me to clip back on. You have a very impressive not just bio, but timeline and the amount you've done in a very, very compressed period of time. So I think we're going to talk a lot about productivity habits and things that are related to that. But I want to just bring up a few other quotes. Some of the quotes are from media. This one is from the New York Times. Quote, grant took three years to get his phd, and in the seven years since, has published more papers in his field's top tier journals than colleagues who have won lifetime achievement awards. And then there's another note from one of our mutual friends, which says, when another Wharton professor got tenure, he opened his speech by saying, quote, I'm so grateful to be in a place where everyone is focused on the same research question, how does Adam grant do it? And that's the question on my mind. And I thought where we could possibly start is with rewinding the clock and going back to your very first experience as teaching. And I have a cheat sheet note here that says, you were so uncomfortable in the beginning that your first evaluation forms read, at least for one person, quote, you're so nervous, you're causing us to physically shake in our seats, end quote. So how do you improve at that point? What did you do to improve after getting those feedback forms?

Oh, thanks for reminding me.

You're welcome.

It was painful. I remember going to grad school and thinking, I've sort of found my calling. I had these professors who changed the way I saw the world, and they were incredibly inspiring, and I wanted to try to pay that forward. And then I go in front of my first audience, and I get comments like that. And it wasn't just one student, right? It was over and over and over again. Instructor seems very nervous. Instructor seems like the most nervous professor I've ever heard in my life. Instructor is sweating so much that I've completely stopped paying attention to the lecture. And it just went on and on. And I think I did what anyone would do in that situation. I started to wonder whether I should quit. And then I started to realize that the reason I got into this in the first place was not about me. It wasn't about my emotions or my anxiety or the fact that I was described as looking like a muppet. I awkwardly moved around the stage. It was because I loved ideas and I wanted to share them, and I wanted to be helpful to the students that I would one day teach. And so I guess I took a little cue out of my diving days, and I