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Look, we want you to aspire to
be fearless. That doesn’t mean
you need to approach your career
like a blindfolded cliffdiver,
warns Adam Grant, a professor
at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania and
author of Originals: How Non-
Conformists Move The World.
‘Everyone needs confidence –
without it you might never take
action,’ he says. ‘But there is also
value in selfdoubt.’ The most
successful creators are often risk
averse, always questioning how
their ideas will work.
‘It’s less about taking big
risks and more about trying
small experiments,’ Grant says.
If you’re considering taking a
leap, try to offset that move with
more caution in the rest of your
life. You don’t have to quit your
job or drop out of school to do it.
In fact, you probably shouldn’t:
entrepreneurs who keep their
day job while also starting a
company on the side (like the
cofounders of Apple and Nike
did) are 33 per cent more likely
to be successful than those who
jump in full plunge. Shore up
your social life, too. ‘Work hard
to have friends who believe in
you and will be at your side.’No offence to the little voice
in your head, but she’s not as
smart as you may think she is.
‘Intuition doesn’t come from
nowhere – it comes from un
consciously detecting patterns
in our experience,’ says Grant.
‘If things went badly the last
four times I did something,
I develop that gut feeling and
I feel a little sick when thinking
about doing that thing.’ That
said, the world is in constant
flux, so ‘all the yesterdays that
gave you that feeling in the pit
of your stomach might not be
relevant today’.
If you work in a field with
a predictable environment (such
as accounting), experience can
make your intuition more trust
worthy. But for the rest of us
(stockbrokers, judges or, um,
magazine writers), decision
making is trickier than ‘follow
your heart’. We tend to be bad
at judging our own work.
In one study of college
professors, 94 per cent said
they do aboveaverage work.
And managers’ track record
of predicting success is not
much better, Grant explains.
Perhaps because boss types
have an incentive to stick to
safe ideas. Because we tend
to be overconfident and our
managers less confident, theForget this myth
Forget this myth
Forget this myth
Big risks
reap big
rewards
Don’t put
off what
you can
do today
Always
trust
your gut
lesson is to seek more feedback
from peers – and not only peers
but adversaries too. ‘The instinct
is to go to your peers for support,
not critical evaluation. But when
you’re championing an original
idea, you don’t just need cheer
leaders – you need critics,’ says
Grant. ‘What’s worse: listening
to negative feedback on your idea
or going forward with it and
having it be a massive failure?’You should waste more time!
Martin Luther King Jr had
months to write his address to
the crowd at the 1963 March on
Washington but winged his ‘I
have a dream’ thing on the spot.
When you start a project, GrantThere’s no
gentle way
to say this:
much of
what you’ve
heard about
how to win
at work is
actually
total BS.
Business
professor
Adam
Grant tells
us what
really works