“Original Thinkers” by Adam Grant
I often ping-pong between the two extremes of “panic monster”
and “instant gratification monkey.” Adam Grant explores the procrastination
habits of people to pinpoint the “sweet-spot where originals seem to live.” I
relate in many ways to this speaker who claims himself a procrastinator
who makes it his mission to take up the habits of his slow-to-start, successful
peers after he bypasses a chance to invest in a booming online business after
prematurely judging them for their lack of immediacy compared to their
competitors. After some experimentation and surveying, he came to find out that
his presumptions checked out—the “moderate” procrastinators were evidently more
likely to come up with creative ideas. I hadn’t ever given much thought in the
past to the parallels between some of our most iconic creatives. Grant’s
observation that what tied Leonardo DaVinci and his famous “Mona Lisa” painting
and Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech was a mindset bent on
revision was one I was unlikely to make myself. Neither was I aware that second-hand
businesses are often more lucrative than the product or service of their
predecessors, with what he calls “First Movers” failure rate at 47% and “Improvers”
at 8%. He exemplified businesses like Myspace and Facebook to prove this
statistic, but I imagine this video was made before the onset of “Snapchat” and
it’s “improver” company, “Instagram.” I feel like this seems especially obvious
to me now when I think of popular mobile apps—like OrderUp and then GrubHub of
food delivery services or Tinder and then Bumble for online dating. Adam Grant gives
the dreamers, doubters, and the slow-doers a category where they can all be
celebrated.
(Image Source: Pxhere Free Images)
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