YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Grant

lines on the record: 106
first: 2019-12-05
most recent: 2019-12-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's very cool. Well, you kind of want them to interview you then so you can experience it. But I guess turning the tables works too.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was interesting. What I like about it is you get so much done that you can disappear for a long time and still be annoyingly productive. One other thing I was just top of mind wondering about is you got LeBron and his trainer. Who are your next stream guests? If you could have anybody”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think being more productive is actually that motivating. I got more done. I wrote words today. More words today. Woo! I think that for me, productivity is a means to an end. And I've always been more productive when I've found a project that I care about or a topic that I'm really intensely curious about. And I think that frequently when you feel like you're not productive, it's not necessarily because you're lazy or because you have bad habits. It's because you're not working on the right projects. And you haven't found the ones that are intrinsically motivating and meaningful to you. And so I think that I guess I would just say if productivity is your goal, maybe you've got the wrong goal.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe just one thought on productivity, because we've talked a bunch about it and it's such a core theme for you and your audience. I think one of the mistakes that people make when they try to boost their productivity is they're focusing on the wrong goals”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple things. One, I happened to catch some, I think the senior national U.S. finals. And after spending six years of my life almost every waking hour, either thinking about it or doing it, the moment I watch it, I want to get back into it again. And also I'd been teaching our kids some techniques. And so it seemed like it was a good time to get my skills back in order.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I do lift weights twice a week. I do, my target is three days a week of cardio, which is usually a mix of an ultimate Frisbee game, tennis match, and elliptical. And then lately, actually just a few weeks ago, I got back on a diving board for the first time. I guess I retired half my life ago. And I had not been on a real diving board in more than a dozen years and got back on to try to relearn some of the old tricks, which hurt very badly the next morning, but has been a lot of fun and a good workout too.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't like archives of podcasts at that time because I actually want to be awake and learn from them. So I just did, I binged the shrink next door in a few nights, which was fascinating. And I ended up staying up way too late one night because I just wanted to know where the story went. But the other nights it was great. I did cereal that way. And so I guess it's mostly more of the narrative or fiction style shows.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not in work mode yet. And so I feel like I need some kind of transition space to get back into focus. And so that's become white space. And then my last favorite routine, which is definitely on the new side, is I actually go to sleep listening to podcasts. For years, I would read or watch TV going to sleep, but it's so much more relaxing to not look at a screen. And I find that I process the information a little bit more deeply than if I had read it. And I also fall asleep faster”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is when you make more unexpected leaps and kind of free associations. And so now what I'll do is at night before I go to bed when I know I want to write the next morning, I still like to write when I'm fresh so that it actually makes sense. But the night before, I'll actually start jotting down some ideas. It might be a couple sentences. It might be an outline. And then I've got some hopefully some novel material to run with in a more organized way in the morning. And so you can obviously flip that if you're a night owl and say, huh, maybe I actually have some creative ideas in the morning when I feel like I can't think straight. You don't want to think straight if you're trying to be creative. So that's one that I really like. Another one that I've adopted recently, which has been extremely productive for me, is I actually take phone calls right after workouts because I found that right after workout, I'm just not very”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I did for a long time, and there's still some that I use, but I have become a little less routine driven in the past few years. I think in part because the moment we talked about in the classroom earlier of kind of losing track of the lesson plan and just following the student questions, that's really unusual for me. I tend to be so laser focused and linear that I worry I'm not being flexible and adaptable enough. And so one of the routines I've been working on is just being comfortable shifting my routine. But I'm probably unusual in that way. So the things, the things, I'll tell you the changes that I made to new routines that I found most helpful. One is as a morning person, I used to try to do all my creative work in the morning because I knew that was when I was most alert. And then I read a bunch of research showing that you actually do your most creative work when you're a little fuzzier because that's when your thinking is more non-”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The interesting thing that I think that surfaces for me is there's another reason why you want to know what your strengths are. Because we often misapply them or overuse them. There's research from the Center for Creative Leadership, which has shown that one of the ways that you identify career derailers is you look at strengths that people overuse. So you've gotten reinforced all your life for being assertive. And then you talk over people in meetings so much that nobody else can get it worded. You've been reinforced for a lot of your career for having charisma. And that becomes a crutch. And you don't prepare the talks that you give. And you end up, you know, kind of underperforming or under delivering. And that's, of course, I think when you think about yourself as a problem solver, that's a case potentially of strengths overused. And so one of the things that I've taken out of the reflective best self is I don't just want to be clear about what my strengths are. I want to know when is an appropriate time to use them and when might be a time to actually say, you know, I might want to turn off this strength so that somebody else can use that strength.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think for those of us who like to solve problems, and probably especially for those of us who are men, that's probably Sage advice.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I tell you something, I do not necessarily want you to fix it. I just want you to know that you care. I want to feel heard.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so I think so. And it's funny I had a mentor, Rick Price, who was trained as a clinical psychologist before he moved into the organizational world. And he used to have a code with his wife that she would just always remind him, Rick, sympathy, not solutions.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I never would have thought of that. It just did not cross my mind. And so it's an exercise I'd like to see people do, you know, I think every couple years because sometimes you have new people in your life who see different strengths, your strengths evolve, you find new ways to activate them. And I'm a big fan of that exercise.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then you have some work to do. You have to analyze the stories and find the common themes and figure out, okay, what is the portrait of me when I'm at my best? And what is it that activates those strengths? And I first did this my first year of grad school and I learned that apparently I didn't realize this, but one of my strengths was actually recognizing other people's strengths. It showed up in almost every story was, you know, I was at my best when I was helping someone else be at their best. And so I said, I've got to make that part of my job. I have to figure out a way to do that because I love it and people are telling me that I'm good at it, or at least that they like it.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that you need to see those through other people's eyes too. So I have some colleagues who developed this great tool at the University of Michigan. It's called the Reflected Best Self-Exercise. And I have all my students do it. MBAs, undergrads, senior executives, everyone in between. And they often come back and say it was eye-opening and occasionally even life-changing. What you do is you reach out to usually 15 to 20 people who know you well. You get to choose them. Often different walks of life. So some colleagues, maybe a boss, a friend, a family member, and you ask them to tell a story about a time when you were at your best. And you collect all these stories, it is the most delightful week of emails you will ever get. This is how amazing you are again and again and again.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then on the other side of that, I think mostly when we, Tim, when we talk about blind spots, we think about our weaknesses, right? So there are things we're not good at, but we don't realize it, and we can't see them because we're inside of our own heads. We also have blind spots about our strengths.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Agreed, but maybe they don't have to be crushed at all. They could be let down a little more gently, they could just be very strong.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last one. The last one I've gotten a few funny ones. One that really caught me off guard was it really bothers you deeply at your core when somebody pretends to know something that they don't. You just all of a sudden go from being a pretty friendly, affable person to just intense prosecutor mode, which was a novel observation for me. I got another one that said that I think the exact quote was that I am unaware that sometimes when I say an idea is not good, I've just crushed somebody's three months that they've invested in that idea. And here I am thinking I'm helping them move on more efficiently and not at all aware of how much they've already invested in the idea.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've gone and done that. I asked a bunch of people who work with me to write my user manual, and it is very simple. The questions are, what are my strengths? What brings those out? What are my weaknesses? What brings those out? What are my blind spots? And what do you know now about working with me that you wish you had known when we first started working together?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I'm kind of starting from square one when, in fact, they have all these experiences that could teach me something from their past about how to work with them better in the present and the future. And so what he did, his name is Or Skolnik, he sat down and he wrote up a one-pager on how to work with him effectively. What are his strengths? What are his weaknesses? What are the triggers that bring out the worst in him? What are the moments that bring out the best in him? And then he didn't stop there. He asked his team to write their user manual for him so that he could gauge his own self-awareness. And of course, he found the team's analysis much more insightful and accurate than his own because of the blind spot factor in part. But now every new person who works with him gets that one pager and gets to immediately start as if they've known him for a month or two and say, okay, you know, here are the things I might want to adapt if I want to be really effective with this manager.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So one of the things I learned about, actually doing a podcast episode on your hidden personality, I went to Bane, the consulting firm, in part because they spend a lot of time building brand new teams where people who know nothing about each other have to go into often in their 20s, into very senior executives offices and tell them how to run their companies. And they have a lot writing on whether these brand new teams can interact smoothly. And so they, not surprisingly, put a lot of energy into figuring out, okay, what are the traits and strengths and weaknesses of everybody and how do we get up to speed on that as fast as possible? And I met a manager there who had said something really interesting. He said, you know, when I buy a new car, it comes with an owner's manual. So I know how to operate it. But when I work with a new person who's way more complex than a car, I don't get anything.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do I work with that to be effective and live a life of meaning? And I think it was a really cool book on how to become more aware of what your strengths and wait tests are.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, so that's another favorite. And then I have, it's a newer book, so I haven't been able to gift it as many times yet. But I've recommended it a lot recently that if people want to figure out what their biggest blind spots are, that one of the things they ought to do is spend a little bit of time reading Tasha Jurek's book on self-awareness. And it's kind of I think it's called insight. And the insight that I took away from it was that people who are really self-aware don't spend a lot of time agonizing over why they are the way they are. They don't find it that productive. I guess I've never found it that productive to cycle analyze myself. Why did I get the way I am? I don't know. There could be a million biogenetic and life experience factors. But it doesn't really matter. Here's how I am.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And interestingly, I started out gifting it to introverts, thinking, okay, this is going to be a book that shows you all of your strengths and the ways you're not alone in the world. And it certainly spoke to me that way as an introvert. And I have to tell you, the biggest fans of that book, from my experience, are actually extroverts who say, oh, you know, I need to embrace my quieter side. And I need to make more room for the quiet people around me because I'm missing out on their brilliance. So I think that's always fun. And it's especially fun to give that book to an engineer who has never heard of introversion extroversion. And it's a giant light bulb. I actually had a student early on who read it and said, oh my gosh, my boyfriend isn't boring. He's just an introvert. I didn't realize.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sure you know that by Taverson Aronson, great book on why our egoes get in the way of just about everything and how to overcome that I've gifted Susan Kane's book Quiet more times than I can count.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I got up there, dished my slides, and about halfway through my talk, I said, all right, I've got to tell you, if you really want to understand what motivates people, you have to read this incredible book, which I wrote. I would normally not be that sarcastic or that snarky, but I just felt like somebody needed to acknowledge the elephant in the room. But otherwise, I would never recommend my own book, right? So to your question, what if I gifted the most? I've got a few favorites. So I think I tend to gift mostly in the genre that I write in. So, you know, thinking about big ideas that are evidence-based that can improve the way we work and live.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You recommended or gifted. I have to tell you as a quick aside. I was speaking at a Google event a few years ago and a bunch of people just went way too far in self-promoting their books. And it was over the top.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I try not to get outside. Wait a minute, Tim. You can't gift someone your own book. It's like, here's this thing I wrote. You do a bunch of work and digest it as opposed to if we know each other, maybe you should just, we can just talk about it, right? I'm just going with you. It makes me.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not learning anymore. And so even if the podcast completely fails, I'm going to pick the people in the places that I want to learn from. And then I'm going to come away with new insights on the back end that in some format I will share. And it was extremely valuable. I mean, it gave me all kinds of ideas for articles and books and for research projects I wanted to take on. It would have been great even if we didn't do a season two and beyond. And I think that you're right. I think there are ways to structure new projects so that even if they don't achieve conventional success, you still gain more than you invested in them.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that's powerful, and it's something, it resonates a lot with me because I got into the podcast world much later than you did and felt like it was by that point pretty crowded. And there were a lot of interesting people having interesting conversations. And so I was pretty hesitant about it at first and then eventually said, okay, my biggest problem is I've spent the past five years getting invited into some of the most interesting organizations on Earth and telling them things I already know mostly.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's so compelling because what it says to me is you decided that learning and relationship building are the two leading indicators of success. But also there were the ends in and of themselves. And so even if they don't drive success, you're still going to be glad you invested in something that sort of formed a meaningful connection or taught you something. That is such a clever workaround to the problem of do I know whether I'm accomplishing anything?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably better than fewer having more podcast listeners is better than fewer. But ultimately, it's reader feedback, listener feedback that somebody says, hey, I tried your approach, it worked. Or I tried it. It didn't work. But here's what I learned. It feels like it at least advanced somebody's thinking and that feels like a contribution. You've been at this a lot longer than I have. You've also had a lot more success. How do you know when you're successful or when you've had an impact?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, impact is seeing the ideas getting embedded in people's language and then in their actions. And so, you know, for me, part of the way that I felt give and take had been more successful than I had expected going in was I would come into an organization and they would tell me who the givers take hers and matches were or they would tell me how they were trying to weed out the most selfish takers from their hiring process and I would say huh wow this is this is in your vocabulary that means I think so much of what I do as a social scientist is I try to provide a framework and some evidence to describe things that maybe you've lived but not known how to talk about and so if that happens that's powerful and then of course if behavior change happened that's even more powerful but it's really hard to know the scale and scope of that and so you know largely I think anecdotally I pay attention to you know yes you know selling more books”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to hear your answer to this. This is one of the worst things about being an entrepreneur of ideas as opposed to products or services. User counts are not that helpful. It doesn't matter how many books you've sold if nobody read them. And I won't name any names here, but there is probably an economist who's sold a lot of books about inequality. But I'm not sure anyone read. And you wonder, did that have an impact? You don't know.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who have creative thoughts, people who might disagree with a big strategic decision, and I don't hear from them until it's too late. How do I change that? And then on the flip side, my students were giving me their version of that, which was we come into an organization at 22 or 27. And we have all these ideas and nobody above us wants to hear them. Like you MBA student, you are overqualified and under-experienced. Shut up until you know something about this industry. How do we overcome that and get our ideas here heard? And I realized those were two sides of the same coin and that nobody had, there were lots of books about creativity. Nobody had really tackled the question of what do you do after you have a creative idea? How do you champion it? How do you get it heard? And I”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure that the pen is muddier than the sword, but I definitely think the ink lasts longer. I think articles kind of fade after a week. People keep books, they reread them, they lend them. So I felt like that was meaningful. And I also felt like it was a chance to challenge my own thinking a little bit. I found that when I wrote give and take, I actually learned more about the topic that I was studying than I had when just doing research on it because it forced me to synthesize lots of different kinds of ideas and also to go and meet people who are living the principles I'd been studying. And so I wanted to go through that learning exercise again. And the way that I chose with the topic was going to be was I paid attention to the questions I was being asked over and over again that I thought were really fascinating and important and hard to answer. And there were two that kept coming up over and over again. One was from senior executives who were consistently asking, how do I fight groupthink? How do I, you know, I know there are people who have different ideas for projects we should be pursuing.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So two quick examples on that. One is after give and take came out, I felt like I was ready to start thinking about a new topic and writing a new book. And I felt like a book was a good choice for a few reasons. One, I feel like unlike articles, it actually has staying power.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I've worked with a couple different structures for it. So sometimes it's a person who works with me in a different capacity who then does triage as a side project. Sometimes it's a master's or PhD student who's doing this kind of in spare time. And I think in one case, actually maybe in two cases, it's somebody who's aspiring to go to grad school in my field and wants to see behind the scenes.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's, I mean, it's hard, right? So, what I would do in that situation is if somebody wrote me a nine-page email on that, I would just forward it right to triage. If it were a two-paragraph email, I might respond and say, you know, here are my two favorite books on the topic are Switch by the Heath Brothers and the Culture Code by Dan Coyle. I think there's a lot of great advice in there. If you read anything and have questions on it, let me know. Or if you have questions on things that they didn't answer, come back to me and I'll suggest some other books to check out. And if it goes to the triage team, what they will do is they might send a bunch of advice and articles and books. They might suggest a phone call or they might come back to me and say, we're not really sure how to respond to this. Do you know anyone else that we should talk to?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll give you a bunch of quick examples. You tell me which one you want to run with. So standard triage. I'm looking for career advice. I am interested in becoming an organizational psychologist, and I wonder what the best place to start is. I'm thinking about writing a book. What advice do you like to give to writers?”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That basically says, you know, look, I have, I do get more emails in a day than I have the time to respond to. And here are a bunch of resources that might be relevant depending on the kinds of questions that you have. So there are various teams that handle different things for me. There are some links to books and podcasts and articles and talks. And then I have a triage team that works with me where if there's something that I think we can collectively be helpful on, but I don't have time to engage with it in that moment, I will forward it and let them figure it out and then come back and tell me if they think I can be helpful.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I have an auto reply that comes to my public email address and I made the decision about, I guess, yeah, it was right after give and take came out when my email volume increased exponentially. I said, okay, I have a choice. I can either maintain a public email address and accept the fact that I will not be as thoughtful and responsive to every person as I have been the rest of my life. Or I'm going to be unreachable and I'm going to miss out on opportunities to be helpful to random people. And I felt like it would have been better for me to go the private route and be a little bit harder to reach. But I felt like the right thing to do was to still be accessible and just, okay, so if it hurts my image a little bit, that's a small price to pay. And so on my public email address, though, I guess the attempt to protect myself is an auto reply.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I'll try to do is suggest either some books or articles to read or some people who might be interested in having that discussion. That's probably the go-to response.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, what I don't have time really means, or I'm too busy, that's even worse, right? Everybody's busy, the busiest people I know have often the clearest calendars. You've written about this before You've written about how Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and George Lucas and others, they basically have nothing scheduled all day, which is kind of an amazing life. But I think that too busy is dishonest and cruel. And what you really mean when you say that is this or you are not a priority for me right now. And so I think that sounds a little harsh.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. I don't take meetings with strangers. I used to take meetings with anyone who asked. And I guess as I've gotten more visible, there just aren't enough hours in the day for it. And I had to decide, I prioritized. I said, my family comes first, my students are second, my colleagues and friends are third, and everybody else is fourth. And that meant that, okay, I'll happily respond to an email from a stranger if it's reasonable and it's up my alley. But I just don't have enough hours in the day to meet with people that I don't have an existing reason to be collaborating with or trying to help. And so that's a categorical no. And one thing I will never say is I don't have time. That is a lie. Everybody makes time for something that's important.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm embarrassingly Luddite on this, even though everyone I know and trust has told me to switch to superhuman. I am still using Outlook without any shortcuts.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like that. I like that a lot. I actually found myself curious a couple months ago when I was trying to write an article and kind of mini writer's block thinking like, huh, I wonder if the cursor was named after all the writers who cursed it. And it's just, you know, it's really daunting, right? It feels like, okay, I have to say something important. I have to have a grand idea. I have to be coherent. I just woke up. And so email is a low bar. And so I feel like, okay, my fingers start moving. I get into a little bit of a productive rhythm and I answer a few easy emails and I feel like I've accomplished something today. Maybe I can organize a coherent thought. And then that spills over and builds my confidence and gives me a little momentum for my writing.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, actually, Tim, I read, you gave fantastic advice about this. I remember right after give and take came out, I just got a deluge of emails from readers. And I read a blog post that you wrote about how to be more efficient with email. One of the first things I saw in there was you were talking about Tony Shea's Yesterbox, which I tried out and found really useful, just the habit of going and saying, okay, if I can answer all of yesterday's email today, I will never fall behind. Amazing. I do a lot of batch processing. So, you know, I try to, I'm not somebody who will just, you know, kind of randomly answer one email. I will sit down and try to go through 30 or 40 or 100 emails. And I think I break one of the cardinal rules that most of the writers I know have with email, which is on my writing days, I actually deliberately start the morning by answering a few emails.”
2019-12-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #399: Adam Grant — The Man Who Does Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT