Forward - By Sheryl Sandberg

Summary Notes

Adam is an informed optimist who offers insights and advice about how anyone - at home, at work, in the community - can make the world a better place.

O Myth Buster

Conventional wisdom holds that some people are innately creative, while most have few original thoughts. Some people are born to be leaders, and the rest are followers. Some people can have real impact, but the majority can’t.

In Originals, Adam shatters all of these assumptions 

**He demonstrates that any of us can enhance our creativity…

He shows how we can become better parents by nurturing originality in our children and better managers by fostering diversity of thought instead of conformity…

*Great creators don’t necessarily have the deepest expertise but rather seek out the broadest perspectives…

Success is not usually attained by being ahead of everyone else but by waiting patiently for the right time to act.

O Informed Optimist

We accept the status quo because affecting real change seems impossible…

*Any one of us can champion ideas that improve the world around us.

O Friend

A friend is someone who sees more potential in you than you see in yourself, someone who helps you become the best version of yourself…

*Adm offers a wealth of advice for overcoming doubt and fear, speaking up and pitching ideas, and finding allies in the least likely of places. He gives practical guidance on how to manage anxiety, change anger, find the strength in our weaknesses, overcome obstacles, and give hope to others.

 

Chapter 1: Creative Destruction - The Risky Business of Going Against the Grain

Summary Notes 

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man” (George Bernard Shaw)

In the span of five years, Warby Parker, an affordable eye-wear start-up launched by four friends, became a fashionable brand and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need…The Warby Parker founders had the originality to dream up an unconventional way to sell glasses online, but became originals by taking action to make them easily accessible and affordable.

Original - A thing of singular or unique character; a person who is different from other people in an appealing or interesting way; a person of fresh initiative or inventive capacity.

*There are two routes to achievement - conformity (i.e., following the crowd down conventional paths and maintaining the status quo) and originality (i.e., taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better).

**Originality itself starts with creativity: generating a concept that is both novel and useful. But it doesn’t stop there. Originals are people who take the initiative to make their visions a reality.

O Finding the  Faults in the Defaults

Why some customer service agents stayed in their jobs longer than others? (Economist Michael Houseman wondered).

Surprisingly, employees who used Firefox or Chrome to browse the Web remained in their jobs 15% longer than those who used Internet Explorer or Safari. Also Firefox and Chrome users were 19% less likely to miss work than Internet Explorer and Safari fans. The Firefox and Chrome users had significantly higher sales, and their call times were shorter. Their customers were happier, too.

Why are the Firefox and Chrome users more committed and better performers on every metric?

*What made the difference was HOW they obtained the browser. If you own a PC, Internet Explorer is built into Windows. If you’re a Mac user, your computer came preinstalled with Safari. Almost ⅔ of the customer service agents used the default browser, never questioning whether a better one was available. 

**To get Firefox or Chrome, you have to demonstrate some resourcefulness and download a different browser. Instead of accepting the default, you take a bit of initiative to seek out an option that might be better. And that act of initiative, however tiny, is a window into what you do at work.

*Employees who accepted the defaults of Internal Explorer and Safari approached their job the same way. They saw their job descriptions as fixed, so when they were unhappy with their work, they started missing days, and eventually just quit.

*The Firefox/Chrome employees took the initiative and looked for novel ways of selling to customers and addressing their concerns. 

**When they encountered a situation they didn’t like, they fixed it. They created the jobs they wanted.

**Many of us accept the defaults in our own lives.

Compared to people in the highest income bracket, people in the lowest income bracket were 17% more likely to view economic inequality as necessary.

**”People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically at least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.”

**Theory of system justification says that people are motivated to rationalize the status quo as legitimate - even if it goes directly against their interests.

Justifying the default system serves a soothing function. It’s an emotional painkiller: If the world is SUPPOSED to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it.

**The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. 

The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place. A case of vuja de.

Vuja de (which is the opposite of deja Vu, that is encountering something new but it feels as if we’ve seen it before) is encountering something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective.

Without a vuja de event, Warby Parker wouldn’t have existed. They, as with all of us, had taken the status quo for granted. For the first time, they wondered “Why did a pair of glasses, such a fundamentally simple product, cost more than a complex smartphone?”

Because the eyewear industry was dominated by Luxottica, a European company (which owned LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban and Oakely, and the licenses for Chanel and Prada frames/sunglasses) that had raked in over $7B the previous year.

Luxottica was charging 20x the cost.

Warby Parker founders suddenly understood - “We could control our own destiny. We could control our own prices.”

**We begin to recognize that most dissatisfying defaults in our world have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them.

O The Two Faces of Ambition

The pressures to accept defaults start much earlier than we realize.

Child prodigies, it turns out, rarely go on to change the world.

**Although child prodigies are often rich in both talent and ambition, what holds them back from moving the world forward is that they don’t learn to be original.

**Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new (e.g., They play magnificent Mozard melodies but never compose their own original score).

***They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to the codified rules of established games, rather than inventing their own rules or their own games. 

All along the way, they strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers.

*Teachers tend to discriminate against highly creative students, labeling them as troublemakers. 

**Child prodigies become the world’s most excellent sheep.

Only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators (Laments psychologist Ellen Winner).

Those who do must make a painful transition from a child who “learns rapidly and effortlessly in an established domain” to an adult who “ultimately remakes a domain.”

Prodigies become doctors who heal without fighting to fix the broken systems.

Prodigies become lawyers who defend without trying to transform the laws themselves.

Prodigies become teachers who teach without questioning whether knowledge is what their students need to learn.

**Although we rely on them to keep the world running smoothly, they keep us running on a treadmill.

**Child prodigies are hindered by achievement motivation. The drive to succeed is responsible for many of the world’s greatest accomplishments. When we’re determined to excel we have the fuel to work harder, longer, and smarter. But as cultures rack up a significant number of achievements, originality is increasingly left to a specialized few.

***When achievement motivation goes sky-high, it can crowd out originality: The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure. Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success. 

***The drive to succeed and the accompanying fear of failure have held back some of the greatest creators and change agents in history.

If a handful of people hadn’t been cajole into taking original action, America might not exist, the civil rights movement could still be a dream, the Sistine Chapel might be bare, we might still believe the sun revolves around the earth, and the personal computer might never have been popularized. 

 **Originality is an act of creative destruction (Economist Joseph Schumpeter)

Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat.

**The last time you had an original idea, what did you do with it?

Although America is a land of individuality and unique self-expression, in search of excellence and in fear of failure, most of us opt to fit in rather than stand out.

“On matters of style, swim with the current. On matters of principle, stand like a rock” (Thomas Jefferson)

The pressure to achieve leads us to do the opposite. We find surface ways of appearing original - donning a bow tie, etc. - without taking the risk of actually being original.

*When it comes to the powerful ideas in our heads and the core values in our hearts, we censor ourselves. 

O The Right Stuff (TBD on 8/12/2024)

Group Reflections