The surprising habits of original thinkers | Adam Grant | TED
TED1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2018–2021
talk · general · evergreen · 2018–2021 on HN
Adam Grant's TED talk on the habits of original thinkers, including procrastination and embracing failure. He argues the greatest originals fail the most because they try the most.
Mentioned when discussing how to become more creative and why non-conformists are undervalued.
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3 comments from Hacker News
I do not have a complete answer for you. But I've developed this simple hack that worked quite well for me. That is, before working on anything, play a little game or solve a puzzle. I learned this after reading "Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World"[1] by Adam Grant. You can watch his TED talk here [2] to get some ideas. How do I know it work? This might be survivorship bias but whatever, I believe it worked for me. After practicing this for around a year, I developed a custom 3D visualization for our 3D scanner[3] which greatly improved the UX. Our customers loved it. We even filed a patent for it (pending though)[4] For me, that little puzzle is usually a leetcode[5] problem, or to solve a non-trivial rubik (my humble collection here[6]). [1]: link [2]: ▶ this video [3]: link [4]: link [5]: link [6]: link
This reminds me of Ted Talks about the original thinkers by Adam Grant: ▶ this video Just because these people are not behaving or contributing the same way like others, it doesn't mean they are worthless. If company design the work "game" like such, people will try to cheat the game like automatically producing whole bunch of crap on daily basis - is that productive? Then, they will have to figure out an anti-cheat, on and on. Play stupid game, get stupid prizes. For people who might want to work for them, this really a turn off. What kind of potential metrics they could be looking for next? If a person made a 2000 line code that impacted the whole company, but that's all the code that person produced, should he/she get fired for being unproductive? What a rabbit hole!
That's a really good point. I'll update the site to have a default video in the text field so that you can have a quick and easy way to test the site without thinking about a video you want to try. In the meantime, I've compiled some URLs that you can paste into the text field! Where's Google going next? | Larry Page link The surprising habits of original thinkers | Adam Grant ▶ this video The Art of Letting Go | The Minimalists | TEDxFargo link Thanks for the feedback!