How Non-Conformists Move the World

A little late here in writing this, but just finished reading a great book called The Originals. Quite timely as some of us celebrate a Monday off in honor of one such ‘original’ who decided to change things in a ‘non-conformist’ way.

Originals takes a stance that creativity, leadership, and genius is everyone’s game, only if we uncover some hidden wisdom. It’s packed with a lot of brilliant insight but there are few nuggets (backed by lots of examples and data) which kind of stood out, and perhaps would change your worldview too?

1.   Unhedged Risk is NOT the Best Risk – whether you’re an entrepreneur, an artist, a writer, or anyone else, exposing yourself to ‘naked’ risk doesn’t make the situation better. In fact, to the contrary, the best always - calculate, plan, and diversify. Kind of in alignment with the prognosis of NOT creating any single point of failures.

2.   One Good Idea Needs a Million Experiments – to bring out a brilliant piece of art or formulate an earth-shattering law of physics, you’d need to produce large volumes of work – some that go unrecognized, unread, and unheard. Another fascinating data point that Adam Grant brings up in this context is that historically, men have had an advantage here because they’ve had the privilege of producing large volumes of work in every domain, by working more.

This automatically increased their chances of success since a brilliant idea has a linear correlation with producing many ideas. That, however, is changing very fast now as women go head-to-head into the workforce, but just something to keep at the back of our minds, ladies.

Anyways, since it's MLK day...MLK made a million not-so-great speeches before the famous 'I have a dream.'

3.   Procrastination and First Mover Disadvantage – this is along similar lines as diversifying the risk portfolio. It talks about treading the path carefully and learning from others to create a more potent product, rather than diving in to be the first and learn the hard way.

When you are not the first to market, you get to learn from the mistakes of the first-movers and gain a larger market and mindshare. Adam Grant talks in terms of ‘settlers’ benefiting from the ‘pioneers’ making the first mover advantage a myth. Network effects and IP could be exceptions to this rule though.

4.   Got to Earn It Before You Wield It – no one wants to listen to authority just because. Whether it’s a professional at work, a teacher at the school, or a mom at home – we all have to earn our ‘credits’ and build up a system of engagement that works before calling the shots. 

Ensure that the employees are taken care of and customers are happy, keep the home running like it has to, deliver the right education day-in, day-out to ensure the best to produce a good citizen out of every kid at school! Adam calls it ‘idiosyncrasy’ credits or ‘earning’ the authority.

So, if there’s no status to push an idea forth, overconfidence to do it won’t help. There’s a lot of other insight around how senior managers are more confident of their status and willing to take more significant risk rather than middle managers who are conservative.

5.   Group Think Promotes Confirmation Bias, Not Always Promoting the Best ‘Idea-Culture’ – if you’ve worked at a startup, you know this. You got to have healthy conflicts to figure and chart the best way forward. You’ve got to stay open to understand and acknowledge that there might be another POV that’s better, another worldview that might be completely different but essential for survival based on culture and context.

Another system of engagement for your company’s marketing or another strategy that could alter the complexion of it, that you never thought about. And for that, disagreement is essential, deliberations are crucial, back and forth is critical, experiments are essential. And most important is moving away from ‘this is the way it was always done’ mindset. When you get your team to think like that, you shun yourself to any new force.

6.   Parenting – last, but never the least. All of us have huge opinions on this very sensitive and personal area. And of course, there’s never a right or a wrong, we know. But there are some nuggets here which I thought were quite priceless to drive home some small but important messages to raise happy, confident, and ORIGINAL kids.

Adam goes back to Simon Sinek’s famous – start with the why. If we’re telling our kids to be a certain way, a strong WHY and an explanation of it will take them a long way, in lieu of at the count of three. He also talks about enforcing too many rules. The quantity of rules creates a creativity barrier especially when they are growing up, making them just conscious to be following rules rather than exploring and being what they could be. Carol Dweck talks about this as well to some extent.

He also talks about giving them the freedom to just be sometimes – all days of packed schedules, packed travel with bucket lists, packed classes, packed everything makes them mechanical sucking the creativity out. Letting them be, not doing anything, floating around to write, sketch, and dance, no matter what the throughput is imperative.

Child prodigies are great at mastering the rules of the game, but in Adam’s new world order, we want to see kids inventing new games! Lots of other great points which I am not covering, so would encourage all you guys to read this book.

Guess, there’s an MLK in all of us. We just need the nuggets from Originals to uncover it to say …I have a dream!

Happy MLK Day.