Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton who uses social science research to challenge common assumptions about success. His books each take one widely held belief, about generosity, originality, certainty or talent, and argue that the evidence points somewhere else.
| Book | Year | Summary PDF | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Give and TakeA Revolutionary Approach to Success | 2013 | Not yet | Generate audio |
| OriginalsHow Non-Conformists Move the World | 2016 | Not yet | Generate audio |
| Think AgainThe Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know | 2021 | Not yet | Generate audio |
| Hidden PotentialThe Science of Achieving Greater Things | 2023 | Not yet | Generate audio |
Grant set out to explain why some people rise to the top while others sink, and focused on a factor he felt was overlooked: how people interact with others. Drawing on his own research, he sorts people into givers, takers and matchers and argues that givers are overrepresented at both the bottom and the top of success, depending on how they give.
It is Grant’s first book and sets his pattern of using research to overturn a piece of conventional wisdom. Its focus on relationships and contribution carries into Originals, which asks how people champion new ideas, and later into Hidden Potential.
Grant opens the book with his own mistake: he turned down a chance to invest in Warby Parker, partly because the founders had not dropped out of school, and later called it the worst financial decision he ever made. The book sets out to understand how original people recognize, voice and champion new ideas, and why his assumptions about them were wrong.
It moves from how people treat each other in Give and Take to how people challenge the status quo. Its interest in questioning received wisdom foreshadows Think Again, which turns that questioning on our own beliefs.
Grant wrote the book during a period of intense political division and describes it as a response to polarization, the tendency to split contested issues into two extreme sides. It sets out to make the case for rethinking and unlearning, and to give tools for questioning your own opinions and having better conversations with people you disagree with.
Where Originals is about challenging other people’s ideas, Think Again is about challenging your own. It is the most inward looking of the four and bridges to Hidden Potential, which also asks readers to revise assumptions about themselves.
Grant has said he became interested in the topic through his own experience as a springboard diver who started with little natural talent but, with a strong coach and effort, far exceeded what he thought he could do. The book argues that people and institutions judge potential too much by early ability and past performance, and sets out how character skills, learning structures and opportunity let people grow further.
It extends Think Again’s call to revise assumptions to the question of what people are capable of. It returns to the interpersonal themes of Give and Take through its emphasis on coaches, teams and systems that help others grow.
Grant began with Give and Take (2013), a study of how generosity and reciprocity shape success at work. Originals (2016) shifted from relationships to ideas, asking how people generate and champion creative change. Think Again (2021) turned the lens inward, arguing that the ability to rethink one’s own views matters more than ever in a polarized time. Hidden Potential (2023) moved from beliefs to growth, arguing that achievement depends less on starting talent than on character skills and opportunity. Over a decade his focus moved from how we treat others, to how we change the world, to how we change our minds and ourselves.
All four books share a method: take an intuitive belief about success and test it against research, often with surprising results. They also share an optimism that the traits that matter can be learned. They differ in their target, which is relationships in Give and Take, creativity in Originals, beliefs in Think Again, and personal growth in Hidden Potential. Read Give and Take if you care about collaboration and careers, Originals if you want to drive new ideas at work, Think Again if you want to argue and decide better, and Hidden Potential if you want to grow yourself or develop others.
