Adam Grant on Clear Thinking, Persuasive Writing, and Rational Self-Interest

By Jon Hersey

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Think Again. I recently asked him about his approach to writing, applying principles of persuasion from his book Think Again, and how some of his ideas relate to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.

Jon Hersey: Dr. Grant, thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

Adam Grant: First, please call me Adam. I don’t answer to anything else. And second, thank you for your extraordinarily thoughtful review of Think Again in Quillette. It’s in a league of its own in terms of how much I’ve learned from it about my own book and my own thinking. And it’s the kind of review that I wish everyone would write when they sit down to evaluate a book.

Hersey: Well, I have to give you much of the credit because you wrote an excellent book on the power of rethinking, and it motivated me to completely rethink that review about five times before I felt comfortable with it.

Grant: I’m honored that it struck a chord, and I will try to live up to it. And don’t let your enthusiasm stand in the way of challenging me to rethink things. Frankly, one of my favorite things about talking with people about this topic is that every time I have a conversation about these ideas, it’s a chance to learn something new. So, I look forward to you pushing and stretching my thinking.

Hersey: In your book Originals, you talk about how procrastination is often part of an incubation period that enhances creativity; and with Think Again, you discuss the power of rethinking even your dearly held views. I wonder how many people come to you and thank you for giving them scientific backing for thinking that things traditionally viewed as vices—such as procrastination or indecisiveness—are actually virtues. . . .

Grant: It happens much more often than I expected and more often than I wanted. I definitely didn’t set out to license procrastination. I didn’t want to give people a giant blank check.

Sometimes, I think people are just being funny. But I have heard from people over the past five years who have said, “You know, I’ve procrastinated all my life. Then I read your research, and I realized that there is good reason to procrastinate more.” I was like, “No, that’s not the message!” The message is not that you need to procrastinate more on any given problem. There might be a sweet spot, as long as you’re intrinsically interested in solving it, where pausing causes incubation. That can lead you to discover some unexpected connections and maybe reframe the problem a little bit.

But if you already procrastinate a lot, that’s probably only going to make things worse. With that research, I just wanted to do something much simpler, which was to normalize procrastination, to say, “This is a natural part of the creative process.” It’s fundamental to being human and working on hard problems. Instead of beating yourself up for it, you should recognize that sometimes even though it feels unpleasant, it can actually unlock ideas.

The same can be said of rethinking. Some people have come away from Think Again thinking, I’m the kind of person who will make plans to go to a restaurant with friends and then, the day before, I change the plan. And then I change it again and again. And thanks to your book, I realized this was a good thing. My question is: Did you change your mind in the face of stronger evidence or sharper logic? Or just because you’re indecisive?

Hersey: Agreed. There has to be, as Aristotle said with regard to virtues, a mean between excess and deficiency.

You’re not only this star-studded academic, but you’re also an excellent writer. Sadly, those two things don’t always go hand in hand. I’m sure you’ve read (and maybe even had to write) a good deal of material in that bizarre language of “academese.” Did you make a conscious effort to become a top-notch communicator?

Grant: Oh, of course, and I don’t feel like I’m there yet. A couple of things happened. First, I drafted my first book, Give and Take, and sent it to my agent. He came back and said, “I don’t even think your academic colleagues would want to read this: 103,000 words describing the intricacies of some esoteric studies? How did you even find the curiosity and the energy to keep going?” And I was like, “I don’t think you understand what we do as academics. This is what we do.” But no, I ended up throwing it out and starting over.

Richard Pine, my agent, gave me a great piece of advice. He said, “Don’t write like you write research papers. Write like you teach.” And all of a sudden it hit me. This is something I’ve been working on my whole career. I was inspired by some professors who are extraordinary communicators of ideas. They lit a fire under me, motivating me to explore the things I study and to spread that knowledge. So, from day one, I’ve been obsessed with trying to figure out, how do I make this material more interesting, more engaging, more thought-provoking, more exhilarating? Becoming a writer was me trying to figure out how to do that on paper, trying to capture what happens in my best moments in the classroom.

Along the way, a couple other things have been helpful. One is that I have long held that unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking. Too often, we get away with incomplete ideas in verbal communication because we explain them with contagious energy or charisma. People don’t notice. They don’t scrutinize the spoken word as carefully as they do the written word. Whereas, if you have holes in your thinking and you try to write down your ideas, everyone will see right through them. So, part of the discipline for me is just doing a lot of ruthless rewriting and engaging my challenge network to trash draft after draft. Another thing is reading great science communicators and storytellers and trying to figure out what they did that hooked me and made these ideas come to life, then trying to find my own version of accomplishing that.

Hersey: Have you noticed that your thinking has gotten better as you’ve become a clearer writer?

Grant: Yes, I think that causal arrow actually goes in both directions. I think becoming a clearer writer has sharpened my thinking. And this is something that I first learned the principle behind while in grad school. I took a seminar with Karl Weick, who introduced me to the smokejumpers story from Think Again. Karl taught this class on the craft of scholarship, and one of the really interesting things Karl said in that seminar was that when he reread his old books, he realized that the better he understood something, the more clearly he explained it. When you are mired in lots of jargon and overly nuanced sentences, sometimes it means you don’t really understand what you’re trying to say yet.

What Karl taught us to do in that seminar was to try to rewrite our hypotheses—which often would go on for pages—in a single sentence. Of course, there will be a lot of nuance to build that hypothesis and explain the reasoning behind it, but you should know what your thesis is and be able to explain it to your grandmother. If you can’t, you don’t understand what you’re trying to say yet.

Surprisingly, this has become one of my favorite things about social media. When I first joined Twitter, I hated this thought that I would be limited to 140 characters. I thought: No, nobody can express a meaningful idea in that short a space. But the discipline of having to boil down what I wanted to say into a nugget—it clarified my thinking a lot.

One of the mistakes I used to make was to just sit down and bash out a chapter. And now I’m much more likely not just to outline, but to try to do that one-sentence thesis statement in my head before I sit down at my computer. And when I do that, the chapter partially writes itself.

Hersey: I teach a writing course, and one of the first things we do after thinking on paper is formulate a single-sentence theme that clearly and concisely states the point of the piece. And I’ve actually just switched the way that I teach this, because sometimes people are overwhelmed by that task. So, now we start with something that seems, at least on the surface, to be simpler, which is to write the idea as if it’s a tweet. It’s amazing, because it forces you to do that thinking, to encapsulate your point, and to do it in a way that’s actually intriguing to people. And I have to say, I’ve been following you on Twitter, and there, too, you’re killing it. You have so many gems of wisdom summed up in a couple lines.

Grant: That’s overly generous of you. But I do think you have to be careful there, too. When I reread some of my old tweets, I see both sides of it. I love that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote: “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” I’ve started to think about those two sides of complexity as ignorant simplicity and elegant simplicity. And I think sometimes when I push myself to write the tweet or the one-sentence thesis too soon, I end up trapped in ignorant simplicity. And it might only be after spilling out six thousand words that I arrive at the elegant simplicity that enables me to write that sentence well.

Hersey: Yes, that’s a great distinction. If you give yourself that job too soon, then you’re really giving your brain an impossible task. Because, basically, you’re asking it to compute numbers that aren’t there. You can’t run the equation, because you don’t have the data.

Grant: That’s exactly right. And if I had written about this in Think Again, I might even have explained it as: If you try to write the thesis statement upfront, there’s a risk that you haven’t done enough rethinking yet. You haven’t pressure tested, developed, and refined your ideas.

Hersey: Part of what you’re trying to do with your writing is change people’s minds. I’m sure you learned a lot about persuasion from writing Think Again. You talk a lot in the book about the power of persuasive listening. Which of those lessons do you think work well with writing?

Grant: Oh, interesting. Some of the principles just don’t apply well because you’re not in dialogue. But one is the idea of giving fewer reasons. I cannot tell you how much of my old writing I look back at now and think, Wow, I over-justified that! I made it easy for the audience to dismiss my whole case based on my least-compelling reason. Or I made it very clear that I was trying to change their minds as opposed to just putting some data out there and letting them form their own opinions about it.

I think another key is trying to pose questions that will get the reader to reflect a little bit. I read a lot of persuasive writing, particularly on polarizing topics. I feel like every other op-ed that I read is basically trying to prosecute somebody else’s beliefs. And I just look at that and think, What you’re doing is inviting their most sophisticated defense attorney. Here’s the courtroom, and no matter what you say, you’re just going to elicit a more extreme and more entrenched response in that person’s head. And if instead you pose more puzzles and say, “I wonder what would happen if you considered the following view?,” or, “how would your life have been different if you had been raised the following way?,” you invite the reader to connect his own dots. You could probably write a persuasive argument that has too many questions. But I think that most writers can benefit from dramatically increasing their question-to-statement ratio.

That also goes to the point: Give me that third perspective or that fourth angle, instead of, “Here’s one side, and here’s the other.” I think some of the most effective articles and books I’ve read have said something like, “Most people believe X, and you’ve probably come across people who believe Y, and what I want to open your eyes to is the possibility of Z.” I think that it’s such a thought-provoking argument when you can take the two sides of a coin and turn them into the many surfaces of a prism. And it just makes my day when I see a writer do that.

Hersey: Yes, that’s definitely a hard thing to do. It requires really being interested and curious enough to ferret out the many different views on a subject. And it takes an incredible amount of time that many writers unfortunately don’t have, because their job is to get this article out by 3 p.m. or whatever. And perhaps that’s part of why people are becoming more interested in individual commentators and less so in organizations.

So, part of what you’re saying is simplify by giving only a few high-quality reasons for your conclusion; don’t over-justify. But also, complexify by acknowledging the many different views on the topic.

Grant: Yes, there’s an interesting tension. I think this is a moment where Esther Perel would push me and say, “This is not a problem to be solved, it’s a paradox to be managed.” In some situations, you will want a thesis that achieves elegant simplicity by finding order in chaos or by taking the oversimplified extremes and revealing a third perspective that’s not a middle ground but a completely different view. And that requires, to your point, both simplicity and complexity. It’s simple in the articulation, and it’s also very complex in the wrestling with multiple points of view. It’s what Phil Tetlock would probably call integrative complexity: the ability to differentiate between all the nuances and see the shades of gray, but then also to draw a fine line in the sand. Sorry for mixing too many metaphors!

Hersey: I think this relates to something from Give and Take. Could you give your essentialized view of what givers and takers are?

Grant: I think of a giver as somebody whose default instinct is to try to figure out “What can I do for you?” And takers are the opposite. They want to know, “What can you do for me?”

Hersey: And matchers are the people who think in terms of tit for tat: you do something for me, I’ll do something for you, right? In your introduction, you say it’s not necessarily the case that all givers are altruistic, right?

Grant: Yes, correct.

Hersey: Perhaps you’ve heard of Ayn Rand. She was the arch-advocate of selfishness, and she wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness. Although people commonly associate selfishness with the taker persona, what she advocated was long-term rational self-interest. Wouldn’t you say that many givers are on the policy of acting toward their long-term rational self-interest?

Grant: Oh, I think it depends on your answer to the question: Who is John Galt?

Hersey: Ha!

Grant: Yes. It’s complicated. I devoured The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged when I was in high school. I didn’t agree with all of Rand’s philosophy, and I don’t think anyone should agree with all of anyone’s views, because then you’re probably not thinking for yourself.

But she definitely challenged some of my assumptions. When I look at my work in Give and Take through her worldview, as I understand it, what she was trying to discourage was being a selfless giver, being one of the givers who is completely self-sacrificing. If you want to break it down in terms of motive, this person is high in concern for others and low in concern for self. I don’t think she had any objection, as I understand her, to being a giver who’s high in both concern for self and concern for others. In other words, you care about your own rational self-interest. But you can also care about other people’s interests, too. In an ideal world, you look for ways to integrate or align those—especially, if you reject the premise of a zero-sum world. There are ways that I can help you and advance my own goals, too.

And that, I think, is the difference between successful givers and matchers. Matchers expect to zero out the balance sheet in every interaction. They think, I want to make sure every time I help you, I get something back, whereas the successful giver will think, I will help whenever I can, as long as it’s not at great personal cost. And you know, in the long run, I’m not going to do that at my own expense. I’m going to help wherever it benefits you more than it costs me. But I’m looking out for my own interests, not in the sense that I’m trying to get ahead here. Just that I’m trying to make sure I don’t fall behind, that I don’t compromise myself in the helping that I do. And I don’t see that as incompatible with Objectivism. Do you?

Hersey: It depends on what you mean by “getting ahead.” Objectivism advocates looking for opportunities that are mutually beneficial. You should try to succeed in life but not by abusing or exploiting other people. Nor by sacrificing your own values. Rand’s view of rational self-interest includes benevolence and generosity toward others, so long as it doesn’t require compromising oneself or one’s values. And she held that altruism means sacrificing oneself to others on principle and so being a selfless giver, as you call it.

Regarding the person who’s looking to zero out the balance sheet in every interaction, that reminds me of something I’ve suffered with a bit myself, which is this sort of scarcity mentality—the view that there’s only so much to go around. It’s a fixed pie, and I have to get my share, and I don’t want to be treated unfairly. I know from personal experience that that’s a really destructive mind-set and a bad way to live.

Grant: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? There’s a great paper on this by Fabrizio Ferraro and his colleagues, along with others—the point being that if you believe in a world dominated by scarcity, you create a world dominated by scarcity. You do not elicit the matching or giving impulses from the people around you. And then you find that the more you give, the more it hurts you, and the more you take, the more it helps you—because nobody ever looks out for your interest or tries to expand the pie with you. So, the scarcity mentality boils down to a set of assumptions that are worth rethinking.

Hersey: This makes me think of successful capitalists and entrepreneurs. You’ve read some Rand, so you understand that, at the political level, she advocates a system of individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism. In her view, successful business people of all sorts, even successful writers, work on the trader principle, offering value for value. When I write something—when I write that thesis statement, that theme, that tweet, whatever it is—I’m thinking, What can I provide to people that I’ll enjoy creating? And if I’m not thinking about that, then what am I doing? Perhaps just trying to get some value without really providing one in return, like trying to increase my standing in the world. And that doesn’t go anywhere. I wonder what you think about this, at the social level, at the political level? Do you think there are many successful business people who aren’t on the premise of trying to provide value for other people?

Grant: No, not when defined that way. It’s funny. It’s sometimes called enlightened self-interest, right? That’s how economists like to talk about it. I always thought that that was an unfair way to describe what we’re discussing, because it’s as if we’re all matchers playing the long game. Right? They think, if I am effective and savvy and strategic enough in my giving, then it’s going to pay off for me over time. And I don’t actually think that that’s what’s going on most of the time, right?

If I look at the hyper-successful entrepreneurs I’ve had a chance to learn from and advise, most of the time they started their companies not with a desire to get rich but with a problem that was driving them and other people around them crazy. They got a jolt of excitement from thinking, Maybe I can fix this, and not just for me. It hurts me that people get stranded without being able to call a cab. It upsets me that there are no affordable places to stay in New York City. A lot of that is, “I want this service. But I also think the world would be a better place if other people had it, too, and I wonder if I can turn that into a business.”

I think that it does a disservice to the complexity of people’s motives to call that enlightened self-interest. We should say that those entrepreneurs were fueled by a combination of concern for others and concern for themselves. And why can’t you have both motives at the same time? I don’t want to live in a world where people are only driven by one or the other. I don’t want to live in a world of altruism, where everybody sacrifices themselves for others. Nor do I want to live in a world of selfishness where everybody is only concerned with themselves.

The other thing I would say about this pattern in action is, if you go with the long matching game, you end up systematically helping the wrong people. You only invest in helping the people who you expect to be able to help you in the future. And we cannot predict where people will end up. So, you’ll end up under-investing in people you don’t expect to strike it big. Reid Hoffman has a great way of describing this. When I asked him about it, he said that if you take this tit-for-tat or matching approach, then you will end up with a narrower network, because you are only helping people who have made it or who have shown the potential to make it. And if there’s any lesson in Silicon Valley, it’s that we all underestimate many people who will go on to do amazing things. So, I think the best way to describe the most successful people is to say that they are givers, but they don’t give in a selfless way.

Hersey: I agree. Different people do have different motives, and whatever they are—whether they are altruistic, egoistic, or a mix of both—we ought to identify them accurately. But I think what we’re advocating is essentially the same thing. One of the problems with long-matchers seems to be that they consider only material values. But there’s another really important component of relationships—which Rand recognized—and that is the spiritual value we derive from them, including the goodwill we foster and the self-esteem we build when helping others do things we think are worthwhile. Not only do long-matchers miss out on a lot of material value that they aren’t equipped to calculate for. Sadly, they also lead spiritually impoverished lives.

Grant: Maybe you can solve a little bit of a mystery for me. When I look at Objectivists in senior positions (and this is just anecdotal observation that I haven’t tried to quantify), there seems to be a bimodal distribution. The CEOs I know who are huge fans of Ayn Rand are either the biggest servant leaders I know, or they are the worst takers I know. Obviously, many people are adept at twisting philosophies to serve their own goals and values. But what do you make of that? Is it too easy to read Rand as recommending unadulterated taking, or is that just a careless read of her work?

Hersey: Ultimately, I think that’s a careless read. Rand was all about trading value for value for mutual benefit, not about extracting as much value as you can from others. Many people who call themselves Objectivists misunderstand the philosophy. Granted, it is complicated and original, and I can see how people who don’t take the time to really digest the ideas might misinterpret them. But Rand’s meaning is there on the page for those who want to understand it and use it in their lives. And for those who don’t, it is easy enough to take Rand out of context.

Grant: Yes, which, I guess, is something that happens with many authors. Something you might find interesting on this topic: One of the most influential organizational psychologists is a devout Objectivist. His name is Ed Locke. Locke and Gary Latham put goal-setting theory on the map. They did these surprisingly powerful and practical experiments looking at how to set a goal with the optimum level of difficulty and specificity to motivate people. Long story short, they created one of the most effective and practical managerial systems out there.

At the same time, Locke has been mired in a debate with management scholars who say, in essence, “Objectivism is bunk. There’s no serious philosopher who takes this seriously.” See, for example, the critique by Bruce Barry and Carroll Stephens and the counterpoint by Locke and Becker. I think it’d be really interesting to see how you engage with the debate and whether you can reconcile their points of view.

Hersey: I’m not familiar with that debate, but I’ll look into it and let you know what I think. I’m thrilled that you’re familiar with Locke’s work. He cowrote a very good book on romance with a friend of mine, Ellen Kenner. But that’s a discussion for another day.

It’s been a pleasure chatting with you. Where can people keep up with your work?

Grant: You can follow me on Twitter at @AdamMGrant, and my website is AdamGrant.net.

Hersey: Thanks so much for your work and for your time today!

Grant: Thanks for the great discussion.