Who: Adam Grant

Claim To Fame: Adam Grant is the three-time New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B, which have sold over a million copies and been translated into 35 languages. Grant has also been Wharton’s top-rated professor for seven straight years. He is a leading expert on how we can find motivation and meaning, and live more generous and creative lives. He has been recognized as one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers and Fortune’s 40 under 40. And his TED talks on original thinkers and givers and takers have been viewed more than 12 million times.

Where To Find Adam: His Website, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram

Praise For Adam: “Reading Originals made me feel like I was seated across from Adam Grant at a dinner party, as one of my favorite thinkers thrilled me with his insights and his wonderfully new take on the world.” — Malcolm Gladwell, five-time New York Times bestselling author including The Tipping Point and Outliers

When do you like to write? Are you regimented about your writing routine?

I like to start writing in the morning: I’m a lark and it’s when my mind feels most focused and least cluttered. My habit is to write at least 1,000 words a day. Once I’ve finished a draft of an article or a chapter, I put it away for a month and then send it to my challenge network—a core group of people I trust to tear my ideas and my writing apart. Then I revise. A lot.

*To learn more about “challenge networks” and the art of taking feedback, check out Adam’s podcast episode “How To Love Criticism”

Do you have any pre-writing rituals that help you get in the zone? Anything you do when the writing isn’t coming easy?

After reading research on how we’re more creative when we’re less alert—it frees us up for creative leaps—I’ve started doing more idea generation in the evenings. When I wake up, I have something to say.

Your background is in organizational psychology. How do you apply your research to your writing routine?

To borrow Vonnegut’s language, be a swooper, not a basher. If there’s one thing psychology has taught me about writing, it’s that drafting and editing are two distinct tasks. Drafting demands a curious mindset, with low attentional filters to let divergent ideas in. Editing requires an evaluative mindset, which is about raising your attentional filters to keep divergent thoughts out. I think it’s wildly inefficient and ineffective to try to perfect every sentence as you write. Generate your ideas in one sitting, and revise them in a different window.

With your expertise in workplace environments, have you found commonalities that make up an ideal writing workplace?

I don’t think there’s such a thing as an ideal writing workplace, but one that’s clearly not ideal is an open-plan office.

A big lesson from your research is that what separates the good from the great is a willingness to try new things. Writers often find the repetitiveness of a routine to be an ally, what would be your advice?

Run a writing experiment once a month, where you test out a new practice. One month you could shift the mode, talking instead of typing or fleshing out ideas with (gasp) a pen. Another month you could toy with timing: most writers believe they need a block of a few hours to make meaningful progress, but Bob Boice actually found that you could train yourself to write productively in 15-minute intervals.

Deciding on a great idea to write about can be the most challenging aspect for a writer. How do you come to the point of ‘this is something I want to write about’ as opposed to ‘this is something I enjoy reading about’?

 Write about three kinds of ideas:

[1] The ones you can’t stop talking about, since they’re fascinating or fun or important enough to pull you into writing

[2] The ones where you have unique evidence or experience, since you have something original to say

[3] The ones you find yourself ranting about, since it will spare you the misery of having the same argument over and over

All of your work is very research intensive. What is your method for researching and organizing material you might want to use for your future writing?

I have yet to find a tool or technology that serves me better than a simple Word doc. I group the studies and stories I want to cover into themes, which eventually become book chapters. Then I use the time I’ve freed up to laugh at my friends who waste hours in utterly beautiful, utterly useless mind mapping software.

Writers have to be master prioritizers — juggling all sorts of projects and deadlines at the same time. That’s certainly the case for you. Do you have any methods for managing tasks and time to stay productive and not let overwhelm sneak in?

If you want to understand someone’s productivity, don’t ask them—ask their collaborators and careful observers. Thankfully, I’ve had two thoughtful writers dig into my habits. See Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? by Susan Dominus and Deep Work by Cal Newport.

What are the best pieces of writing advice that you’ve ever received or read?

From Hemingway: don’t stop writing at the natural end of a chapter or even a paragraph. Stop in mid-sentence. When you come back to it, you can pick up where you left off—and you’ve usually done some incubation along the way.

What writers and/or books do you consider gold standards?

In my genre of big ideas about work and psychology, I’m partial to Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, Quiet by Susan Cain, and A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink.

____________

Ready to create a writing routine of your own?

Sign up now and receive our free guide “12 Essential Writing Routines To Help You To Craft Your Own.”

Learn from the routines of superstar authors Stephen King, Gertrude Stein, John Grisham, Ernest Hemingway, Neil Gaiman, and many more.

Get the free guide here!