“Think different.” If Steve Jobs hadn’t done so, there’d be no Apple.

From Galileo to Benjamin Franklin, people who moved the world forward have championed ideas that challenged the status quo. Adam Grant, who established himself as one of his generation’s most compelling thought leaders with his first book, Give and Take, is joined by bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell to explore the big idea of originality: How do we champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity and buck outdated traditions — without risking it all?

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My first question is that I went to the place where I get my mail, the mailboxes store today, and there was a giant, very expensive bottle of wine, and there was no note attached to it, and I wanted to know, did you send that?

Because I thought, well, I mean, then I'm left with a little bit of a mystery.

I thought for sure the author of Give and Take was giving before the evening and sort of getting me, softening me up in some way.

The next unlabeled bottle of wine will be from me.

I've now made it impossible for you not to send me a bottle of wine in the next couple

I wanted to start by talking about the 1 subject that is scrupulously absent from your books, which is there's almost never anything personal in them.

Hold on, I got to do the George Costanza thing.

Who has written about himself ad nauseum?

You, on the other hand, where do you, I mean, you'd never, there's not a peep about your background, your family, your parents, your, can you tell us even a little bit?

Well, actually, before, no, before we do that, tell us why, why not?

You didn't really get there until book 2 though, right?

No, I sprinkled in a story or 2 here and there, but I'm always more fascinated by other people's experiences than mine.

And also, I don't know, I've learned a lot more from my failures than my successes.

And if I wrote about me, it would just be like a book of failures and I don't really want to put that out there.

Because there's a moment in this book when you talk about parenting and you talk about role models and how the most important role models in children's lives are not their parents, but outsiders.

And that was the moment when I wondered, Are you being subtly autobiographical here?

No, I had amazing parents as role models.

I think that just I was just thinking about specifically for a career, right?

Unless you're going to follow in your parents' footsteps, or unless you're like a poor Andre Agassi with a Lombardi dad, I think the rest of the time it's really hard to find role models in your own house for exactly what you want to do.

But I'm not really talking about me, am I?

No, so you didn't follow in your parents.

So I found out after I chose my field that both of my parents were psychology majors and I didn't know it.

No, I knew that they were a lawyer and a teacher, but I just assumed that like normal people talked about self-fulfilling prophecies at home.

No, really, I found this in a psychology class.

I was like, wait, that's, I just thought that was a common vocabulary.

Are there large, other large areas of your parents' history that were undiscussed in your childhood?

So my dad is, he's, he actually always wanted to be a pilot.

And so He kind of steered his career that way.

He flies these little glider planes with no engine, which is a little scary.

And he's really intensely curious about the world and has lots of fascinating interests.

My mom is the biggest overachiever I've ever met.

She will get excited about something and start working on it years before she should ever even be thinking about it.

And I guess I inherited a little bit of this, or she shared it with me, because growing up, she always said, as long as you try your hardest, whatever grade you get in school, I'll be proud of you.

And then she would add, but if you didn't get an A, I'll know you didn't try your hardest.

Did you feel, what was your reaction to that attitude?

Did you feel emboldened by it, cheered by it, intimidated by it?

No, I think actually as a kid, I used a lot of self-handicapping.

And then if I didn't succeed, I could say, well, I didn't prepare or I didn't try.

As opposed to confronting the idea that I didn't have the ability or the talent to handle it.

But Looking back, I think that it made me constantly worry about feeling guilty and letting her down.

And we all know guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.

When did your, you clearly don't engage in self-handicapping anymore.

I had some roommates who were insanely smart and still not doing that well in school.

I realized I had to had to start studying.

Was that a, do you consider that a pivotal moment in your...

was kind of a turning point though, because I had been, like when I was a freshman in high school, I fell in love with springboard diving, which was a bad idea because I didn't like heights, I was afraid of them.

I didn't like pain, and I kept hitting the water at like 30 miles an hour where the surface tension is not that different from concrete.

And I had teammates who broke their bones just hitting the water wrong.

But ultimately, you know, I guess I got to college and I had done okay in diving by outworking people who are more talented than I was.

And when I got to college, everyone worked as hard as I did and they were more talented.

And I kind of got tired of diving and I took the, I guess, like the discipline and work ethic that I'd learned there, and I started channeling it into school.

The, do you know, have you, I promise we'll leave your childhood in the next 45 minutes.

Isn't that a kind of, it's a slightly eccentric choice for a Jewish kid from suburban Detroit?

Yeah, so it's, I mean, it's kind of a nerd sport, right?

So it attracts all the people who are too short for basketball, too weak for football, too slow for track.

Which would have been more culturally appropriate.

I think that's called a sport within the Jewish community.

No, I was actually I was addicted to playing video games as a kid.

And the summer before high school, I was literally playing like 14-hour days.

And my mom came in 1 day and she said, you need to get some fresh air.

And it just so happened that 1 of the lifeguards there was like an all-state diver.

And on 1 of his breaks, he started doing somersaults and twists.

I guess I'd seen it on TV, but never up close.

And it was just fascinating to me that somebody could leap into the air so seemingly out of control and land with such precision.

And I just said, I want to learn how to do that.

Now, unfortunately, I walked like Frankenstein.

As my coach later told me, he once brought a metronome to practice to try to get me to walk in rhythm.

Later, my wife signed us up for dancing lessons before our wedding and then she quit.

Yeah, I wouldn't have wanted to dance with me either.

So you're an uncoordinated champion diver is what you're saying.

I was, I have really bad small motor skills, but the gross motor skills are okay, I guess.

The worst thing that can happen as a diver is getting lost.

Like even worse than the pain is just hurling yourself into the air and having no idea what's up and what's down.

You can't brace yourself for impact that way.

And I still wake up with nightmares a couple times a month of just being in the air, flailing completely lost.

And then the other nightmare that I occasionally have is you do a lot of visualization in diving because it's such a visual sport.

And oftentimes, you have to add a half a somersault or a twist to something that's already pretty hard for you.

So you picture it first and sometimes like you get stuck in this tape that you can't edit and so you're supposed to picture like 2 forward somersaults with a twist and then a dive in and your body just freezes after the first somersault and you can't get yourself to keep going.

And sometimes I wake up in the middle of that.

Do you have pleasurable dreams about diving?

This is a very anxiety-driven sport for me.

Sorry, I'm now vastly more interested in your diving than I am in anything else.

But you persisted for, wait, how many years?

And then you, and what happens now when you approach a pool that has a springboard?

So I have not set foot on a real diving board in 9 years.

I'm afraid to do it, because the last time I did it, I wanted to go and train hours and hours a day to get better than I was.

And that's no longer something that I want to spend my time on.

But I wouldn't, it wouldn't be wrong to return to some of these questions.

Because, well no, because you have, 1 of my favorite chapters in the book is about parenting and about, well you have 2 times you return to the issue of what it means to be a child in a family.

I hope that's not unusual in the people that interview you.

But I wanted to start with, so the book is an argument about, essentially it's an argument about character, isn't it?

That there is a, there is a kind of ideal temperament for dealing with, productively with the world of ideas and such.

And it's not a book, It's a book in which the word intelligence barely appears.

In fact, I mean, I know it's in there, but it's barely in there.

And so you're in you're in this kind of what I find very interesting tradition of trying to reorient our thinking away from these, you know, the, as I like to call them, the IQ fundamentalists and towards the.

But so my question is, if you're, if you're right, and what, and that what truly distinguishes people in complex environments is our matters of temperament Then what does that mean for the various institutions that we have created in our world?

So for example you teach at Penn and elite Ivy League school which selects people largely on the basis of their SAT score.

Now, is there any correlation between your SAT score and the kinds of questions of temperament and character you're talking about in this book?

Does that suggest that your own school goes about choosing students all wrong?

Don't lead the witness, though, or anything.

If I made you admissions director at Penn tomorrow, what happens?

The school wouldn't play out, first of all.

After that, I think what would happen is I would go back to the drawing board and say, look, what are we even trying to select on?

So I'm a big fan of Barry Schwartz's view on this, that the college admissions process is largely a smoke screen, and that there are at least 5 times as many students academically similar to each other who could get in as don't.

And we might as well just say, here's our bar, and let's either do a lottery or let's treat it like the medical residency matching program, where students have to rank and prioritize, and then you can only get into 1 place that also chooses you.

I think that would make people spend their time differently and probably in more valuable ways in high school.

But what I would probably end up doing is I'd put a lot more emphasis on originality, not surprisingly.

And I really like the George Lucas proposal for this.

He wants every child to go through school thinking about a creative portfolio.

And at the end of high school submit that with a college application.

What do you mean by a creative portfolio?

So you submit something that's your own original work.

It could be a film that you made, a story that you wrote, a song that you created.

Something original, though, that's an active creative self-expression.

And I would love to see that added to the admission process, along with the standard SAT, essays, grades.

But it strikes me that your ideas have perhaps even more implications for what happens at the school.

Well, you only put me in charge of admissions.

I think- By the way, before you answer that question, This is actually a really important point.

If you really, if we are doing Adam Grant U, do we care more about looking for these kinds of kids at the point of admissions or creating these kinds of kids over the course of the 4 years?

That seems like a false dichotomy, doesn't it?

I think it's easier to influence the selection process than to know how to socialize students to college.

You know, social psychologists are telling me that they don't know how to socialize students in college?

No, look, I don't know that we have as much influence on the socialization process as peers do, right?

So we could control this election process completely.

A teacher at a college is saying that the best way to socialize a student is at the point of admission and not what actually goes on.

So for your 65 grand, you're not actually getting anything, any experience that can be controlled by the faculty?

Maybe 63 grand of that is uncontrolled by the faculty.

Are you suggesting you've become highly disillusioned with the efficacy of higher education?

That assumes I was illusioned to begin with.

I think that, look, I think by the time people come to college, they make a lot of their own choices, right?

And so, you know, it's a little bit like the Judith Rich Harris argument about parents not mattering.

You know, how preschoolers supposedly pay more attention to what their peers do than what their parents do.

I think when you get to college, right, like there are very few people who say, I'm gonna find out what professors think is important, and then I'm gonna go follow that.

Right, peers have a much bigger influence.

They must have influenced you like that when you were an undergrad, clearly.

You weren't just wandering around following the lead of your faculty, were you?

No, actually, I didn't go to class, so it would be very difficult for me to follow the leader.

But, wait, so, but let's talk a little bit, So let's go back to the, since we're on the Upper East Side, we might as well talk about the college admissions process, since as far as I can tell, that's all people talk about on the Upper East Side.

Let's be a little bit, so you, a creative portfolio is 1.

Now does that run the risk of simply creating a new kind of admissions tyranny that favors the arty kid over the, I mean, do you worry a little bit about, I mean, 1 reaction I had to your book was that you're describing a kind of person, but we can't all be originals, or can we?

So I wrote this op-ed about raising a creative child a couple of weeks ago.

And I was quite taken aback to discover that every single reader of the New York Times has a gifted child.

You start to see the comments and the e-mails come in and you realize that the question is how can I create a formula now for not only raising a super smart, overly gritty child, but now my kid has to be an original too and I want to program that as much as I can from fetus stage?

And I worry a lot about that, but I think that there's the way that everyone can be more original is I think conformity is a dangerous thing.

Conformity is about saying I don't agree with your ideas or your values, but I'm going to follow you anyway because I think something bad is going to happen to me if I stand out instead of fitting in.

I think there are lots of ways that people could think for themselves and be original that still say, still involve saying, look, I believe this person's leadership is compelling and I wanna follow.

So I think, and we should see people being original in different domains of their lives too.

So not everyone is going to be musically gifted, but why not let a thousand flowers bloom in that way?

So does this mean, we keep going on what the admissions process looks like.

Let's be really nitty gritty here, because I think it's a really interesting question.

We're gonna rebuild it from the ground up so that kids are now coming in with something like a creative portfolio.

You're gonna have, are you gonna, are you gonna, Is it possible to do college admissions in the Adam Grant U without meeting every student in person?

Yeah, 1 of the things I want to do is I want to find out what are your core values, what are your personality traits, what do we know about you as an individual?

And then we should make sure that we're selecting at least 1 person who's your alter ego and the complete opposite of you.

And if we composed half of our class with interesting people and half of the class with their opposites, it would be fascinating or it would be a horrible, horrible experiment gone awry.

But either way, I think it would be worth running.

I would also, I guess what I would say is, I would like to see us really getting a sense of who is willing to think in original ways and challenge norms and conventions.

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Adam Grant and Malcolm Gladwell: Originals—How Nonconformists Move the World