• We are constantly borrowing thoughts, whether intentionally or inadvertently. We’re all vulnerable to “kleptomnesia”—accidentally remembering the ideas of others as our own.

• The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.

• The pressures to accept defaults start much earlier than we realize. If you consider the individuals who will grow up and make a dent in the universe, the first group that probably comes to mind is child prodigies. These geniuses learn to read at age two, play Bach at four, breeze through calculus at six, and speak seven languages fluently by eight. Their classmates shudder with jealousy; their parents rejoice at having won the lottery. But to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, their careers tend to end not with a bang, but a whimper. Child prodigies, it turns out, rarely go on to change the world.10 When psychologists study history’s most eminent and influential people, they discover that many of them weren’t unusually gifted as children. And if you assemble a large group of child prodigies and follow them for their entire lives, you’ll find that they don’t outshine their less precocious peers from families of similar means.

• Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new. The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies and beautiful Beethoven symphonies, but never compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights.

• When achievement motivation goes sky-high, it can crowd out originality: The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure.

• The drive to succeed and the accompanying fear of failure have held back some of the greatest creators and change agents in history. Concerned with maintaining stability and attaining conventional achievements, they have been reluctant to pursue originality. Instead of charging full steam ahead with assurance, they have been coaxed, convinced, or coerced to take a stand.

• And astronomy stagnated for decades because Nicolaus Copernicus refused to publish his original discovery that the earth revolves around the sun.20 Fearing rejection and ridicule, he stayed silent for twenty-two years, circulating his findings only to his friends. Eventually, a major cardinal learned of his work and wrote a letter encouraging Copernicus to publish it. Even then, Copernicus stalled for four more years. His magnum opus only saw the light of day after a young mathematics professor took matters into his own hands and submitted it for publication.

• We can only imagine how many Wozniaks, Michelangelos, and Kings never pursued, publicized, or promoted their original ideas because they were not dragged or catapulted into the spotlight. Although we may not all aspire to start our own companies, create a masterpiece, transform Western thought, or lead a civil rights movement, we do have ideas for improving our workplaces, schools, and communities.

• As economist Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, originality is an act of creative destruction.22 Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat.

• “There are so few originals in life,” says renowned executive Mellody Hobson, because people are afraid to “speak up and stand out.”24 What are the habits of the people whose originality extends beyond appearance to effective action?

• In every domain, from business and politics to science and art, the people who move the world forward with original ideas are rarely paragons of conviction and commitment. As they question traditions and challenge the status quo, they may appear bold and self-assured on the surface. But when you peel back the layers, the truth is that they, too, grapple with fear, ambivalence, and self-doubt.

• In a fascinating study, management researchers Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng asked a simple question: When people start a business, are they better off keeping or quitting their day jobs? From 1994 until 2008, they tracked a nationally representative group of over five thousand Americans in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties who became entrepreneurs. Whether these founders kept or left their day jobs wasn’t influenced by financial need; individuals with high family income or high salaries weren’t any more or less likely to quit and become full-time entrepreneurs. A survey showed that the ones who took the full plunge were risk takers with spades of confidence. The entrepreneurs who hedged their bets by starting their companies while still working were far more risk averse and unsure of themselves.

• If you think like most people, you’ll predict a clear advantage for the risk takers. Yet the study showed the exact opposite: Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit.26 If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969.27 After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977.28 And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says,…

• This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even…

• Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night.32 Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published.33 Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years…

• Risk portfolios explain why people often become original in one part of their lives while remaining quite conventional in others.

• As Polaroid founder Edwin Land remarked, “No person could possibly be original in one area unless he were possessed of the emotional and social stability that comes from fixed attitudes in all areas other than the one in which he is being original.”

• But don’t day jobs distract us from doing our best work? Common sense suggests that creative accomplishments can’t flourish without big windows of time and energy, and companies can’t thrive without intensive effort. Those assumptions overlook the central benefit of a balanced risk portfolio: Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another. By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses.

• Managing a balanced risk portfolio doesn’t mean constantly hovering in the middle of the spectrum by taking moderate risks. Instead, successful originals take extreme risks in one arena and offset them with extreme caution in another. At age twenty-seven, Sara Blakely generated the novel idea of creating footless pantyhose, taking a big risk by investing her entire savings of $5,000.41 To balance out her risk portfolio, she stayed in her full-time position selling fax machines for two years, spending nights and weekends building the prototype—and saving money by writing her own patent application instead of hiring lawyers to do so. After she finally launched Spanx, she became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.

• A century earlier, Henry Ford started his automotive empire while employed as a chief engineer for Thomas Edison, which gave him the security necessary to try out his novel inventions for a car.42 He continued working under Edison for two years after building a carburetor and a year after earning a patent for it.

• And what about Bill Gates, famous for dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft? When Gates sold a new software program as a sophomore, he waited an entire year before leaving school. Even then he didn’t drop out, but balanced his risk portfolio by applying for a leave of absence that was formally approved by the university—and by having his parents bankroll him. “Far from being one of the world’s great risk takers,” entrepreneur Rick Smith notes, “Bill Gates might more accurately be thought of as one of the world’s great risk mitigators.”

• In one representative study of over eight hundred Americans, entrepreneurs and employed adults were asked to choose which of the following three ventures they would prefer to start: (a) One that made $5 million in profit with a 20 percent chance of success (b) One that made $2 million in profit with a 50 percent chance of success (c) One that made $1.25 million in profit with an 80 percent chance of success The entrepreneurs were significantly more likely to choose the last option, the safest one. This was true regardless of income, wealth, age, gender, entrepreneurial experience, marital status, education, household size, and expectations of how well other businesses would perform. “We find that entrepreneurs are significantly more risk-averse than the general population,” the authors conclude.

• AT THE TURN of the century, an invention took Silicon Valley by storm. Steve Jobs called it the most amazing piece of technology since the personal computer. Enamored with the prototype, Jobs offered the inventor $63 million for 10 percent of the company. When the inventor turned it down, Jobs did something out of character: he offered to advise the inventor for the next six months—for free. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took one look at the product and immediately got involved, telling the inventor, “You have a product so revolutionary, you’ll have no problem selling it.” John Doerr, the legendary investor who bet successfully on Google and many other blue-chip startups, pumped $80 million into the business, predicting that it would be the fastest company ever to reach $1 billion and “would become more important than the internet.”

• The Segway was a false positive: it was forecast as a hit but turned out to be a miss. Seinfeld was a false negative: it was expected to fail but ultimately flourished.

• The creators proved to be terrible at judging how their performances would do with the test audiences. On average, when ranking their videos against the performances of nine other circus artists, they put their own work two slots too high. The managers were more realistic: they had some distance from the performances, which put them in a more neutral position.

• When we’ve developed an idea, we’re typically too close to our own tastes—and too far from the audience’s taste—to evaluate it accurately.

• originals aren’t reliable judges of the quality of their ideas, how do they maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece? They come up with a large number of ideas. Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.”

• In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra chose the 50 greatest pieces of classical music, the list included six pieces by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach.14 To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit.

• Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, not to mention prints, rugs, and tapestries—only a fraction of which have garnered acclaim.

• If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.”

• Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.

• In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality.

• Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.

• “You gotta kiss a lot of frogs,” he often told his team, “before you find a prince.”

• The device went through three or four iterations before a customer ever saw it.fn2 Conviction in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false positives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential.

• As we gain knowledge about a domain, we become prisoners of our prototypes.

• In practice, though, Justin Berg finds that test audiences are no better than managers at predicting the success of new ideas: focus groups are effectively set up to make the same mistakes as managers.

• Instead of speaking up to audiences who are highly agreeable, we’re better off targeting suggestions to people with a history of originality. Research shows that when managers have a track record of challenging the status quo, they tend to be more open to new ideas and less threatened by contributions from others.

• As she climbed up the CIA ladder, Medina noticed that her colleagues became more receptive to her suggestions, though it was mostly middle managers who dismissed them. Social scientists have long demonstrated this middle-status conformity effect.36 If you’re perched at the top, you’re expected to be different and therefore have the license to deviate. Likewise, if you’re still at the bottom of a status hierarchy, you have little to lose and everything to gain by being original. But the middle segment of that hierarchy—where the majority of people in an organization are found—is dominated by insecurity.

• Extensive research shows that when women speak up on behalf of others, they avoid backlash, because they’re being communal.

• “What got me heard,” Dubinsky explains, “was output and impact. People saw me as somebody who could make things happen. If you become known as someone who delivers, you do your job and do it well, you build respect.” She had earned status before exercising power, so she had idiosyncrasy credits to cash in.

• From the outside, the prospect of speaking up against Steve Jobs might seem a losing battle. But given his disagreeable tendencies, Jobs was exactly the kind of person who could be confronted. Dubinsky knew that Jobs respected those who stood up to him and was open to new ways of doing things. And she wasn’t speaking up for herself; she was advocating for Apple. By virtue of her willingness to challenge an idea she viewed as wrong, Dubinsky landed a promotion. She was not alone. Starting in 1981, the Macintosh team had begun granting an annual award to one person who challenged Jobs—and Jobs promoted every one of them to run a major division of Apple.

• Although one ultimately chose voice and the other opted to exit, there’s one way in which their choices were the same: they chose to speak up rather than stay silent. And in the long run, research shows that the mistakes we regret are not errors of commission, but errors of omission.53 If we could do things over, most of us would censor ourselves less and express our ideas more. That’s exactly what Carmen Medina and Donna Dubinsky did, and it left them with few regrets.

• Being original doesn’t require being first. It just means being different and better.

• “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”

• Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.”

• This holds true beyond the world of business, where many original people, ideas, and movements have failed because they were ahead of their time. At the CIA in the early 1990s, when Carmen Medina initially voiced her idea to share digital information online more rapidly, the agency wasn’t ready to consider the concept. As electronic communication became more secure and more familiar, people became more receptive to the idea.

• “People under 35 are the people who make change happen.36 People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.” After publishing his first revolutionary paper on relativity in his midtwenties, Albert Einstein made a similar observation: “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.”

• And in technology startups that have raised venture capital funding, the average founder is thirty-eight.

• These fundamental differences between conceptual and experimental innovators explain why some originals peak early and others bloom late. Conceptual innovation can be done quickly, because it doesn’t require years of methodical investigation. When Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA, they didn’t need to wait for data to amass. They had built a three-dimensional theoretical model and examined X-ray images provided by Rosalind Franklin. In addition, conceptual breakthroughs tend to occur early, because it is easiest to come up with a strikingly original insight when we approach a problem with a fresh perspective. “Conceptual innovators normally make their most important contributions to a discipline not long after their first exposure to it,” Galenson finds.

• Conceptual innovators may become the captives of an important early achievement.

• The participants thought they were being tested on their singing. But there was a twist: after singing, they moved into what was supposedly a different study, where they had a chance to keep money for themselves or cooperate by sharing it with the group. The few minutes they spent singing shouldn’t have affected their behavior, but it did. The group that sang together shared significantly more.6 They reported feeling more similar to each other and more like a team than participants in the other conditions.fn1