Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist who focuses on finding motivation and the most meaningful way to help yourself and others succeed in living a fulfilled and happy life. Grant is currently a professor at the Whorton School at the University of Pennsylvania where he was voted the top-rated professor for seven years straight in the years of 2011-2017 and was the school’s youngest professor to receive tenure at the age of 28 as stated in the Wharton Management Department under his bio. Grant has been acknowledged as one of the world’s top 10 most influential management thinkers and he has received numerous awards for his research and publications. As discussed in the bio of Adam Grant’s webpage, he is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of 5 of his books including “Think Again,” “Give and Take,” “Originals,” “Option B,” and “Power Moves.” Grant is continuously and constantly publishing more content on different approaches to finding inspiration, rethinking assumptions, and living more generous lives.
Grant has inspired people to change their perspective on how to look at success and live fulfilled lives. Grant discusses the importance of happiness in the small battles, learning from others to learn about and better yourself, and finding strength in the face of adversity. Because of the work Grant has published he can fit under the category of a public intellectual because his work focuses on making an impact and influence to change the way people view happiness, success, and how to get the most out of yourself and others around you without burning out. Grant proposes new tactics while debunking old ones to dealing with and overcoming struggles in everyday and long-term scenarios, especially in the workplace. Grant’s ability to inspire and grab the public’s attention with his ideas and claims supports the notion that he should be considered a public intellectual. As discussed in Stephan Mack’s “Are Public Intellectuals a Thing of the Past,” Mack describes public intellectuals as people who bring ideas that impact and force their audiences to critically think and have the power and evidence to influence or challenge the perspectives or opinions of individuals. As seen in the popularity and support of Grant’s publications he clearly has had an impact and influence on large audiences by changing the way they find motivation and fulfillment in their life. He also backs his practices and claims by his personal experiences, research, and numerous studies, making his arguments more persuasive and reliable to his audience.
Grant was born in West Bloomfield Township Michigan on August 13, 1981, to the parents of a lawyer father and a teacher mother. He attended West Bloomfield High school where he was named All-American in diving in 1999 (Adam Grant-Bio). As discussed by New York Times writer Susan Dominus in her article “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead,” Grant aspired to be a professional basketball player growing up and would spend hours practicing outside refusing to go in until he made twenty-three consecutive free throws (Dominus, 2013). Although Grant’s career did not lead him to become a professional basketball player it is clear that from a young age Grant has always been a highly motivated individual whose determination and focus push him to be his most accomplished self. Even before he realized it as a child Grant was following his own methods to find motivation and passion for what you are working for.
Grant explains how his path to becoming an organizational psychologist came mostly from his college years and advice from his professors but I could see his path beginning from his childhood. As discussed in Grant’s Youtube video “Why I Did a Ph.D., & You Might (Not) Want to,” and in Dominas’s article, he described himself as an upbeat boy who was also socially awkward and very introverted. Grant’s insecurities helped motivate his passions and work to fight against them. Grant discussed in his interview with Dominas how he forced himself to give as many public speeches as possible to help diminish his fear of public speaking. Even growing up Grant was observing weak behaviors from himself and studied different methods to strengthen them. Grant wanted answers to why he was behaving a certain way and what he could do to change that. Grant admits that a lot of his research begins with looking at himself and researching his own behaviors. A lot of his publications focus on how to stand out in the office with originality or the strengths of introverts in an office, both things that Grant struggled with (Dominus, 2013). Grant takes the lessons he’s taught himself to inspire his research, find solutions, and then share it with the public to help others learn and mimic those solutions to live more successfully in the world. Grant seems to have been doing this since he’s been young but has now mastered it and decided to share his tools to turning weaknesses into strengths and find the little wins in the world.
After high school, he attended Harvard University receiving his B.A. in psychology then directly after attending the University of Michigan where he earned his Ph.D. in organizational psychology, completing it in less than three years (Grant-Bio). Grant admits that a big part of finding his path to becoming an organizational psychologist comes from the advice and observing the behaviors of his professors at Michigan. He admitted that in his undergraduate college years he had no idea what he wanted to do and was actually a professional magician during that time (Grant-Bio). Grant knew he loved psychology and was interested in understanding the behaviors of individuals but he wasn’t sure if he wanted that as a career path. After attending a psychology class with personality psychologist Brian Little he was so engaged with the class and inspired by Professor Little’s lectures (especially because Little was also an introvert who was still able to give such riveting lectures) that he knew he wanted to teach. Grant then took another class with just as engaging of a professor Richard Hackman an organizational psychologist who gave Grant the reasoning behind why he chose to pursue that career, inspiring Grant to do the same. Grant realized his similar passion of wanting to study the behaviors of individuals and specifically finding what switches in behavior could live to a more creative and happy life (Grant, 0:47-4:35, 2016). Grant acknowledges how engaged and thoughtful his professors were while aiding him in his decision of what career path he should take and now uses that same engagement with his students and those seeking advice from him.
In Dominas’ article, she actually observed Grant in his office and his engagement with his students and saw how much time and passion he put into aiding others. Grant always offers full engagement for the advice he gives, aids them in connections in jobs, and always offers as much time and help to those that need it. Grant argues that helping others does not take away from productivity but actually motivates us more, giving us more creativity. He argues in his book “Give and Take” that helping others makes you feel good about yourself and your work, increasing your confidence and inspiration at work or in other aspects of life. To help support his argument Grant reveals a personal scenario that led him to this theory about how giving to others at work will also benefit your productivity. He shares the story of his job selling advertisements for the travel guide series “Let’s Go,” and how bad he was at it but after hearing one of his coworkers was using this money to pay through college he immediately found more motivation to sell. Grant ended up selling the largest advertising package in company history and got promoted to director of advertising sales less than a year later. The stories that Grant shares of his own life are living proof of his theories or methodologies. Grant uses real-life examples to persuade his audience and prove his claims to living a productive, efficient, and accomplished life.
As Grant explains in “Why I Did a Ph.D., & You Might (Not) Want to,” while at Michigan Grant was eager to begin teaching so during his years there he held mini-research seminars with undergraduate students where he conducted research projects with them, read articles, and conducted new ideas to the different case studies he brought on. (Grant, 6:46-7:44, 2016). Grant found that helping teach these students and collaborating ideas with them gave him more motivation to come up with new case studies and a passion to find new theories to help inspire those students. Again Grant is sharing another personal experience of being more inspired and motivated in his work because of helping and giving to others. A lot of Grant’s support or evidence of his statements comes from personal experiences which in turn can be seen as making his arguments more believable because its firsthand proof. However, it could also be argued as less believable or persuasive because the proof of those theories are coming from him, not outside sources. I believe they make his arguments more convincing because they are experiences that helped lead him to these conclusions and not events that happened following his claims.
Grant has also produced many different studies besides his personal experiences to help prove and test his theories. To help prove his theory of increased productivity at work from giving to others he produced multiple studies. For example, as explained in Knowledge At Whorton’s “Putting a Face to a Name: The Art of Motivating Employees,” one of his most well-known studies looked at the call center for the “Let’s Go” travel guide series whose main purpose was to help fund scholarships. Grant brought in a student who had greatly benefited from the scholarship and had him share how much the scholarship had changed his life and the future it had created for him. A month after Grant found that workers were spending 142 percent more time on the phone and brought in 171 percent more revenue. Grant did the same study just by showing letters from students who benefited from the program and found the same results. Grant disproved the theories that the workers were just lucky that month or because they had more practice they could sell more travel guides by testing the theory five times leaving him confident in his hypothesis (Knowledge At Whorton, 2010). Grant’s “Let’s Go” study gave hard data by showing the increase in revenue in numbers not from workers’ responses to the test to help strengthen his argument. Grant uses his studies on how people grasp motivation and shares it with the public arena to help claim and give warrant to his theories with this evidence. Not only does he give personal experiences as evidence he also uses his studies and research he conducts as proof of his theories.
The use of Grant’s personal experiences and studies as evidence to his proposals and advice strengthen is reliability and persuasiveness to his claims. In the case of sharing his personal stories, he reveals that they are the incidences that he had to go through in order to discover these methods, by hearing firsthand experiences an audience is more likely to be persuaded because it shows he did not make these claims off of nothing and has support to how he came to his methods. Sharing personal experiences also gives Grant a greater sense of trustworthiness because he is showing vulnerability and a relatable side to himself to his audience. Grant’s research and case studies outside of his personal life also help seal the deal to convince an audience because he is providing hard evidence to back up his claims. Adam Grant proves himself to be a public intellectual in the ways in which he shares his theories of how to better motivate, fulfill, and find happiness with ourselves and others to the world and supplies valid evidence and proof to those claims. Grant’s success in his publications shows the impact he has on the public arena. The numerous responses, engagement, and praise from his large audience shows the influence he has and that his work is worth listening to, earning his right to be considered a public intellectual.
Work Cited
“Bio-Adam Grant.” Adam Grant, https://adamgrant.net/about/biography/.
Mack, Stephan. “Are Public Intellectuals a Thing of the Past.” The New Democratic Review: Are Public Intellecuals a Thing of the Past? (Repost), 14 Aug. 2012, http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2012/08/are_public_inte.html.
Dominus, Susan. “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 27 Mar. 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/magazine/is-giving-the-secret-to-getting-ahead.html.
Knowledge at Whorton. “Adam Grant.” Management Department, 1 June 2022, https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/grantad/#.
Dadam813, director. Why I Did a PhD & You Might (Not) Want To. YouTube, YouTube, 28 Oct. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8ugPibs5Us. Accessed 22 Sept. 2022.
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