Adam Grant's Originals: Nonconformity as Two Openness Facets

Adam Grant's Originals is about the people who generate new ideas and push them into a world that would rather keep the old ones. His definition of originality is smaller than genius or daring: it is a habit anyone can practice. In his 2016 TED talk he puts it simply: "It's about being the kind of person who takes the initiative to doubt the default and look for a better option." Some people do that constantly and some almost never, and in the Big Five that difference is a matter of Openness.

Original thinking is two Openness facets

Generating original ideas draws on Imagination (O1), the facet for a busy inner world that keeps producing possibilities, and Intellect (O5), the appetite for playing with ideas and questioning how things are done. Grant is blunt that the raw material is mostly junk: "Originals have lots and lots of bad ideas, tons of them, in fact." That is O1 and O5 doing volume. The originality lives less in having only good ideas than in generating enough that a few turn out great, with the O5 to keep sorting which is which.

The other half of Originals is nerve, and it also has a trait home. Doubting the default takes more than curiosity; it takes a willingness to break with what everyone else accepts, which shades into Liberalism (O6), the openness facet for questioning tradition and authority. Grant's originals feel the same fear of standing out that everyone does. High Openness leaves that fear intact and quietly changes the math, so the boredom of the default ends up feeling worse than the risk of the new idea.

Grant even reframes procrastination, arguing that a little delay lets an idea incubate, which is why we cover the trait picture of procrastination on its own. The through-line of Originals is that world-changing nonconformity is mostly high Openness plus the willingness to ship the third idea instead of waiting for a perfect first one. If your O1 and O5 run high, the book is describing your factory. If they run low, it is describing a process you can borrow: generate more, doubt the default, and let a few bad ideas be the cost of a good one.

Read the book: Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant.

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