Adam Grant Books in Order

About

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the youngest person to receive tenure and has been the top-rated professor for multiple consecutive years. His five books — Give and Take (2013), Originals (2016), Option B (2017, with Sheryl Sandberg), Think Again (2021), and Hidden Potential (2023) — have all been major bestsellers and have been translated into dozens of languages. He hosts two podcasts, WorkLife and Re:Thinking, and contributes regularly to The New York Times. Think Again was named one of the best books of 2021 by major publications on multiple continents.

What distinguishes Grant from comparable popular science writers like Malcolm Gladwell is his methodological rigor and his willingness to challenge his own findings. Gladwell’s books build toward memorable, counterintuitive conclusions; Grant’s books are more likely to complicate those conclusions, acknowledging where the evidence is mixed and where earlier research has been revised. His framework in Give and Take — categorizing people as Givers, Takers, and Matchers, and arguing that Givers both finish last and finish first depending on how they operate — is a model of nuanced thinking applied to an apparently simple premise. He is more interested in the conditions under which a principle holds than in the principle itself.

Grant was born and raised in the Detroit suburbs and was a competitive springboard diver, which he has described as formative: the sport taught him about the relationship between practice, feedback, and expertise that now underpins his research on skill development. He studied psychology at Harvard under Brian Little and went on to earn his PhD at Michigan. He was 28 when he received tenure at Wharton, making him the youngest full professor in the school’s history. His own career trajectory — a person who gives generously of his time and expertise and receives enormous professional returns — serves as a living demonstration of his central thesis.

“The hallmark of an open mind is not letting your ideas become your identity.” This is the thesis of Think Again and the animating principle of Grant’s entire body of work: that intellectual flexibility is the most undervalued form of intelligence, and that treating your beliefs as hypotheses rather than commitments is both more accurate and more productive. Readers connect with Grant because his books make them feel smarter and give them frameworks that genuinely change how they think about their own behavior at work and in relationships. He is the psychologist whose work you want to apply on Monday morning.