Adam Grant

I believed for the longest time that hard work was the key to success.

And I organized my life that way.

And when people argued that luck and opportunity mattered more than I thought, I was like, no, no, no.

I want to live in a world in which the harder I work, the more luck I have.

And I've kind of created that world around me and I don't realize all the ways I've been lucky.

And it took way longer than it should have for me to abandon that belief because it was so easy to prosecute it and find so many examples in the world and so much evidence.

It's like, okay, just because hard work increases the probability of success doesn't mean that it guarantees success.

Why was I not willing to recognize that?

Why did I have to prosecute that for so long?

Because it had become part of my identity.

I think this is the scariest thing we do when we use these mindsets as armor is we turn our opinions into beliefs and we turn our beliefs into our identities.

And all of a sudden, who I am is what I think, when in fact, who I am should be what I value.

Increasingly hard.

And this is another thing.

So this is the second thing that you have changed my mind about.

I normally leap from...

There are three steps in order to help people change.

Step one is you open them up to a new possibility.

Step two is you help them overcome the barriers to realizing that possibility.

And then step three is you build a habit around it or a practice around it.