Adam Grant has one of those rare careers where the academic and the everyday actually meet. He is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, one of its most popular professors, and somehow also the person quietly rethinking how you feel about your job.

His breakthrough book, 'Give and Take', made a claim that felt almost naive until the data backed it up: generous people — the givers — can outperform the takers, if they are smart about it. It gave a lot of quietly kind professionals permission to stop apologising for how they work.

The most generous people, his research found, don't finish last. They just take longer to win — and win bigger.

What he does best is challenge your certainty. In 'Think Again', he argues the most underrated skill of our time is the willingness to change your mind — to hold your opinions a little more loosely and your curiosity a little more tightly.

You do not read Adam Grant to feel clever. You read him to feel a bit more honest about your own habits, and a bit more hopeful about the people around you. In a noisy feed, that is a rare and welcome thing.

Grant studied psychology at Harvard and took a PhD in organisational psychology at the University of Michigan; as a student he sold advertising for the Let's Go travel guides and was a Junior Olympic springboard diver. He became the youngest tenured professor at Wharton, and student ratings have repeatedly placed him among the school's top teachers.

Originals, published in 2016, looked at how non-conformists champion new ideas. Option B, written in 2017 with Sheryl Sandberg after the death of her husband, dealt with resilience after loss. Hidden Potential, in 2023, argued that character skills such as discipline and proactivity predict achievement better than early talent does.

He hosts the podcasts WorkLife and Re:Thinking, and his TED talks have been watched tens of millions of times. A 2021 New York Times essay in which he described the pandemic's emotional flatness as 'languishing' became one of the paper's most read pieces that year and put the word into everyday use.