Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

I realized that success is not so much how close you come to perfection as how much you overcome along the way.

Research indicates that one of the best ways to gauge the value of other people’s judgments is to look for convergence between them. If one person raises a red flag, it might be idiosyncratic. If a dozen people independently have the same issue, it’s more likely to be an objective problem. You have inter-rater reliability.

A great deal of research shows that perfectionists tend to define excellence on other people’s terms. This focus on creating a flawless image in the eyes of others is a risk factor for depression, anxiety, burnout, and other mental health challenges.

Seeking validation is a bottomless pit: the craving for status is never satisfied.

Ultimately, excellence is more than meeting other people’s expectations. It’s also about living up to your own standards. After all, it’s impossible to please everyone. The question is whether you’re letting down the right people. It’s better to disappoint others than to disappoint yourself.

Scaffolding unleashes hidden potential by helping us forge paths we couldn’t otherwise see. It enables us to find motivation in the daily grind, gain momentum in the face of stagnation, and turn difficulties and doubts into sources of strength.

When the Royal Academy of Music decided that Evelyn was lacking in ability, they weren’t wrong. Technically, she didn’t have an ear for music—she couldn’t really hear it at all. The world’s first and finest solo percussionist is profoundly deaf.

She explained that although she couldn’t hear all the different pitches with her ears, she could feel the vibrations in her arms, her stomach, her cheekbones, and her scalp. She started to think of her body as a giant ear.

We’re often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice. But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind. It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.

Research demonstrates that people who are obsessed with their work put in longer hours yet fail to perform any better than their peers. They’re more likely to fall victim to both physical and emotional exhaustion.

Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.

Deliberate play often involves introducing novelty and variety into practice. That can be in the ways you learn, the tools you use, the goals you set, and the people with whom you interact.

the person you’re competing with is your past self, and the bar you’re raising is for your future self. You’re not aiming for perfect—you’re shooting for better. The only way to win is to grow.

Relaxing is not a waste of time—it’s an investment in well-being. Breaks are not a distraction—they’re a chance to reset attention and incubate ideas. Play is not a frivolous activity—it’s a source of joy and a path to mastery.

Feeling abandoned left him with something to prove.

A rut is not a sign that you’ve tanked. A plateau is not a cue that you’ve peaked. They’re signals that it may be time to turn around and find a new route. When you’re stuck, it’s usually because you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’re taking the wrong path, or you’re running out of fuel. Gaining momentum often involves backing up and navigating your way down a different road—even if it’s not the one you initially intended to travel. It might be unfamiliar, winding, and bumpy. Progress rarely happens in a straight line; it typically unfolds in loops.

It’s often difficult to accept that we need to retreat. Backing up means scrapping our current plan and starting over. That’s what causes a temporary decline in performance: we’ve chosen to give up the gains we’ve made. We’re regressing in order to progress.

It shouldn’t take an extreme event like an injury to push us to stop, reverse, and switch routes. But the truth is we’re often afraid to go backward. We see slowing down as losing ground, backing up as giving up, and rerouting as veering off course. We worry that when we step back, we’ll lose our footing altogether. This means we stay exactly where we are—steady but stuck. We need to embrace the discomfort of getting lost.

Experts often have an intuitive understanding of a route, but they struggle to articulate all the steps to take. Their brain dump is partially filled with garbage.

Instead of helping you find your way, directions from expert guides can leave you stuck. Even worse, they can leave you feeling like your own limitations are preventing you from progressing.

Even if your chosen expert can walk you through their route, when you ask for directions on yours, you’ll run into a second challenge. You don’t share the same strengths and weaknesses—their hills and valleys aren’t the same as yours. You might be heading for the same destination, but you’re starting far from their position. This makes your path as unfamiliar to them as theirs is to you.

Being a sponge starts with seeking their advice—but instead of asking to pick their brain, you ask them to retrace their route. The goal is to get your guides to drop pins—the key landmarks and turning points from their climbs. To jog their memories of paths long forgotten, you might inquire about the crossroads they faced. Those could be skills they sought out, advice they took or ignored, or changes they made.

Sometimes we need to discover things no guide can provide and write our own directions.

Getting discouraged is a common obstacle after turning around. That’s because going backward doesn’t always lead directly to a new peak. Sometimes you end up stuck, and it’s not because you’re on the wrong path. It’s because your path is taking you in long circles toward the top, and you can’t even tell that you’re gaining ground. You’re not seeing enough progress to maintain your motivation.

There’s a name for that feeling: it’s called languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. The term was coined by a sociologist (Corey Keyes) and immortalized by a philosopher (Mariah Carey).

Research shows that languishing disrupts your focus and dulls your motivation. It becomes a Catch-22: you know you need to do something, but you doubt whether it will do anything. That’s when you need to pull off the freeway and refuel.

You can’t always find motivation by staring harder at the thing that isn’t working. Sometimes you can build momentum by taking a detour to a new destination. A detour is a route off your main road that you take to refuel. You’re not taking a break; you’re not sitting still, idling. You’re temporarily veering off course, but you’re still in motion. You’re advancing toward a different goal.

As a social scientist, I can confidently answer this question with a definitive maybe.

What looks like a big breakthrough is usually the accumulation of small wins.

It’s only when you look at your trajectory over the course of weeks, months, or years that you appreciate the distance you’ve traveled.

As Samuel Barnes observed, “We were determined to succeed in spite of the burden that was being placed on our shoulders.”

But it’s actually in turning outward to harness resources with and for others that we discover—and develop—our hidden potential. When the odds are against us, focusing beyond ourselves is what launches us off the ground.

Seeing obstacles as challenges depends partly on having a growth mindset—believing in your ability to improve.

we aren’t lucky enough to have others hand us that scaffolding, we may have to assemble it ourselves. That’s where bootstrapping comes in. Bootstrapping is using your existing resources to pull yourself out of a sticky situation.

Teaching others can build our competence. But it’s coaching others that elevates our confidence. When we encourage others to overcome obstacles, it can help us find our own motivation.

The coach effect captures how we can marshal motivation by offering the encouragement to others that we need for ourselves. By reminding us of the tools we already possess, coaching others raises our expectations of ourselves.

We should listen to the advice we give to others—it’s usually the advice we need to take for ourselves.

Giving is active—coaching others reminds you that you have something to offer.

The desire to prove others wrong can light a spark of motivation. Turning the spark into a flame, though, often requires more. Ignorant naysayers may give us something to fight against, but a roaring fire comes from having something to fight for.

It’s easier to overcome obstacles when we’re carrying a torch for people who matter to us. When others are counting on us, we find strength we didn’t know we had.

Making progress isn’t always about moving forward. Sometimes it’s about bouncing back. Progress is not only reflected in the peaks you reach—it’s also visible in the valleys you cross. Resilience is a form of growth.

when we feel a strong sense of belonging to a group, we feel our bootstraps are linked. We become driven to defy low expectations of our group in order to pull the entire group up. We don’t just want to prove ourselves—we want to blaze a trail for others to follow.

It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants. Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it’s to improve conditions for our successors.

If multiple credible supporters believe in us, it’s probably time to believe them. If ignorant naysayers don’t believe in us, it might be time to prove them wrong. And when our faith falters, it’s worth remembering what we’re fighting for.

Chetty and his colleagues were interested in how opportunity shapes who ends up innovating. They reasoned that some kids would grow up in environments that gave them special access to resources. When they linked federal income tax returns with patent records for more than a million Americans, they found an alarming result. People raised in the top 1 percent of family income were ten times more likely to become inventors than people from families below the median income.

When we think of geniuses as people with extraordinary abilities, we neglect the importance of life circumstances in shaping them. When they had an idea, rich kids got to shoot their shot. Some of the less fortunate were lost Einsteins: they could have become great innovators, if only they’d had the opportunity.

Chetty and his colleagues estimate that if girls had as much exposure to female inventors as boys do to male inventors, it would more than double women’s patent rates—closing more than half the gender gap in innovation.

Good systems provide the opportunity for people to travel great distances. They open doors for people who don’t grow up with means, offer windows to those who get turned away at the door, and shatter glass ceilings for those who are all too often denied a shot to break through.

If we design them the right way, admissions and hiring systems can recognize the potential in late bloomers and long shots.

Instead of only looking for geniuses where we expect to find them, we can reach humanity’s greatest potential by cultivating the genius in everyone.