Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

The Tennessee experiment contained a startling result. Chetty was able to predict the success that students achieved as adults simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers.

Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles. Character skills equip a chronic procrastinator to meet a deadline for someone who matters deeply to them, a shy introvert to find the courage to speak out against an injustice, and the class bully to circumvent a fistfight with his teammates before a big game. Those are the skills that great kindergarten teachers nurture—and great coaches cultivate.

Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.

I was surprised to discover that when they finally picked up their first foreign tongue, it wasn’t due to overcoming a cognitive block. It was because they cleared a motivational hurdle: they got comfortable being uncomfortable. Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill—an especially important form of determination. It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon your tried-and-true methods, to put yourself in the ring before you feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts. The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek, and amplify discomfort. Going Out of Style There’s a popular practice in schools that has dissuaded many learners from seeking discomfort. It arose as a well-intentioned solution to a pervasive problem in the American education system. For decades, many schools were run like assembly lines in a factory. Students were treated as interchangeable parts in the mass production of young minds. Despite having different strengths, they were stuck absorbing uniform knowledge through the same standardized lessons and lectures.

Although listening is often more fun, reading improves comprehension and recall. Whereas listening promotes intuitive thinking, reading activates more analytical processing. It’s true in English and Chinese—people display better logical reasoning when the same trivia questions, riddles, and puzzles are written rather than spoken. With print, you naturally slow down at the start of a paragraph to process the core idea and use paragraph breaks and headers to chunk information. Unless you have a reading disability or learning disorder that makes it difficult to parse text, when it comes to critical thinking,

Thanks to Martin Luther’s teachings in the 1500s, it was transformed into a calling. Being a good Protestant meant that you had a moral obligation to serve society through productive work. Determination and discipline became virtues; idleness and wastefulness became vices. That might be why many people today worship at the altar of hustle and pray to the high priest of persistence. But the distance we travel is due less to how much labor we do than the fruit it bears. Not long ago, the economists Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann decided to test the impact of the Protestant Reformation on a grand scale: Did it affect what a population accomplished? They found that as Protestant beliefs spread, entire countries had higher economic growth. But it wasn’t necessarily because people were suddenly working harder. In most areas where Protestantism took hold, the historically dominant religion was Catholicism. At the time, the Catholic Church maintained careful control over the Bible, and Catholics typically absorbed its teachings orally at church. Martin Luther changed that: he wrote the first influential German translation of the Bible and preached that every school in every town should teach children to read scripture. That meant people had to learn to read. And once they could read, a whole world of information was at their fingertips. They could learn everything else at a much

engine of the Protestant Reformation wasn’t work ethic so much as literacy.

Absorptive capacity is the ability to recognize, value, assimilate, and apply new information. It hinges on two key habits. The first is how you acquire information: Do you react to what enters your field of vision, or are you proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills, and perspectives? The second is the goal you’re pursuing when you filter information: Do you focus on feeding your ego or fueling your growth?

People drank from pottery that was worn and weathered. They called this practice wabi sabi. Wabi sabi is the art of honoring the beauty in imperfection. It’s not about creating intentional imperfections. It’s about accepting that flaws are inevitable—and recognizing that they don’t stop something from becoming sublime.

That’s been a dominant theme in Tadao Ando’s architecture and his life. He’s an imperfectionist: he’s selective about what he decides to do well.

It’s not a coincidence that in music, the term for practice is play.

It’s often said that those who can’t do, teach. It would be more accurate to say that those who can do, can’t teach the basics. A great deal of expert knowledge is tacit—it’s implicit, not explicit. The further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals.

“Reading is the basic skill for all subjects,” Kari explained. “If you don’t have the motivation to read, you can’t study any other subject.” Cultivating the desire to read nourishes individual interests.

A Different Kind of Recess A love of reading often begins at home. The Finnish Reading Center recently found that over half of parents felt they weren’t reading enough to their kids. They started giving a free bag of books to every baby born in Finland. Although filling our homes with books might be a start, psychologists find that it’s not enough. If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize.

Right now, what we know is that Finland is the best in the world at helping students progress without monopolizing their time, wreaking havoc on their lives, or making them hate school. Their deepest underlying assumption may be that the tradeoff between doing well and being well is a false choice.

it was introverts who led them to achieve greater things. The more reserved leaders came across as more receptive to input from below, which gave them access to better ideas and left their teams more motivated. With a team of sponges, the best leader is not the person who talks the most, but the one who listens best.

As the humorist Dave Barry quipped, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: ‘meetings.’ ”

he applied again . . . and was rejected again. José didn’t give up hope. He kept putting himself back in the ring—revising his resume, highlighting his strengths, updating his references as he reapplied—only to be met with rejection after rejection. He couldn’t even get his foot in the door for an interview.

If you doubt yourself, shouldn’t you also doubt your low opinion of yourself? I now believe that impostor syndrome is a sign of hidden potential. It feels like other people are overestimating you, but it’s more likely that you’re underestimating yourself. They’ve recognized a capacity for growth that you can’t see yet. When multiple people believe in you, it might be time to believe them.

Choose leaders based on prosocial skills. Instead of promoting babblers and ball hogs, elevate people who put the mission above their ego—and prioritize team cohesion over personal glory. When teams are eager to contribute, the most effective leader is not the loudest talker, but the best listener.