Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

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