Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

Across hundreds of experiments, people who are encouraged to do their best perform worse—and learn less—than those who are randomly assigned to goals that are specific and difficult.

Every time I came out of the water, Eric gave me a score. Then he gave me a change to make and reminded me that if I wanted to get closer to right, it had to feel wrong.

When divers tell him they had a bad day, Eric likes to ask two questions: Did you make yourself better today? Did you make someone else better today? If the answer to either question is yes, it was a good day.

There’s another technique that I’ve found helpful for dumping perfectionism. In psychology, it’s known as mental time travel.

Appreciating progress depends on remembering how your past self would see your current achievements. If you knew five years ago what you’d accomplish now, how proud would you have been?

Being kind to yourself isn’t about ignoring your weaknesses. It’s about giving yourself permission to learn from your disappointments.

We grow by embracing our shortcomings, not by punishing them. Make it feel wrong.

But take it from eight studies: people don’t judge your competence based on one performance. It’s called the overblown implications effect.

People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?

For a major project like this book, I set two targets: an aspirational goal (9) and an acceptable result (8). When I get 8s across the board, I know I can be satisfied with my progress.

I’ve accepted that life is like diving: if you’re ever lucky enough to

get a 10, it’s not for perfection but for excellence.

We have to be careful about how much weight we put on judges’ scores. A great deal of research shows that perfectionists tend to defi...

Seeking validation is

a bottomless pit: the craving for status is never satisfied. But if an external assessment serves as a tool for growth, it may be worth using.

Aspiring to stay green is a commitment to continued growth, to staying unfinished. An apple that isn’t ripe is not fully formed—it’s

it’s incomplete and imperfect. That’s what makes it beautiful.

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

Deliberate practice is the structured repetition of a task to improve performance based on clear goals and immediate feedback.

Research reveals that the actual number of hours required for excellence varies dramatically by person and activity. What’s clear is that deliberate practice is particularly valuable for improving skills in predictable tasks with consistent moves—swinging a golf club, solving a Rubik’s Cube, or playing a violin.

Whereas burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when you’re overloaded, boreout is the emotional deadening you feel when you’re under-stimulated.

Elite musicians are rarely driven by obsessive compulsion. They’re usually fueled by what psychologists call harmonious passion. Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.

Deliberate play is a structured activity that’s designed to make skill development enjoyable.

It blends elements of deliberate practice and free play. Like free play, deliberate play is fun, but it’s structured for learning and mastery along with recreation. It’s built to break complex tasks

into simpler parts so you can hone a s...

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.

Play is not a frivolous activity—it’s a source of joy and a path to mastery.

Without enjoyment, potential stays hidden.

The more uncertain the path and the higher the peak, the greater the range of guides

you’ll need. The challenge is to piece the various tips together into a route that works for you.

Languishing is the emotional experience of stalling. You may not be depressed or burned out, but you definitely feel blah.

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.

Of all the factors that have been studied, the strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress.

When you get stuck on your way up a mountain, it’s better to shift into reverse than to stand still.

Progress is rarely noticeable at a snapshot in time—it unfolds over extended periods of time. If you focus your attention on a specific difficult

moment, it’s easy to feel stuck.

I’ve come to think of this as the coach effect. We’re more confident in our ability to surmount struggles after guiding others through them.

This is different from the tutor effect, which highlights

how we can learn through sharing the very knowledge that we want to acquire.

The coach effect captures how we can marshal motivation by offering the encouragement to others...

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

It’s called the Golem effect: when others underestimate us, it limits our effort and growth. These kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies are particularly pronounced among stigmatized groups, who are frequently inundated by low expectations.

But groundbreaking research by my colleague Samir Nurmohamed offers a twist. There are times when you can turn others’ low expectations to your advantage. They don’t have to strap you in place—you can grab on to them and pull yourself forward.

When you’re invested in a goal, being doubted by experts is a threat.

But the research suggests that when they come from an uninformed audience, low expectations can become a self-negating prophecy. You’re motivated to shatter their confidence that you won’t succeed. Samir calls it the underdog effect.

As Maya Angelou wrote, “I do my best because I’m counting on you counting on me.”

In organizational psychology, culture has three elements: practices, values, and underlying assumptions. Practices are the daily routines that reflect and reinforce values. Values are shared principles around what’s important and desirable—what should be rewarded versus what should be punished. Underlying assumptions are deeply held, often taken-for-granted beliefs about how the world

works. Our assumptions shape our values, which in turn drive our practices.

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.