Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

“What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn,” the lead psychologist concluded, “if provided with appropriate…conditions of learning.”

What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.

When we assess potential, we make the cardinal error of focusing on starting points—the abilities that are immediately visible. In a world obsessed with innate talent, we assume the people with the most promise are the ones who stand out right away. But high achievers vary dramatically in their initial aptitudes. If we judge people only by what they can do on day one, their potential remains hidden.

Potential is not a matter of where you start, but of how far you travel. We need to focus less on starting points and more on distance traveled.

This book is not about ambition. It’s about aspiration. As the philosopher Agnes Callard highlights, ambition is the outcome you want to attain. Aspiration is the person you hope to become. The question is not how much money you earn, how many fancy titles you land, or how many awards you accumulate. Those status symbols are poor proxies for progress. What counts is not how hard you work but how much you grow. And growth requires much more than a mindset—it begins with a set of skills that we normally overlook.

character skills “predict and produce success in life.” But they don’t grow in a vacuum. You need the opportunity and motivation to nurture them.

It’s often said that where there’s a will, there’s a way. What we overlook is that when people can’t see a path, they stop dreaming of the destination. To ignite their will, we need to show them the way. That’s what scaffolding can do.

The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.

If our cognitive skills are what separate us from animals, our character skills are what elevate us above machines.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

But according to a growing body of evidence, the decline in the rate of language learning around age 18 is not a feature of our biology. It’s a bug in our education.

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.

What we now know is that your preference isn’t fixed, and playing only to your strengths deprives you of the opportunity to improve on your weaknesses.

The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily how you learn best.

Sometimes you even learn better in the mode that makes you the most uncomfortable, because you have to work harder at it. This is the first form of courage: being brave enough to embrace disc...

Many people associate procrastination with laziness. But psychologists find that procrastination is not a time management problem—it’s an emotion management problem. When you procrastinate, you’re not avoiding effort.

“because it’s all about the bare bones of something,” he said. “The way a joke’s structured, it can’t be too elaborate.”

writing is more than a vehicle for communicating—it’s a tool for learning.

Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic. It pushes you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments. Unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking.

Fans of learning styles would have us believe that verbal learning is good for one person and auditory learning is good for another person. But learning is not always about finding the right method for you. It’s often about finding the right method for the task.

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, there’s no substitute for reading.[*2]

Sure enough, in meta-analyses of dozens of experiments, students and adults were more adept at understanding and speaking a new language over time when they had been taught to produce it rather than only to comprehend it.

You can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until you’ve practiced it enough to master it. But practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it. Accelerating learning requires a second form of courage: being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it.

The ones who persisted the longest—and took the most creative risks—weren’t the ones who were encouraged to focus on learning. They were the ones who had been advised to intentionally pursue discomfort. “Your goal is to feel awkward and uncomfortable…it’s a sign the exercise is working,” the instructions said. Once people saw discomfort as a mark of growth, they were motivated to stretch beyond their comfort zones.

She had nightmares about choking and stumbling, but she reminded herself that feeling awkward and making mistakes was a sign of learning.

That took a third form of courage—not just embracing and seeking discomfort, but amplifying it by being brave enough to make more mistakes.

That’s where courage comes in: to get practice speaking a language, you need to be brave enough to make many mistakes. The more, the better.

Learning is often understood as the process of recognizing, correcting, and preventing mistakes. But Benny believes that if you want to become proficient in a language, rather than aiming to reduce your mistakes, you should strive to increase them. It turns out that he’s right. Many experiments have shown that when students are learning new information, if they’re randomly assigned to guess wrong before being given the right answer, they’re less likely to make errors later on tests. When we’re encouraged to make mistakes, we end up making fewer of them. Early mistakes help us remember the correct answer—and motivate us to keep learning.

“The more mistakes you make, the faster you will improve and the less they will bother you,” he observes. “The best cure to feeling uncomfortable about making mistakes is to make more mistakes.”

Psychologists call that cycle learned industriousness. When you get praised for making an effort, the feeling of effort itself starts to take on secondary reward properties. Instead of having to push yourself to keep trying, you feel pulled toward it.

If we wait until we feel ready to take on a new challenge, we might never pursue it all. There may not come a day when we wake up and suddenly feel prepared. We become prepared by taking the leap anyway. Skip Notes *1 If writing isn’t your preferred mode of learning, the greatest discomfort of putting your thoughts on a page is probably writer’s block. As Steve Martin joked, “Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.” There’s a reason we don’t talk about dancer’s block or carpenter’s block. Writer’s block is actually a thinking block: you’re stuck because you haven’t figured out what to say. Some novelists get in the groove by typing sentences from fiction they’ve loved. I get my ideas churning by answering a few emails: it’s like a warm-up to give me momentum. If writing becomes a regular routine, eventually words start to flow as fluidly on the page as they do out of your mouth. Psychologists have found that when people were randomly assigned to scheduledaily writing sessions, their output quadrupled—and even scheduling 15 minutes a day was enough to make progress. And now we have artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to help. In preliminary experiments, randomly assigning professionals to use tools like ChatGPT and Bing boosts both the quality and quantity of their writing—especially for poor writers—by shifting effort from rough drafting to idea generating and editing. For the record, I didn’t write a word of this bo...

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest… the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt.

Being a sponge is more than a metaphor. It’s a character skill—a form of proactivity that’s vital to realizing hidden potential. Improving depends not on the quantity of information you seek out, but the quality of the information you take in. Growth is less about how hard you work than how well you learn.

The lesson here is layered. The progress we normally chalk up to working harder may actually be due to working smarter. Cognitive skills aren’t sufficient for learning, but they’re necessary. Basic literacy makes it possible to leverage character skills more effectively—to be proactive in learning more and learning faster. Prosperity rises as people become more capable of absorbing new ideas and filtering out old ones.

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?

Being polite is withholding feedback to make someone feel good today. Being kind is being candid about how they can get better tomorrow. It’s possible to be direct in what you say while being thoughtful about how you deliver it.

It’s easy for people to be critics or cheerleaders. It’s harder to get them to be coaches. A critic sees your weaknesses and attacks your worst self. A cheerleader sees your strengths and celebrates your best self. A coach sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself.

Instead of seeking feedback, you’re better off asking for advice. Feedback tends to focus on how well you did last time. Advice shifts attention to how you can do better next time. In experiments, that simple shift is enough to elicit more specific suggestions and more constructive input.[*2] Rather than dwelling on what you did wrong, advice guides you toward what you can do right.

A key to being a sponge is determining what information to absorb versus what to filter out. It’s a question of which coaches to trust. I like to break trustworthiness down into three components: care, credibility, and familiarity.

If they don’t care about you, they haven’t earned the right for you to care about their reactions. If they’re not qualified to judge the task or close enough to know your potential, you can discount their views and prove them wrong. But if they’ve demonstrated that you matter to them and they know the domain and your skills, they’re offering information to improve yourself.

Many people fail to benefit from constructive criticism because they overreact and under-correct.

If not for sponges, the human race might not exist.

Being a sponge is not only a proactive skill—it’s a prosocial skill. Done right, it’s not just about soaking up nutrients that help us grow. It’s also about releasing nutrients to help others grow.

I’ve come to understand that unlocking hidden potential is not about the pursuit of perfection. Tolerating flaws isn’t just something novices need to do—it’s part of becoming an expert and continuing to gain mastery. The more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable.

In their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.