Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

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...