Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

He knew from experience that although talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not.

“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.

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.

ambition is the outcome you want to attain. Aspiration is the person you hope to become.

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.

If you want to forecast the earning potential of fourth graders, you should pay less attention to their objective math and verbal scores than to their teachers’ subjective views of their behavior patterns.

Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles.

Character skills do more than help you perform at your peak—they propel you to higher peaks.

You need the opportunity and motivation to nurture them.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Instead of seeking feedback, you’re better off asking for advice.

Perfectionists excel at solving problems that are straightforward and familiar.

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.

It turns out that when people assess your skills, they put more weight on your peaks than on your troughs.

A great deal of research shows that perfectionists tend to define excellence on other people’s terms. This focus on creating a flawless image in the eyes of others is a risk factor for depression, anxiety, burnout, and other mental health challenges.

persistence was more likely to translate into performance when passion was present.[*1]

the more they loved their favorite task in their job, the worse they performed at their least favorite task.

It turns out that if you’re taking a new road, the best experts are often the worst guides.

It’s called the curse of knowledge: the more you know, the harder it is for you to fathom what it’s like to not know.

Being a sponge starts with seeking their advice—but instead of asking to pick their brain, you ask them to retrace their route.

In one study, when people had spent engaging evenings on their side hustles, they performed better the next day in their regular jobs. The progress they made at night put an extra spring in their step the following morning. The motivation benefits outweighed any distraction costs.

Teaching is a surprisingly powerful method of learning.

All it takes is embracing the discomfort of putting yourself in the instructor’s

seat before you’ve reached mastery. Even just being told you’re going to teach something is enough to boost your learning.

And people who were struggling to save money, lose weight, control their tempers, and find jobs all came away more motivated after giving advice than receiving it.

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

We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it’s to improve conditions for our successors.

Around the world, evidence shows that whether children get ahead or fall behind depends in part on the cultures created in schools and classrooms.

Surprisingly, that doesn’t require small classes; a typical Finnish teacher has around 20 students. It involves a set of practices for personalized learning. Finnish schools create cultures of opportunity by enabling students to build individualized relationships, receive individualized support, and develop individualized interests.

Students who made significant progress didn’t have better teachers. They just happened to have the same teacher for two years in a row.

A culture of opportunity only succeeds when students are motivated to take advantage of those opportunities.

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.

A teacher’s task is not to ensure that students have read the literary canons. It’s to kindle excitement about reading.

Collective intelligence rises as team members recognize one another’s strengths, develop strategies for leveraging them, and motivate one another to align their efforts in pursuit of

a shared purpose.

What really makes a difference is whether people recognize that they need one another to succeed on an important mission.

When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect.

You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.

Past performance is only helpful if the new job requires similar skills to the old one.