Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

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

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.

For every Mozart who makes a big splash early, there are multiple Bachs who ascend slowly and bloom late.

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.

Proactive: How often did they take initiative to ask questions, volunteer answers, seek information from books, and engage the teacher to learn outside class? Prosocial: How well did they get along and collaborate with peers? Disciplined: How effectively did they pay attention—and resist the impulse to disrupt the class? Determined: How consistently did they take on challenging problems, do more than the assigned work, and persist in the face of obstacles?

“Disciplined is interesting. Old school conformity is good in work places and navigating authority but also stifling in other ways and harder for neurodivergent kids. The other qualities I didn’t learn from ms mulligan but from my parents and innate anxiety.”

the ratings on these behaviors mattered 2.4 times as much as math and reading performance on standardized tests.

Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles. Character skills equip a chronic procrastinator to meet a deadline for someone who matters deeply to them, a shy introvert to find the courage to speak out against an injustice, and the class bully to circumvent a fistfight with his teammates before a big game. Those are the skills that great kindergarten teachers nurture—and great coaches cultivate.

Sure enough, evidence shows that although kids and novices learn chess faster if they’re smarter, intelligence becomes nearly irrelevant in predicting the performance of adults and advanced players.

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 Raging Rooks weren’t just single roses growing from cracks in the concrete. They tilled the soil for many more roses to bloom.

Character skills training had a dramatic impact. After founders had spent merely five days working on these skills, their firms’ profits grew by an average of 30 percent over the next two years. That was nearly triple the benefit of training in cognitive skills. Finance and marketing knowledge might have equipped founders to capitalize on opportunities, but studying proactivity and discipline enabled them to generate opportunities. They learned to anticipate market changes rather than react to them. They developed more creative ideas and introduced more new products. When they encountered financial obstacles, instead of giving up, they were more resilient and resourceful in seeking loans.

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

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. This is the first form of courage: being brave enough to embrace discomfort and throw your learning style out the window.

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.

The popular adage “use it or lose it” doesn’t go far enough. If you don’t use it, you might never gain it in the first place.

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.

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 faster rate. Becker and Woessmann argued that the engine of the Protestant Reformation wasn’t work ethic so much as literacy.

Cognitive skills that amplify our ability to take in and understand information lay the groundwork for becoming a sponge. As we become more spongelike, we become better equipped to achieve greater things. To paraphrase a verse from Hamilton, you get a lot farther by being a self-starter. That’s what Mellody Hobson did.

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 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.

What’s the one thing I can do better?

There’s nothing wrong with taking criticism personally. Taking it personally shows you’re taking it seriously. Getting upset isn’t a mark of weakness or even defensiveness—as long as your ego doesn’t stand in the way of your learning.

If they don’t care about you, they haven’t earned the right for you to care about their reactions.

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

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.

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 boxing, you must risk moving into danger in order to fully take advantage of your skills and eventually win the match,” Ando observes. “New building projects require the same mentality…. Taking that extra step forward into the unknown is vital.”

The ideal foil for perfectionism is an objective that’s precise and challenging. It focuses your attention on the most important actions and tells you when enough is enough.

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.

Beating yourself up doesn’t make you stronger—it leaves you bruised. Being kind to yourself isn’t about ignoring your weaknesses. It’s about giving yourself permission to learn from your disappointments.

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.

Research demonstrates that people who are obsessed with their work put in longer hours yet fail to perform any better than their peers.

Hundreds of experiments show that people improve faster when they alternate between different skills. Psychologists call it interleaving, and it works in areas ranging from painting to math, especially when the skills being developed are similar or complex.

After poring over more than a century of evidence on progress, cognitive scientists Wayne Gray and John Lindstedt observed a fascinating arc. When our performance stagnates, before it improves again, it declines. When people’s skills stalled in tasks ranging from Tetris to golf to memorizing facts, they didn’t usually ascend again until after they had deteriorated.

The good news is that to start moving, we don’t actually need a map. All we need is a compass to gauge whether we’re heading in the right direction.

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

if you want to predict which teams will produce the best work, the most important factor to consider is how often colleagues teach and coach one another.

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

The impact of these expectations depended on who was setting them. High expectations led to greater effort and performance…if they came from someone knowledgeable about the task. But if the observer lacked credibility, being uninformed about the task, the effect reversed: people actually ended up trying harder and doing better when they were doubted rather than encouraged.

The desire to prove others wrong can light a spark of motivation. Turning the spark into a flame, though, often requires more. Ignorant naysayers may give us something to fight against, but a roaring fire comes from having something to fight for.

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.

Maximizing group intelligence is about more than enlisting individual experts—and it involves more than merely bringing people together to solve a problem. Unlocking the hidden potential in groups requires leadership practices, team processes, and systems that harness the capabilities and contributions of all their members. The best teams aren’t the ones with the best thinkers. They’re the teams that unearth and use the best thinking from everyone.

Surprisingly, certain groups consistently excelled, regardless of the type of task they were doing. No matter what kind of challenge Anita and her colleagues threw at them, they managed to outperform the others. My assumption was that they were lucky to have a bunch of geniuses. But in the data, collective intelligence had little to do with individual IQs. It turned out that the smartest teams weren’t composed of the smartest individuals.

In a meta-analysis of 22 studies, Anita and her colleagues discovered that collective intelligence depends less on people’s cognitive skills than their prosocial skills. The best teams have the most team players—people who excel at collaborating with others.

It’s well documented that a single bad apple can spoil the barrel: when even one individual fails to act prosocially, it’s enough to make a team dumb and dumber.