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January 8, 2024
When they have helpful input, people are often reluctant to share it. We even hesitate to tell friends they have food in their teeth. We’re confusing politeness with kindness. 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.[*] Rather than dwelling on what you did wrong, advice guides you toward what you can do right.
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.
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.
Many people fail to benefit from constructive criticism because they overreact and under-correct.
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.
Perfectionists excel at solving problems that are straightforward and familiar.
The real world is far more ambiguous. Once you leave the predictable, controllable cocoon of academic exams, the desire to find the “correct” answer can backfire. In a meta-analysis, the average correlation between perfectionism and performance at work was zero. When it came to mastering their tasks, perfectionists were no better than their peers. Sometimes they even did worse. The skills and inclinations that drive people to the top of their high school or college class may not serve them so well after they graduate.
The people who go on to become masters in their fields often start out with imperfect transcripts in school.
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
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Perfectionism traps us in a spiral of tunnel vision and error avoidance: it prevents us from seeing larger problems and limits us to mastering increasingly narrow skills. Even if you don’t consider yourself a perfectionist, you’ve probably experienced those tendencies on tasks that are important to you. On the projects that matter deeply to us, we’ve all felt the urge to keep revising and refining until it’s exactly right. But traveling great distances depends on recognizing that perfection is a mirage—and learning to tolerate the right imperfections.
Extensive evidence shows that it’s having high personal standards, not pursuing perfection, that fuels growth. Many people interpret that as advice to shift from be the best to do your best. But aiming for your best is not the best alternative. 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. Do your best is the wrong cure for perfectionism. It leaves the target too ambiguous to channel effort and gauge momentum.
Expectations tend to rise with accomplishment. The better you’re performing, the more you demand of yourself and the less you notice incremental gains. 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?
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. We grow by embracing our shortcomings, not by punishing them.
But take it from eight studies: people don’t judge your competence based on one performance.
It turns out that when people assess your skills, they put more weight on your peaks than on your troughs.
People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?
success is not so much how close you come to perfection as how much you overcome along the way.
Identifying which imperfections to fix doesn’t have to be a last-minute scramble.
Getting a precise score isn’t just information—it’s motivation. When multiple judges come in below 7, it nudges them to start coaching me and me to be coachable. I know I can’t settle for minor tweaks—it needs a major overhaul. I want to close the gap.
We have to be careful about how much weight we put on judges’ scores. 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.
Seeking validation is a bottomless pit: the craving for status is never satisfied.
Ultimately, excellence is more than meeting other people’s expectations. It’s also about living up to your own standards. After all, it’s impossible to please everyone. The question is whether you’re letting down the right people. It’s better to disappoint others than to disappoint yourself.
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 incomplete and imperfect. That’s what makes it beautiful.
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.
Research demonstrates that people who are obsessed with their work put in longer hours yet fail to perform any better than their peers. They’re more likely to fall victim to both physical and emotional exhaustion. The monotony of deliberate practice puts them at risk for burnout—and for boreout. Yes, boreout is an actual term in psychology. Whereas burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when you’re overloaded, boreout is the emotional deadening you feel when you’re under-stimulated. Although it takes deliberate practice to achieve greater things, we shouldn’t drill so hard that
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Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.
You’re no longer practicing under the specter of should. I should be studying. I’m supposed to practice. You’re drawn into a web of want. I feel like studying. I’m excited to practice. That makes it easier to find flow: you slip quickly into the zone of total absorption, where the world melts away and you become one with your instrument. Instead of controlling your life, practicing enriches your life.
Gamification is often a gimmick—an attempt to add bells and whistles to a tedious task.
Passion for one task can lead us to neglect the less exciting ones on our plate.
research suggests that the people with the most discipline actually use the least amount of it. My colleague Angela Duckworth finds that instead of relying on willpower to push through a strenuous situation, they change the situation to make it less strenuous.
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.
It turns out that taking breaks has at least three benefits. First, time away from practice helps to sustain harmonious passion.
It’s not just about preventing burnout: research reveals that when we work nights and weekends, our interest and enjoyment in our tasks drop. Even just reminding you that it’s Saturday is enough to reduce your intrinsic motivation—you realize that you could be doing something fun and relaxing instead.
Second, breaks unlock fresh ideas.
Third, breaks deepen learning.
Relaxing is not a waste of time—it’s an investment in well-being. Breaks are not a distraction—they’re a chance to reset attention and incubate ideas. Play is not a frivolous activity—it’s a source of joy and a path to mastery.
Without enjoyment, potential stays hidden.
A rut is not a sign that you’ve tanked. A plateau is not a cue that you’ve peaked. They’re signals that it may be time to turn around and find a new route. When you’re stuck, it’s usually because you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’re taking the wrong path, or you’re running out of fuel. Gaining momentum often involves backing up and navigating your way down a different road—even if it’s not the one you initially intended to travel. It might be unfamiliar, winding, and bumpy. Progress rarely happens in a straight line; it typically unfolds in loops.
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.
Finding the right method involves trial and error. Some trials will just be plain errors: we spin our wheels on bad strategies. But even if we discover a better method, our inexperience with it will usually make us worse at first. Those backsteps aren’t only normal—in many situations they’re necessary.
It shouldn’t take an extreme event like an injury to push us to stop, reverse, and switch routes. But the truth is we’re often afraid to go backward. We see slowing down as losing ground, backing up as giving up, and rerouting as veering off course. We worry that when we step back, we’ll lose our footing altogether. This means we stay exactly where we are—steady but stuck. We need to embrace the discomfort of getting lost.
It turns out that if you’re taking a new road, the best experts are often the worst guides. There are at least two reasons why experts struggle to give good directions to beginners. One is the distance they’ve traveled—they’ve come too far to remember what it’s like being in your shoes. 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.
The further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals.
Experts often have an intuitive understanding of a route, but they struggle to articulate all the steps to take. Their brain dump is partially filled with garbage.
Even if your chosen expert can walk you through their route, when you ask for directions on yours, you’ll run into a second challenge. You don’t share the same strengths and weaknesses—their hills and valleys aren’t the same as yours. You might be heading for the same destination, but you’re starting far from their position. This makes your path as unfamiliar to them as theirs is to you.
Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness.
Languishing is the emotional experience of stalling. You may not be depressed or burned out, but you definitely feel blah. Every day starts with a case of the Mondays. You’re muddling through the moments, watching your weeks go by in shades of gray.[*]
As I’ve studied hidden potential, I’ve realized that languishing is more than the feeling of being stuck. It also keeps you stuck. 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.
