Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

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. Polyglots prove that it’s possible to master new languages well into adulthood.

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.

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. You’re avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up. Sooner or later, though, you realize that you’re also avoiding getting where you want to go.

In the words of the great psychologist Ted Lasso, “If you’re comfortable, you’re doin’ it wrong.” That was the discovery that launched our polyglots into language learning.

Although listening is often more fun, reading improves comprehension and recall. Whereas listening promotes intuitive thinking, reading activates more analytical processing. It’s true in English and Chinese—people display better logical reasoning when the same trivia questions, riddles, and puzzles are written rather than spoken. 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.

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. They also learned better in “flipped classrooms” that challenged them to study vocabulary before class and then practice communicating during class.

Comfort in learning is a paradox. 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.

Knowing her in-laws would test her after the toast, she started doing what she calls “spamming your brain.” She listened to podcasts in Cantonese and watched Cantonese-language movies. She practiced talking daily in secret lessons with a Cantonese tutor, embracing the pain of introducing herself with the wrong words and the embarrassment of reciting her monologue with the wrong tones.

You don’t have to wait until you’ve acquired an entire library of knowledge to start to communicate. Your mental library expands as you communicate. When I asked Sara Maria what it takes to begin, she said she no longer waits to talk until she has a basic level of proficiency. She starts talking on the first day, discomfort be damned. “I’m always trying to convince people to start speaking,” she tells me. “Just memorize a few sentences—a short monologue introducing yourself and explaining why you’re learning the language.”

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.