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October 28, 2023 - December 28, 2024
As an organizational psychologist, I’ve spent much of my career studying the forces that fuel our progress.
What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.
If we judge people only by what they can do on day one, their potential remains hidden.
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.
People who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They’re usually freaks of nurture.
This book is not about ambition. It’s about aspiration.
As the philosopher Agnes Callard highlights, 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.
I now see character less as a matter of will, and more as a set of skills.
Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles.
He’s played ten games simultaneously against ten different opponents and won them all—blindfolded. But he believes character matters more than talent.
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.
When people talk about nurture, they’re typically referring to the ongoing investment that parents and teachers make in developing and supporting children and students.
Hidden Potential is divided into three sections.
The first section
The second section
The third section
I met people who progressed far beyond their starting points and uncovered their hidden potential in a wide range of settings—from underwater and underground to mountaintops and outer space.
The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.
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.
When we say success and happiness are our most important goals in life, I’m curious about why character isn’t higher on the list.
After studying the character skills that unleash hidden potential, I’ve identified specific forms of proactivity, determination, and discipline that matter.
Sara Maria and Benny are polyglots: people who can talk—and think—in many languages.
they got comfortable being uncomfortable.
There’s just one small problem with learning styles. They’re a myth.
When a team of experts conducted a comprehensive review of several decades of research on learning styles, they found an alarming lack of support for the theory.
The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily how you learn best.
This is the first form of courage:
being brave enough to embrace discomfort and throw your learning style out the window.
As blogger Tim Urban
describes it, your brain gets hijacked by an instant gratification monkey, who picks what’s easy and fun over the hard work that needs to be done.
When you procrastinate, you’re not avoiding effort. You’re avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up.
On paper, writing forced him to trim the fat.
“If you’re comfortable, you’re doin’ it wrong.”
Although listening is often more fun, reading improves comprehension and recall.
comfortable being uncomfortable,
You don’t have to wait until you’ve acquired an entire library of knowledge to start to communicate.
When therapists treat phobias, they use two different kinds of exposure therapy: systematic desensitization and flooding.
Exposure therapy
only through full-on flooding.
To overcome his shyness, Benny started out
systematic desensitization:
Benny calls it social skydiving.
“The best cure to feeling uncomfortable about making mistakes is to make more mistakes.”
