Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

Deliberate play is a structured activity that’s designed to make skill development enjoyable. It blends elements of deliberate practice and free play.

The downside of competing against others is that you can win without improving.

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.

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

what mattered was being guided by multiple mentors. Different mentors were able to share different tidbits on how to advance.

The more uncertain the path and the higher the peak, the greater the range of guides you’ll need.

instead of asking to pick their brain, you ask them to retrace their route.

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.

when people took on serious hobbies at home, their confidence climbed at work—but only if the hobbies were in a different area from their jobs.

You’re temporarily veering off course, but you’re still in motion. You’re advancing toward a different goal.

it’s actually in turning outward to harness resources with and for others that we discover—and develop—our hidden potential. When the odds are against us, focusing beyond ourselves is what launches us off the ground.

when we view hurdles as threats, we tend to back down and give up. When we treat barriers as challenges to conquer, we rise to the occasion.

the best way to learn something is to teach it. You remember it better after you recall it—and you understand it better after you explain it.

Those who can’t do yet can learn by teaching.

Teaching others can build our competence. But it’s coaching others that elevates our confidence.

middle schoolers spent more time on homework after they were randomly assigned to give motivational advice to younger students—rather than receive motivational advice from expert teachers.

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

Receiving is passive—if you’re always the one being coached, it puts you in the position of depending on others for guidance. Giving is active—coaching others reminds you that you have something to offer.

It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants. Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future.

The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it’s to improve conditions for our successors.

Instead of singling out the best and brightest, Finnish schools are designed to give every student the opportunity to grow.

In Finnish schools, a popular mantra is “We can’t afford to waste a brain.”

In organizational psychology, culture has three elements: practices, values, and underlying assumptions.

a country’s values and assumptions about education aren’t a given—they’re chosen.

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.

teachers gain a deeper grasp of their strengths and challenges. They’re able to tailor their instructional and emotional support to help everyone in the class reach their potential.

teachers also get to specialize in their students. Their role evolves from instructor to coach and mentor.

looping actually had the greatest upsides for less effective teachers—and lower-achieving students. Building an extended relationship did the most good for the teachers and students who were struggling. It gave them the opportunity to grow together.

Extensive evidence shows that the wellspring of intrinsic motivation is having the freedom of opportunity to explore our interests.

Me & MyCity was such a hit that the majority of Finland’s sixth graders now participate in it. The program is powerful because it puts students in charge of their individualized learning.

Cultivating the desire to read nourishes individual interests.

when students get to pick their own books and read in class, they become more passionate about reading. It’s a virtuous cycle: the more they read for fun, the better they get and the more they like it. And the more they like it, the more they learn—and the better they perform on exams.

To make it engaging and interactive, whenever students were passionate about a book, the floor was theirs to tell their classmates about it. That became another tradition—before she knew it, Nelli had a room full of budding book critics.

what impresses me most about their culture is that they don’t put performance above well-being.

Finland is the best in the world at helping students progress without monopolizing their time, wreaking havoc on their lives, or making them hate school.

The best teams aren’t the ones with the best thinkers. They’re the teams that unearth and use the best thinking from everyone.

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.

When they have prosocial skills, team members are able to bring out the best in one another. 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.

Prosocial skills are the glue that transforms groups into teams. Instead of operating as lone wolves, people become part of a cohesive pack.

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

bond around a common identity and stick together to achieve their collective goals.

The people to promote are the ones with the prosocial skills to put the mission above their ego—and team cohesion above personal glory. They know that the goal isn’t to be the smartest person in the room; it’s to make the entire room smarter.

when people are already determined, we don’t need a leader to bark commands.

When teams were relatively reactive, waiting for direction from above, extraverts drove the best results.

when teams were proactive, bringing many ideas and suggestions to the table, it was introverts who led them to achieve greater things.

With a team of sponges, the best leader is not the person who talks the most, but the one who listens best.

Brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that we get more ideas—and better ideas—if we all work alone.

Dave Barry quipped, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: ‘meetings.’