Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

We’re often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice. 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. It’s not a coincidence that in music, the term for practice is play.

Deliberate practice is the structured repetition of a task to improve performance based on clear goals and immediate feedback.

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.

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 we drive the joy out of the activity and turn it into an obsessive slog.

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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.

The question is how to build the scaffolding to bring that passion into practice. My favorite answer is called deliberate play.

Deliberate play is a structured activity that’s designed to make skill development enjoyable. It blends elements of deliberate practice and free play. Like free play, deliberate play is fun, but it’s structured for learning and mastery along with recreation. It’s built to break complex tasks into simpler parts so you can hone a specific skill.

An allergy nurse started introducing herself as Nurse Quick Shot, which immediately put her young patients at ease. She let them time her, and when they came back for their next visit, they would ask for Nurse Quick Shot and challenge her to beat her previous time.

The scaffolding for deliberate play is often set up by a teacher or coach, but it’s possible to make real strides on your own. If you want to improve your sight reading at the piano, you could challenge yourself to see how many notes you get right on new pieces and track your progress week by week. If you’re a Scrabble player hoping to improve your anagram aptitude, you can practice drawing random sets of tiles and see how many words you can spell in a minute.

Deliberate play has become especially popular in sports. Extensive evidence shows that athletes who specialize early in a single sport tend to peak quickly and then flame out. Pounding the pavement from a young age puts them at greater risk for both physical and mental health challenges. With deliberate play, it’s easier to sustain enjoyment and achieve greater things.

In sports, deliberate play is typically organized around a subcomponent of a performance or match. In tennis, for example, you might hone your serving skills by challenging yourself to see how many consecutive serves you can make. Success might be defeating an opponent, outdoing yourself, or beating the clock. You’re not counting your hours; you’re...

By fueling harmonious passion, deliberate play can prevent boreout and burnout. Although it might sound similar to gamification, deliberate play is fundamentally different. Gamification is often a gimmick—an attempt to add bells and whistles to a tedious task. The aim is to offer a dopamine rush that distracts from boredom or staves off exhaustion. Sure, a leaderboard might motivate you to push through the pain, but it’s not enough to trick you into liking a routine you hate.[*] In deliberate play, you actually redesign the task itself to make it both motivating and developmental. The best example I’ve seen was dreamed up by a basketball trainer.

Passion for one task can lead us to neglect the less exciting ones on our plate.

“There is no boring in our workouts.” He set up the scaffolding to make the hardest parts of practice easier—to help Curry make more progress while relying less on sheer discipline.

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

It turns out that taking breaks has at least three benefits. First, time away from practice helps to sustain harmonious passion.

Second, breaks unlock fresh ideas.

Third, breaks deepen learning.

Under harmonious passion, it’s easier to recognize that rest is a supply of fuel. We take regular reprieves to maintain energy and avoid burnout.

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.

Evelyn says. Deliberate play taught her that “the real outcome is her enjoyment.” Without enjoyment, potential stays hidden.

Getting Unstuck The Roundabout Path to Forward Progress Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. —George Eliot

One of the most frustrating parts of honing a skill is getting stuck. Instead of continuing to improve, you start to stagnate. It feels as if you’ve reached the upper bound of your mental or physical capacities. Since stagnation marks the end of growth, it seems to spell the beginning of decline. My best days are behind me. It’s all downhill from here. Surgeons expect to stagnate and decline as their eyesight and reflexes deteriorate. Scientists prepare to stagnate and decline as their neurons die. Athletes inevitably stagnate and decline as their strength and speed wane. Or at least that’s what we assume. But the reality is less linear—and more uplifting.

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 we reach a dead end, to move forward, we may have to head back down the mountain. Once we’ve retreated far enough, we can find another way—a path that will allow us to build the momentum needed to reach the peak.

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. As cognitive scientist Sian Beilock summarizes it, “As you get better and better at what you do, your ability to communicate your understanding or to help others learn that skill often gets worse and worse.”

It’s often said that those who can’t do, teach. It would be more accurate to say that those who can do, can’t teach the basics. A great deal of expert knowledge is tacit—it’s implicit, not explicit. The further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals.

ball.” 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.

Just as it’s unwise to seek rudimentary instruction from the most eminent experts, it’s a mistake to rely on a single guide. No one else knows your exact journey. But if you collect directions from multiple guides, they can sometimes combine to reveal routes you didn’t see. The more uncertain the path and the higher the peak, the greater the range of guides you’ll need. The challenge is to piece the various tips together into a route that works for you.

The point of engaging guides isn’t to blindly follow their leads. It’s to chart possible paths to explore together. To do that, you have to make their implicit knowledge explicit. Being a sponge starts with seeking their advice—but instead of asking to pick their brain, you ask them to retrace their route. The goal is to get your guides to drop pins—the key landmarks and turning points from their climbs. To jog their memories of paths long forgotten, you might inquire about the crossroads they faced. Those could be skills they sought out, advice they took or ignored, or changes they made. It can also help to tell them about the roads you’ve taken so far. As they learn about your prior paths and current location, they may begin to notice avenues for progress that they didn’t think to point out originally. The pins you gather won’t form an accurate map. Some won’t apply to you—one pin might lead you across a stream, and your bicycle makes for a terrible boat. Some may no longer apply at all—they’ll take you to a road that’s closed. You may end up doing plenty of loops before you find the right path. And your guides are likely to be unaware of bridges that have only recently been built.

There’s a name for that feeling: it’s called languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. The term was coined by a sociologist (Corey Keyes) and immortalized by a philosopher (Mariah Carey).

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.[*]

A digression doesn’t have to be a diversion. It can be a source of energy.

Of all the factors that have been studied, the strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress. You can’t always find motivation by staring harder at the thing that isn’t working. Sometimes you can build momentum by taking a detour to a new destination. A detour is a route off your main road that you take to refuel. You’re not taking a break; you’re not sitting still, idling. You’re temporarily veering off course, but you’re still in motion. You’re advancing toward a different goal.

What looks like a big breakthrough is usually the accumulation of small wins.[*]

Defying Gravity The Art of Flying by Our Bootstraps I believe in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe it is possible. I saw this guy do it once in Cirque du Soleil. —Stephen Colbert

When the odds are against us, focusing beyond ourselves is what launches us off the ground.

Extensive evidence shows that 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.

Bootstrapping is using your existing resources to pull yourself out of a sticky situation.

Teaching is a surprisingly powerful method of learning.

Teaching others can build our competence. But it’s coaching others that elevates our confidence. When we encourage others to overcome obstacles, it can help us find our own motivation.

I’ve come to think of this as the coach effect. We’re more confident in our ability to surmount struggles after guiding others through them.

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