Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

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.

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.

You’re not seeing enough progress to maintain your motivation. There’s a name for that feeling: it’s called languishing. 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.

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.

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

But 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.

Considerable evidence shows that studying with knowledgeable colleagues is good for growth.

Teaching is a surprisingly powerful method of learning.

Psychologists call this the tutor effect. It’s even effective for novices: 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.

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

It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants.

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

When we think of geniuses as people with extraordinary abilities, we neglect the importance of life circumstances in shaping them.

Yet being in the right zip code doesn’t have the same benefit for every resident. Role models do matter, and underrepresented groups often have a hard time finding them.

Instead of only looking for geniuses where we expect to find them, we can reach humanity’s greatest potential by cultivating the genius in everyone.

Based on studying what Finland does differently, I believe much of their success stems from the culture they’ve created. That culture is rooted in a belief in the potential of all students. Instead of singling out the best and brightest, Finnish schools are designed to give every student the opportunity to grow.

In organizational psychology, culture has three elements: practices, values, and underlying assumptions. Practices are the daily routines that reflect and reinforce values. Values are shared principles around what’s important and desirable—what should be rewarded versus what should be punished. Underlying assumptions are deeply held, often taken-for-granted beliefs about how the world works. Our assumptions shape our values, which in turn drive our practices.

Today, Finnish teachers have a great deal of autonomy to use their judgment to help students grow. They’re expected to stay up-to-date on the latest research—and to educate and coach one another on applying it. And they don’t have to waste time teaching to the test.

Finnish educators assume the most important lesson to teach children is that learning is fun.

A refrain among Finnish teachers captures it nicely: “The work of a child is to play.”

“If you don’t have the motivation to read, you can’t study any other subject.” Cultivating the desire to read nourishes individual interests.

A love of reading often begins at home.

Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize.

Reading is a gateway to opportunity: it opens the door for children to keep learning.

A teacher’s task is not to ensure that students have read the literary canons. It’s to kindle excitement about reading.

This is the kind of fuel that can propel learning anywhere, for almost any kid, about almost anything. Interest is amplified when we have the opportunity to choose what we learn and share it with others. Intrinsic motivation is contagious. When students talk about the books that light up their imaginations, it crystallizes why they love them—and gives others the chance to catch that enthusiasm.

As much as they value education, what impresses me most about their culture is that they don’t put performance above well-being.

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.

Being a team player is not about singing “Kumbaya.” It’s not about getting along all the time and ensuring everyone’s cooperation. It’s about figuring out what the group needs and enlisting everyone’s contribution.

It’s well documented that a single bad apple can spoil the barrel: when even one individual fails to act prosocially, it’s enough to make a team dumb and dumber.

In a meta-analysis, highly narcissistic people were more likely to rise into leadership roles, but they were less effective in those roles.[*] They made self-serving decisions and instilled a zero-sum view of success, provoking cutthroat behavior and undermining cohesion and collaboration.

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.

The more reserved leaders came across as more receptive to input from below, which gave them access to better ideas and left their teams more motivated.

A lattice system rejects two unwritten rules that dominate ladder hierarchies: don’t go behind your boss’s back or above your boss’s head.

Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.

If we listen only to the smartest person in the room, we miss out on discovering the smarts that the rest of the room has to offer. Our greatest potential isn’t always hidden inside us—sometimes it sparks between us, and sometimes it comes from outside our team altogether.

It’s a mistake to judge people solely by the heights they’ve reached. By favoring applicants who have already excelled, selection systems underestimate and overlook candidates who are capable of greater things. When we confuse past performance with future potential, we miss out on people whose achievements have involved overcoming major obstacles.

In schools and workplaces, selection systems are usually designed to detect excellence. That means people who are on their way to excellence rarely make the cut.

We can calculate the degree of difficulty in a dive, but there isn’t a formula to quantify the degree of difficulty in a life. This is a problem that has long plagued affirmative action efforts. Creating policies that favor underrepresented groups is a politically charged issue. Liberals and conservatives have heated debates about whether it levels the playing field by compensating for historical injustice or perpetuates injustice by introducing reverse discrimination.

Impostor syndrome says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.” Growth mindset says, “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s only a matter of time until I figure it out.”

Success is more than reaching our goals—it’s living our values. There’s no higher value than aspiring to be better tomorrow than we are today. There’s no greater accomplishment than unleashing our hidden potential.

To take a quiz about your hidden potential, visit www.adamgrant.net.

Choose leaders based on prosocial skills. Instead of promoting babblers and ball hogs, elevate people who put the mission above their ego—and prioritize team cohesion over personal glory.

Shift from brainstorming to brainwriting. For more balanced participation and better solutions, before you meet as a group, have people generate and evaluate ideas independently.