Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.

Traveling great distances requires the courage to seek out the right kinds of discomfort, the capacity to absorb the right information, and the will to accept the right imperfections.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved. —Helen Keller

In the words of the great psychologist Ted Lasso, “If you’re comfortable, you’re doin’ it wrong.”

We’re confusing politeness with kindness. Being polite is withholding feedback to make someone feel good today. Being kind is being candid about how they can get better tomorrow. It’s possible to be direct in what you say while being thoughtful about how you deliver it.

It’s easy for people to be critics or cheerleaders. It’s harder to get them to be coaches. A critic sees your weaknesses and attacks your worst self. A cheerleader sees your strengths and celebrates your best self. A coach sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself.

Perfectionism traps us in a spiral of tunnel vision and error avoidance: it prevents us from seeing larger problems and limits us to mastering increasingly narrow skills.

it’s impossible to please everyone. The question is whether you’re letting down the right people. It’s better to disappoint others than to disappoint yourself.

It is neither work nor play, purpose nor purposelessness that satisfies us. It is the dance between. —Bernard De Koven

Progress is rarely noticeable at a snapshot in time—it unfolds over extended periods of time. If you focus your attention on a specific difficult moment, it’s easy to feel stuck. It’s only when you look at your trajectory over the course of weeks, months, or years that you appreciate the distance you’ve traveled.

Making progress isn’t always about moving forward. Sometimes it’s about bouncing back. Progress is not only reflected in the peaks you reach—it’s also visible in the valleys you cross. Resilience is a form of growth.

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. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it’s to improve conditions for our successors.

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.

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. We need to consider how steep their slope was, how far they’ve climbed, and how they’ve grown along the way. The test of a diamond in the rough is not whether it shines from the start, but how it responds to heat or pressure.

A candidate with 20 years of experience on a resume may have just repeated the same year of experience 20 times. So, you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience . . . and that experience reveals little about your potential.[*] The key question is not how long people have done a job. It’s how well they can learn to do a job.