Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

Did u hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete Proving nature’s laws wrong it learned 2 walk without having feet Funny it seems but by keeping its dreams it learned 2 breathe fresh air —“The Rose That Grew from Concrete,” written by Tupac Shakur

In just two years, the poor kids from Harlem traveled the distance from novices to national champions. But the biggest surprise isn’t that the underdogs won—it’s why they won. The skills they developed would eventually earn them much more than chess titles.

What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.

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.

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.

Chetty is one of the world’s most influential economists. He’s the winner of a MacArthur genius grant. And his research suggests that excellence depends less on our natural talents than we might expect. The Tennessee experiment contained a startling result. Chetty was able to predict the success that students achieved as adults simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers.

When Aristotle wrote about qualities like being disciplined and prosocial, he called them virtues of character. He described character as a set of principles that people acquired and enacted through sheer force of will.

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.

Hidden Potential is divided into three sections. The first section explores the specific character skills that catapult us to greater heights.

The second section is about creating structures to sustain motivation.

The third section focuses on building systems to expand opportunity.

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.

In the late 1800s, the founding father of psychology made a bold claim. “By the age of thirty,” William James wrote, “character has set like plaster and will never soften again.”

Recently a team of social scientists launched an experiment to test that hypothesis.

Character skills training had a dramatic impact. After founders had spent merely five days working on these skills, their firms’ profits grew by an average of 30 percent over the next two years. That was nearly triple the benefit of training in cognitive skills.

Along with demonstrating that character skills can propel us to achieve greater things, this evidence reveals that it’s never too late to build them.

Character doesn’t set like plaster—it retains its plasticity.

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.

For too long, character skills like proactivity and determination have been dismissed as “soft skills.”

Recognizing the importance of human skills, they introduced a broader emphasis on the leadership and teamwork capabilities that enabled groups to become more than the sum of their parts and troops to come home safe and sound.

If our cognitive skills are what separate us from animals, our character skills are what elevate us above machines.

After studying the character skills that unleash hidden potential, I’ve identified specific forms of proactivity, determination, and discipline that matter.

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

Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill—an especially important form of determination. It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon your tried-and-true methods, to put yourself in the ring before you feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts. The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek, and amplify discomfort.

It’s not enough to simply accept minimal discomfort when it arises. Surprisingly, we’re better off actively seeking out discomfort.

Comfort in learning is a paradox. You can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until you’ve practiced it enough to master it. But practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it. Accelerating learning requires a second form of courage: being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it.

The idea of speaking from day one has changed how I think about learning. You can code from day one, teach from day one, and coach from day one. You don’t need to get comfortable before you can practice your skills. Your comfort grows as you practice your skills.

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest . . . the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt. —Leon C. Megginson

More than three quarters of all species died. It was one of the first and worst mass extinction events in history—more devastating than the one that decimated the dinosaurs. Strangely, though, there was at least one species that didn’t just survive—it thrived. Entire forests of sea sponges grew and flourished. Long before SpongeBob memes ruled the internet, sponges ruled the oceans. Upon discovering sea sponges, scientists assumed they were plants. They’re often shaped like bushes, they’re almost entirely stationary, and they have no brains, nerves, organs, or muscles. But they don’t subsist on sunlight—they consume food like animals. Sea sponges are now recognized as one of the earth’s oldest animals.

But sea sponges don’t just passively absorb food and oxygen. They’re adept at filtering out toxic substances and unhealthy particles. Their flagella, which look like tiny hairs, create currents that catch nutrients and expel bacteria. They take in water through their outer walls and eject it through what looks like a miniature mouth. They can even sneeze out mucus through their pores. Some sea sponges can live more than 2,000 years.

When sponges are damaged by strong currents or munched on by predators, they don’t necessarily float away or die. Some can regenerate via survival pods: cells that allow a new sponge to develop once conditions improve.

Being a sponge is more than a metaphor. It’s a character skill—a form of proactivity that’s vital to realizing hidden potential. Improving depends not on the quantity of information you seek out, but the quality of the information you take in. Growth is less about how hard you work than how well you learn.

In most areas where Protestantism took hold, the historically dominant religion was Catholicism. At the time, the Catholic Church maintained careful control over the Bible, and Catholics typically absorbed its teachings orally at church. Martin Luther changed that: he wrote the first influential German translation of the Bible and preached that every school in every town should teach children to read scripture. That meant people had to learn to read. And once they could read, a whole world of information was at their fingertips.

The progress we normally chalk up to working harder may actually be due to working smarter. Cognitive skills aren’t sufficient for learning, but they’re necessary.

Cognitive skills that amplify our ability to take in and understand information lay the groundwork for becoming a sponge.

Sponginess was the first thing that stood out to me about Mellody too. I first met her a decade ago, when I was invited to give a presentation on my research to a group of VIPs. When I walked into the room, I recognized multiple Oscar-winning filmmakers and tech billionaires. It was Mellody who asked the most questions—and she was the only one to take notes.

Absorptive capacity is the ability to recognize, value, assimilate, and apply new information. It hinges on two key habits. The first is how you acquire information: Do you react to what enters your field of vision, or are you proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills, and perspectives? The second is the goal you’re pursuing when you filter information: Do you focus on feeding your ego or fueling your growth?

The sweet spot is when people are proactive and growth oriented. That’s when they become sponges. They consistently take the initiative to expand themselves and adapt. That character skill is especially valuable when the deck is stacked against you—as

Julius took charge of his own growth. When people asked who his coach was, he said: “YouTube.” In 2009, Julius went to an internet café and started watching videos of top javelin throwers on YouTube. By scrutinizing their skills, he was able to start coaching himself. “Everything began to change in my training,” Julius says. “Javelin requires technique, power, flexibility, and speed and there were many of these aspects which I’d never looked at.” In 2015, Julius won the world javelin championship. At 92.72 meters, his was the farthest throw in fourteen years—only two humans had ever hurled a javelin farther.

Don’t lead with a joke unless you’re confident it will land.

Open with a personal story—it humanizes you.

I was delighted to discover something even more remarkable than their capacity to absorb. It’s their capacity to create. Sea sponges don’t just expunge toxins. They also produce biochemicals that protect and promote life with anticancer, antibacterial, antiviral, and anti-inflammatory properties. Substances from a Caribbean sea sponge spurred breakthroughs in the treatment of HIV, herpes, and leukemia. Compounds from a Japanese sea sponge have been developed into a chemotherapy drug that has extended the lives of women with advanced breast cancer by blocking cell division. And a peptide from an Antarctic sea sponge offers a promising lead in the treatment of malaria.

For decades, scientists believed that new animal species emerged as oxygen arose in the oceans. The latest evidence suggests that sea sponges actually contributed to this process. By filtering organic matter out of the water, they helped to oxygenate the oceans, which enabled animals to evolve. This means sponges may be partly responsible for all complex life as we know it. If not for sponges, the human race might not exist.

Done right, it’s not just about soaking up nutrients that help us grow. It’s also about releasing nutrients to help others grow.

There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in —Leonard Cohen

Without the means to go to college, Ando decided to learn architecture on his own. While doing odd jobs to pay the rent, he scrutinized the structures around him. He borrowed architecture books from friends and read about the evolution of materials, techniques, and styles. He honed his drawing skills by tracing directly over sketches of buildings until the pages were black. Eventually, Ando had taught himself enough to earn an architecture license.

Remarkably, not a single one of Ando’s 35 buildings had collapsed. As he inspected them, he couldn’t find even a visible crack.

His buildings have been described as earthquake-proof, and his designs have been called visual haikus.