Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

I learned that to be uncompromising, architects have to make compromises. And I kept hearing that no one did this better than Tadao Ando.

I’ve come to understand that unlocking hidden potential is not about the pursuit of perfection. Tolerating flaws isn’t just something novices need to do—it’s part of becoming an expert and continuing to gain mastery. The more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable.

Extensive evidence shows that it’s having high personal standards, not pursuing perfection, that fuels growth. Many people interpret that as advice to shift from be the best to do your best.

The ideal foil for perfectionism is an objective that’s precise and challenging. It focuses your attention on the most important actions and tells you when enough is enough.

Even in the Olympic judging rules, a 10 doesn’t stand for perfection—it stands for excellence.

I didn’t need to be perfect. I just needed to aim for a clear, high target.

I stopped waiting for the perfect approach and started going on the first one that was good enough.

I stopped beating myself up for past failures and focused on recent progress.

There’s another technique that I’ve found helpful for dumping perfectionism. In psychology, it’s known as mental time travel. Yes, that’s a thing. Expectations tend to rise with accomplishment. The better you’re performing, the more you demand of yourself and the less you notice incremental gains.

I realized that success is not so much how close you come to perfection as how much you overcome along the way.

In the summer of 2002, over a thousand people filed into a Chicago theater to see the debut of a dance musical. During the first act, the audience looked so miserable and confused that the creator worried they’d leave after intermission. In a scathing review, theater critic Michael Phillips called it “strenuous, chaotic . . . crazily uneven . . . ill-conceived.” The show was the brainchild of Twyla Tharp, best known for her choreography of ballets for Mikhail Baryshnikov—and of dances in films like Hair and Amadeus.

The big Broadway premiere was just around the corner. The devastating feedback raised serious questions in Tharp’s mind about whether it was fatally flawed: “Whether I or anybody else could make it work was a gamble.”

Just a month after the disastrous debut, Tharp unveiled a revamped show for the end of their Chicago run. When the critic Michael Phillips came back, he was pleasantly surprised at the distance traveled. “Extensive revisions . . . have made for a clearer, more satisfying show” that was “often exhilarating,” he wrote. “Tharp’s changes may give the show a better chance at Broadway success.” She hadn’t choreographed a perfect performance, but the blemishes no longer overshadowed the strengths—thanks to her quick pivot.

Tharp and her son came up with a filter to find the signal in the noise. They decided that any concern raised independently by more than two critics wasn’t a matter of taste—it was a quality control issue. “The critics turned out to be enormously useful,” Tharp recalls, quipping: “Bless their coal-black little hearts.”

Perfecting the show would have required Tharp to go back to the drawing board and intersperse dialogue between the songs and dances. But she was an imperfectionist—she was aiming for excellence, not flawlessness. For minimum lovable, she just needed to simplify the story, clarify the characters, and manage expectations.

Her production designer noticed striking similarities between some Billy Joel beats and a dance Tharp had created for another show decades earlier. It took Tharp just a few hours to teach the recycled routine to the two dozen dancers. Now they had an opening that introduced the characters and dazzled visually. The following spring, Movin’ Out was nominated for ten Tony Awards, and Tharp won for best choreography.

A great deal of research shows that perfectionists tend to define excellence on other people’s terms. This focus on creating a flawless image in the eyes of others is a risk factor for depression, anxiety, burnout, and other mental health challenges. Striving for social approval comes with a cost: across 105 studies with over 70,000 people, valuing extrinsic goals like popularity and appearance over intrinsic goals like growth and connection predicted lower well-being. Seeking validation is a bottomless pit: the craving for status is never satisfied. But if an external assessment serves as a tool for growth, it may be worth using.

After the earthquake rocked Kobe, Ando wanted to preserve the artifacts of the past and renew hope for the future. On the waterfront overlooking the mountains, he designed an art museum. The deck features a sculpture of his own: a giant green apple. “In life, it’s better to be green—and the greener the better,” Ando declares. “The green apple is a symbol of youth.” Ando is now in his eighties, and his youth is reflected in his ongoing desire to grow.

An apple that isn’t ripe is not fully formed—it’s incomplete and imperfect. That’s what makes it beautiful.

Difficult tasks lead to failure, dejection, and doubt. We begin to question whether we can bounce back, let alone move forward. Character skills aren’t always enough to travel great distances. Many new skills don’t come with a manual, and steeper hills often require a lift. That lift comes in the form of scaffolding: a temporary support structure that enables us to scale heights we couldn’t reach on our own. It helps us build the resilience to overcome obstacles that threaten to overwhelm us and limit our growth.

The scaffolding that psychologists offer to boost resilience is a game of Tetris. Yes, Tetris. After people watch an especially upsetting film clip, over the next week they typically have six or seven disturbing flashbacks. But if they’re randomly assigned to play a few rounds of Tetris right after watching the scene, it cuts their flashbacks in half over the next week. Somehow, the act of rotating, moving, and dropping geometric blocks shields us from intrusive thoughts and aversive emotions.

Scaffolding generally comes from other people. It would never have occurred to me to ward off unwelcome images by playing Tetris—the idea came from people with relevant experience and expertise. When our circumstances threaten to overpower us, instead of only looking inward, we can turn outward to mentors, teachers, coaches, role models, or peers.

Scaffolding is tailored to the obstacle in your path. When psychologists suggest Tetris, it’s because it has a specific benefit: it changes how your brain constructs mental imagery. Brain scans suggest that Tetris blocks intrusive images by activating our visual-spatial circuits—we’re too busy processing falling shapes to attend to the threat of unnerving images.

Scaffolding comes at a pivotal point in time. It doesn’t do any good to play Tetris before you watch the movie—there’s no imagery yet to disrupt.

Scaffolding is temporary. It doesn’t take a lifetime of Tetris therapy to recover from a horror movie. Playing for just ten minutes is enough to interfere with memory consolidation and curtail flashbacks.

Scaffolding unleashes hidden potential by helping us forge paths we couldn’t otherwise see. It enables us to find motivation in the daily grind, gain momentum in the face of stagnation, and turn difficulties and doubts into sources of strength.

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

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.

Research reveals that the actual number of hours required for excellence varies dramatically by person and activity.

Elite musicians are rarely driven by obsessive compulsion. They’re usually fueled by what psychologists call harmonious passion. Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.

When I asked Evelyn Glennie how she practices, she said she spends nearly all her time in deliberate play.

Deliberate play often involves introducing novelty and variety into practice.

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.

Deliberate play has become especially popular in sports.

In sports, deliberate play is typically organized around a subcomponent of a performance or match.

By fueling harmonious passion, deliberate play can prevent boreout and burnout.

Hundreds of experiments show that people improve faster when they alternate between different skills. Psychologists call it interleaving, and it works in areas ranging from painting to math, especially when the skills being developed are similar or complex.

Evelyn Glennie thinks so—she’s felt it for half a century. She knows what research shows: even deliberate play shouldn’t be done all day every day. She learned this lesson the hard way.

First, time away from practice helps to sustain harmonious passion.

Second, breaks unlock fresh ideas.

Your interest keeps the problem active in the back of your mind, and you’re more likely to incubate new ways of framing it and unexpected ways of solving it.

Third, breaks deepen learning. In one experiment, taking a ten-minute break after learning something improved recall for students by 10 to 30 percent—and even more for stroke and Alzheimer’s patients. Once about 24 hours have passed, information starts to fade from our memories—we fall down a forgetting curve. It’s well established that we can avoid that forgetting curve with spaced repetition—interspersing breaks into practice.

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.

“Worthwhile practice is where progress is made. It’s about quality, not quantity.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. —George Eliot

Since stagnation marks the end of growth, it seems to spell the beginning of decline.

At age 35, R. A. Dickey broke through his wall once and for all. After spending the bulk of fourteen years in the minor leagues, he made it back to the majors. That year, his earned run average made him one of the ten best pitchers in all of baseball, and he signed a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract with the New York Mets. Of the nine pitchers who had outranked him in his draft class, eight had already retired, and the ninth would never make it back to the majors. Yet RA was just beginning to realize his hidden potential. The key to his eventual triumph was the scaffolding others helped him build.

he never would’ve gotten unstuck if his coaches hadn’t started by sending him back to the drawing board. 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.

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.

Skills don’t grow at a steady pace. Improving them is like driving up a mountain. As we climb higher and higher, the road gets steeper and steeper, and our gains get smaller and smaller. When we run out of momentum, we start to stall.