Hidden Potential

by Adam M. Grant

although talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not.

People who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They’re usually freaks of nurture.

ambition is the outcome6 you want to attain. Aspiration is the person you hope to become.

By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers7 were earning significantly more money than their peers.

The capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills.

If you want to forecast the earning potential of fourth graders, you should pay less attention to their objective math and verbal scores than to their teachers’ subjective views of their behavior patterns.

character less as a matter of will, and more as a set of skills.

But helping them reach their full potential requires something different. It’s a more focused, more transient form of support that prepares them to direct their own learning and growth. Psychologists call it scaffolding.

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.

Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. Personality is your predisposition—your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.

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

The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek, and amplify discomfort.

There’s just one small problem with learning styles. They’re a myth.

Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic. It pushes you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments. Unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking.

“If you’re comfortable, you’re doin’ it wrong.”

learning is not always about finding the right method for you. It’s often about finding the right method for the task.

Although listening is often more fun, reading improves comprehension and recall. Whereas listening promotes intuitive thinking, reading activates more analytical processing.

when it comes to critical thinking, there’s no substitute for reading.

Accelerating learning requires a second form of courage: being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it.

One of the biggest mistakes I see language learners make is believing that studying languages is about acquiring knowledge,” Benny notes. “It’s not! Learning a new language is about building a communication skill.”

if you want to become proficient in a language, rather than aiming to reduce your mistakes, you should strive to increase them.

You don’t need to get comfortable before you can practice your skills. Your comfort grows as you practice your skills.

Thanks to Martin Luther’s teachings in the 1500s, it was transformed into a calling.12 Being a good Protestant meant that you had a moral obligation to serve society13 through productive work. Determination and discipline became virtues; idleness and wastefulness became vices.

Becker and Woessmann argued that the engine of the Protestant Reformation wasn’t work ethic so much as literacy.

The progress we normally chalk up to working harder may actually be due to working smarter.

Prosperity rises as people become more capable of absorbing new ideas and filtering out old ones.

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.

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.

There’s nothing wrong with taking criticism personally. Taking it personally shows you’re taking it seriously. Getting upset isn’t a mark of weakness or even defensiveness—as long as your ego doesn’t stand in the way of your learning.

Many people fail to benefit from constructive criticism because they overreact and under-correct.

the average correlation between perfectionism and performance at work was zero.

Wabi sabi is a character skill. It gives you the discipline to shift your attention from impossible ideals to achievable standards—and then adjust those standards over time.

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.

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

breaks unlock fresh ideas.

Third, breaks deepen learning.

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.

Without enjoyment, potential stays hidden.

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.

The more uncertain the path and the higher the peak, the greater the range of guides you’ll need.

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

Seeing obstacles as challenges depends partly on having a growth mindset—believing in your ability to improve.

growth mindset alone does little good without scaffolding to support

it.

the best way to learn something is to teach it. You remember it better after you recall it10—and you understand it better after you explain it.

The coach effect captures how we can marshal motivation by offering the encouragement to others that we need for ourselves.

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

Creating opportunities on a larger scale requires us to build better systems in our schools, teams, and organizations.

that one of the advantages kids got in wealthy families was more exposure and access to innovators in their homes and neighborhoods. They had more guides available to provide a compass and drop pins. They got to dream bigger, aim higher, and travel farther.

evidence shows that whether children get ahead or fall behind depends in part on the cultures created in schools and classrooms.