Hidden Potential

by Adam M. Grant

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.

Knowing your principles doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to practice them, particularly under stress or pressure. It’s easy to be proactive and determined when things are going well. The true test of character is whether you manage to stand by those values when the deck is stacked against you. If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.

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 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.

Instead of seeking feedback, you’re better off asking for advice.23 Feedback tends to focus on how well you did last time. Advice shifts attention to how you can do better next time.

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.

As I read far and wide about sea sponges, 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 life28 with anticancer, antibacterial, antiviral, and anti-inflammatory properties.

When I considered the traits of great architects, the first quality that came to mind was perfectionism. It takes painstaking attention to detail to create an aesthetic masterpiece—let alone a structure that can withstand an earthquake. If you’re not fastidious about getting every element right, your designs will be flawed and your buildings could collapse. But then I learned that to be uncompromising, architects have to make compromises. And I kept hearing that no one did this better than Tadao Ando.

We usually associate aesthetic and technical prowess with a drive for flawless results. As I’ve studied the habits of great designers, dancers, and divers, though, 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.

The people who go on to become masters in their fields often start out with imperfect transcripts in school. In a study of world-class sculptors, it turned out that they were mostly average students. Two thirds graduated high school with Bs and Cs.8 A similar pattern emerged in a comparison of America’s most influential architects with peers who had fallen short of transforming the field. The great architects had rarely been great students:9 they typically finished college with a B average. Their perfectionistic colleagues had gleaming grades but went on to build far fewer glistening buildings.

Eric told me that when announcers rave about dives getting perfect 10s, they’re making a mistake. There’s no such thing as a perfect dive. Even in the Olympic judging rules, a 10 doesn’t stand for perfection—it stands for excellence. He was teaching me the art of wabi sabi.

the beat of the tractor, the low hum of the cows, the clanging of the blacksmiths, the rustling of the trees in the wind.

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.

Finding the right method involves trial and error. Some trials will just be plain errors: we spin our wheels on bad strategies. But even if we discover a better method, our inexperience with it will usually make us worse at first. Those backsteps aren’t only normal—in many situations they’re necessary.

It shouldn’t take an extreme event like an injury to push us to stop, reverse, and switch routes. But the truth is we’re often afraid to go backward. We see slowing down as losing ground, backing up as giving up, and rerouting as veering off course. We worry that when we step back, we’ll lose our footing altogether. This means we stay exactly where we are—steady but stuck. We need to embrace the discomfort of getting lost.

lumpy,

Instead of flying with vicious speed and deadly spin, a knuckleball sails slower and as flat as possible. Rather than wrapping your fingers around the ball, you dig the nails of your index and middle fingers into it. Those two knuckles stick up in the air, giving the pitch its signature name. That unusual grip takes the rotation off11 the ball, allowing it to zigzag erratically in the air and befuddle batters.

The drawback of a compass is that it only gives you direction—not directions. It can help you back away from the wrong path and point you toward a better one. But to navigate that path effectively, you need a guide.

Of course, you’ll get more personalized advice from a guide who knows you well. But as tempting as it is to turn to a trusted mentor for sage advice, no individual will have all the right directions. You can see this in a study of lawyers navigating the path to partner. Guidance from a single mentor didn’t make a difference21 in promotions. There were other upsides: lawyers who had a supportive mentor were more satisfied and committed than their peers who lacked one. But when it came to getting promoted to partner, what mattered was being guided by multiple mentors. Different mentors were able to share different tidbits on how to advance. It didn’t take a village, though—all it took was two or three mentors to help lawyers make the climb to partner rather than seeing their careers stall.

There’s a name for that feeling: it’s called languishing.23 Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. The term was coined by a sociologist (Corey Keyes) and immortalized by a philosopher (Mariah Carey).

Hobbies have similar benefits. In another study, when people took on serious hobbies at home, their confidence climbed at work28—but only if the hobbies were in a different area from their jobs. If you’re an artist and you’re languishing, doing ceramics on the side won’t do much to spur a sense of mastery. But if you’re feeling meh as a social worker or an accountant, a pottery project might just be a new path to progress.

When you get stuck on your way up a mountain, it’s better to shift into reverse than to stand still. As you take U-turns and detours, you’ll feel as if you’re going in circles. In the short run, a straight line brings faster progress. But in the long run, loops lead to the highest peaks.

When we’re facing a daunting task, we need both competence and confidence. Our ability to elevate our skills and our expectations depends first on how we interpret the obstacles in front of us. Extensive evidence shows that when we view hurdles as threats, we tend to back down and give up.

Psychologists call this the tutor effect.9 It’s even effective for novices: 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. All it takes is embracing the discomfort of putting yourself in the instructor’s seat before you’ve reached mastery. Even just being told you’re going to teach11 something is enough to boost your learning.

I’ve come to think of this as the coach effect.19 We’re more confident in our ability to surmount struggles after guiding others through them.

But she still faced a major barrier: a circulatory disorder. In frigid temperatures, her arteries would stop sending blood to her fingers and toes, leaving them numb and at severe risk of frostbite.

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.

Chetty and his colleagues were interested in how opportunity shapes who ends up innovating. They reasoned that some kids would grow up in environments that gave them special access to resources. When they linked federal income tax returns with patent records for more than a million Americans, they found an alarming result. People raised in the top 1 percent of family income were ten times more likely to become inventors than people from families below the median income.