Hidden Potential Quotes

“Wabi sabi is the art of honoring the beauty in imperfection. It’s not about creating intentional imperfections. It’s about accepting that flaws are inevitable—and recognizing that they don’t stop something from becoming sublime.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Las personas que hacen grandes avances casi nunca son unos prodigios de la naturaleza. Casi siempre son unos prodigios de la educación.”
― Adam M. Grant, Potencial oculto: La ciencia de conseguir grandes cosas (Deusto)

“Si sus entrenadores habían decidido trabajar con ellos, no fue por tener un talento extraordinario, sino por demostrar una motivación extraordinaria. Y aquella motivación tampoco era una cualidad innata, solía aparecer gracias a un profesor o un entrenador que había conseguido convertir el aprendizaje en una diversión.”
― Adam M. Grant, Potencial oculto: La ciencia de conseguir grandes cosas (Deusto)

“In organizational psychology, culture has three elements: practices, values, and underlying assumptions. Practices are the daily routines that reflect and reinforce values. Values are shared principles around what’s important and desirable—what should be rewarded versus what should be punished. Underlying assumptions are deeply held, often taken-for-granted beliefs about how the world works. Our assumptions shape our values, which in turn drive our practices.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“spending afternoons, evenings, and weekends shooting hoops”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Of all the factors that have been studied, the strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress. You can’t always find motivation by staring harder at the thing that isn’t working. Sometimes you can build momentum by taking a detour to a new destination.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Instead of promoting babblers and ball hogs, elevate people who put the mission above their ego—and prioritize team cohesion over personal glory. When teams are eager to contribute, the most effective leader is not the loudest talker, but the best listener.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Collective intelligence depends on cohesion—aligning a team around shared responsibility for a meaningful mission. When people believe they need one another to succeed in reaching an important goal, they become more than the sum of their parts.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“The best way to learn something is to teach it. You understand it better after you explain it—and you remember it better after you take the time to recall it.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“When you’re struggling to appreciate your progress, consider how your past self would view your current achievements. If you knew five years ago what you’d accomplish now, how proud would you have been?”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Progress comes from maintaining high standards, not eliminating every flaw. Practice wabi sabi, the art of honoring beauty in imperfection, by identifying some shortcomings that you can accept. Consider where you truly need the best and where you can settle for good enough. Mark your growth with Eric Best’s questions: Did you make yourself better today? Did you make someone else better today?”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Feedback is backward-looking—it leads people to criticize you or cheer for you. Advice is forward-looking—it leads people to coach you. You can get your critics and cheerleaders to act more like coaches by asking a simple question: “What’s one thing I can do better next time?”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Seek out new knowledge, skills, and perspectives to fuel your growth—not feed your ego. Progress hinges on the quality of the information you take in, not on the quantity of information you seek out.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Many people dream of achieving goals. They measure their progress by the status they acquire and the accolades they collect. But the gains that count the most are the hardest to count. The most meaningful growth is not building our careers—it’s building our character. Success is more than reaching our goals—it’s living our values. There’s no higher value than aspiring to be better tomorrow than we are today. There’s no greater accomplishment than unleashing our hidden potential.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Impostor syndrome says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.” Growth mindset says, “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s only a matter of time until I figure it out.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“If we listen only to the smartest person in the room, we miss out on discovering the smarts that the rest of the room has to offer. Our greatest potential isn’t always hidden inside us—sometimes it sparks between us, and sometimes it comes from outside our team altogether.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting.26 The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect. Research shows that groups promote the people who command the most airtime15—regardless of their aptitude and expertise. We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility, and quantity for quality. We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Maximizing group intelligence is about more than enlisting individual experts—and it involves more than merely bringing people together to solve a problem. Unlocking the hidden potential in groups requires leadership practices, team processes, and systems that harness the capabilities and contributions of all their members. The best teams aren’t the ones with the best thinkers. They’re the teams that unearth and use the best thinking from everyone.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“In organizational psychology, culture has three elements:9 practices, values, and underlying assumptions. Practices are the daily routines that reflect and reinforce values. Values are shared principles around what’s important and desirable—what should be rewarded versus what should be punished. Underlying assumptions are deeply held, often taken-for-granted beliefs about how the world works.10 Our assumptions shape our values, which in turn drive our practices.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“When discomfort is a signal of progress, you don’t want to run away from it. You want to keep stumbling toward it to continue growing.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Teaching is a surprisingly powerful method of learning. In a meta-analysis of 16 studies, students who were randomly assigned to tutor their peers7 ended up earning higher scores in the material they were teaching. Students who taught reading improved in reading; those who taught math got dramatically better at math. The more time they spent tutoring, the more they learned. As one group of researchers concluded, “Like the children they helped, the tutors gained a better understanding of and developed more positive attitudes toward the subject matter covered in the tutorial program.”8,fn2 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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“It turns out that if you’re taking a new road, the best experts are often the worst guides. There are at least two reasons why experts struggle to give good directions to beginners. One is the distance they’ve traveled—they’ve come too far to remember what it’s like being in your shoes. It’s called the curse of knowledge:13 the more you know, the harder it is for you to fathom what it’s like to not know. As cognitive scientist Sian Beilock summarizes it, “As you get better and better at what you do, your ability to communicate your understanding or to help others learn that skill often gets worse and worse.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“In sports, deliberate play23 is typically organized around a subcomponent of a performance or match. In tennis, for example, you might hone your serving skills by challenging yourself to see how many consecutive serves you can make. Success might be defeating an opponent, outdoing yourself, or beating the clock. You’re not counting your hours; you’re tracking your improvement. Your score is not a symbol of victory; it’s a gauge of progress.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“It turns out that when people assess your skills, they put more weight on your peaks18 than on your troughs. Even if you happened to see Serena Williams repeatedly double-fault on her serve, you’d recognize her excellence if you witnessed just one of her aces. When Steve Jobs flopped with the Apple Lisa, people still deemed him a visionary for his feats with the Mac. And we judge Shakespeare’s genius by his masterpieces (think Hamlet and King Lear), forgiving his forgettable plays (I’m looking at you, Timon of Athens and The Merry Wives of Windsor). People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Expectations tend to rise with accomplishment. The better you’re performing, the more you demand of yourself and the less you notice incremental gains. Appreciating progress depends on remembering how your past self would see your current achievements. If you knew five years ago what you’d accomplish now, how proud would you have been?”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Being a sponge is not only a proactive skill—it’s a prosocial skill. Done right, it’s not just about soaking up nutrients that help us grow. It’s also about releasing nutrients to help others grow.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential