Hidden Potential Quotes

“Some sea sponges can live more than 2,000 years.7 Despite having bodies that are soft and porous, they have skeletal structures that are strong and durable.8 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:9 cells that allow a new sponge to develop once conditions improve. This capacity to absorb, filter, and adapt enables sponges to grow and thrive. And it’s a capacity that matters a great deal for humans too. 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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“When Benny is ready to start learning a new language, he sets an ambitious goal: to make at least 200 mistakes a day. He measures his progress by the number of errors he makes. “The more mistakes you make, the faster you will improve and the less they will bother you,” he observes. “The best cure to feeling uncomfortable about making mistakes is to make more mistakes.” Along the way, Benny has put himself in some awkward positions. He’s introduced himself with the wrong gender, said he was attracted to a bus, and accidentally complimented someone for having a nice arse. But he doesn’t beat himself up, because his goal is to make mistakes. Even when he fumbles, people generally commend him for making an effort. And that motivates him to keep trying. Psychologists call that cycle learned industriousness. When you get praised for making an effort, the feeling of effort itself starts to take on secondary reward properties.33 Instead of having to push yourself to keep trying, you feel pulled toward it.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“if we avoid the discomfort of learning techniques that don’t come easily to us, we limit our own growth.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Many people associate procrastination with laziness. But psychologists find that procrastination is not a time management problem—it’s an emotion management problem.14 When you procrastinate, you’re not avoiding effort. You’re avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up. Sooner or later, though, you realize that you’re also avoiding getting where you want to go.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential

“Instead of seeking feedback, you’re better off asking for advice. Feedback tends to focus on how well you did last time. Advice shifts attention to how you can do better next time.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“people fail to benefit from constructive criticism because they overreact and under-correct. Mellody made a resolution to do the opposite: she told herself that champions adapt.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

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

“What we overlook is that when people can’t see a path, they stop dreaming of the destination.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“When teams were relatively reactive, waiting for direction from above, extraverts drove the best results. They asserted their visions and motivated teams to follow their lead. But when teams were proactive, bringing many ideas and suggestions to the table, it was introverts who led them to achieve greater things. The more reserved leaders came across as more receptive to input from below, which gave them access to better ideas and left their teams more motivated. With a team of sponges, the best leader is not the person who talks the most, but the one who listens best.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. 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: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“there’s another key ingredient for intrinsic motivation. “Reading is the basic skill for all subjects,” Kari explained. “If you don’t have the motivation to read, you can’t study any other subject.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

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

“We’re often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice. 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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“She also observed a fascinating paradox at the intersection of the tutor effect and the curse of knowledge: you can learn by teaching, but once you’ve learned them well, it can become harder to teach them.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily how you learn best. Sometimes you even learn better in the mode that makes you the most uncomfortable, because you have to work harder at it. This is the first form of courage: being brave enough to embrace discomfort and throw your learning style out the window.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

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

“boreout is an actual term in psychology. Whereas burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when you’re overloaded, boreout is the emotional deadening you feel when you’re under-stimulated.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

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

“When we evaluate people, there’s nothing more rewarding than finding a diamond in the rough. Our job isn’t to apply the pressure that brings out their brilliance. It’s to make sure we don’t overlook those who have already faced that pressure—and recognize their potential to shine.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“A candidate with 20 years of experience on a resume may have just repeated the same year of experience 20 times. So, you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience . . . and that experience reveals little about your potential.[*] The key question is not how long people have done a job. It’s how well they can learn to do a job.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“In many cases, unproven ideas carry too much risk and uncertainty. Managers know that if they bet on a bad idea, it might be a career-limiting move, but if they pass on a good idea, it’s unlikely anyone will ever find out. And even if managers are supportive of an idea, if they perceive leaders above them as opposed to it, they tend to see it as a losing proposition. All it takes is one gatekeeper to close off a new frontier. That kind of hierarchy is set up to reject ideas with hidden potential. You can see it clearly in the tech world. Xerox programmers pioneered the personal computer but struggled to get managers to commercialize it. An engineer at Kodak invented the first digital camera but couldn’t persuade management to prioritize it.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Collective intelligence is best served by a different kind of leader. The people to promote are the ones with the prosocial skills to put the mission above their ego—and team cohesion above personal glory. They know that the goal isn’t to be the smartest person in the room; it’s to make the entire room smarter.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“It’s well documented that a single bad apple can spoil the barrel: when even one individual fails to act prosocially, it’s enough to make a team dumb and dumber.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“In a meta-analysis of 22 studies, Anita and her colleagues discovered that collective intelligence depends less on people’s cognitive skills than their prosocial skills. The best teams have the most team players—people who excel at collaborating with others.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“refrain among Finnish teachers captures it nicely: “The work of a child is to play.” In the United States, play is practiced in Montessori schools. In Finland, it’s mandated in the common core for all primary schools. The Finnish government insists that children play, because their policymakers understand that play fosters a love of learning. That’s a value best developed early on—and one that ultimately builds both better cognitive skills and better character skills.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Benjamin Franklin famously observed that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Dozens of experiments have shown that early interventions can help students facing disadvantages and learning disabilities make leaps in math and reading.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Finland loves to loop, and I was unprepared for how far they take it. It’s common for Finnish elementary schoolers to have the same teacher for multiple grades—not just two years in a row, but up to six straight years. Instead of just specializing in their subjects, teachers also get to specialize in their students. Their role evolves from instructor to coach and mentor. Along with delivering content, they’re able to help students progress toward their goals and navigate social and emotional challenges.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Students who made significant progress didn’t have better teachers. They just happened to have the same teacher for two years in a row. The practice is called looping. Instead of staying in the same grade and teaching new students each year, teachers move up a grade with their students. The benefits of looping aren’t specific to North Carolina. A separate team of economists replicated the study with nearly a million elementary and middle schoolers in Indiana—and found the same results.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Chetty’s team discovered 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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things