Hidden Potential | Adam Grant

Everyone has hidden potential. This book is about how we unlock it. There’s a widely held belief that greatness is mostly born—not made. That leads us to celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But you don’t have to be a wunderkind to accomplish great things. My goal is to illuminate how we can all rise to achieve greater things.

With the right opportunity and motivation to learn, anyone can build the skills to achieve greater things. Potential is not a matter of where you start, but of how far you travel. We need to focus less on starting points and more on distance traveled.

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

It’s often said that where there’s a will, there’s a way. What we overlook is that when people can’t see a path, they stop dreaming of the destination. To ignite their will, we need to show them the way. That’s what scaffolding can do.

When we admire great thinkers, doers, and leaders, we often focus narrowly on their performance. That leads us to elevate the people who have accomplished the most and overlook the ones who have achieved the most with the least. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed.

Character doesn’t set like plaster—it retains its plasticity.

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.

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

Going Out of Style

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.

In the words of the great psychologist Ted Lasso, “If you’re comfortable, you’re doin’ it wrong.”

“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.”

If we wait until we feel ready to take on a new challenge, we might never pursue it all. There may not come a day when we wake up and suddenly feel prepared. We become prepared by taking the leap anyway.

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

A do-it-yourself approach can be effective for certain kinds of learning. If you’re doing a relatively mechanical task like throwing the javelin, you can make great strides by absorbing objective techniques. But in many walks of life, becoming a sponge depends on filtering more subjective guidance from others. As I learned early in my career, that feedback may not even arrive at all—and gathering it is not as simple as it seems.

Getting the Cold Hard Truth

There is a crack, a crack in everything

 That’s how the light gets in

 —Leonard Cohen

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. But aiming for your best is not the best alternative. Across hundreds of experiments, people who are encouraged to do their best perform worse—and learn less—than those who are randomly assigned to goals that are specific and difficult.

Do your best is the wrong cure for perfectionism. It leaves the target too ambiguous to channel effort and gauge momentum. You’re not sure what you’re aiming for or whether you’ve made meaningful progress. 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.

Pivoting is a popular concept in Silicon Valley, where it’s often said that done is better than perfect. To rapidly iterate and improve, entrepreneurs and engineers are advised to build a minimum viable product. But excellence is a higher standard: for me, that means aiming for a minimum lovable product.

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.

The person you’re competing with is your past self, and the bar you’re raising is for your future self. You’re not aiming for perfect—you’re shooting for better. The only way to win is to grow.

Without enjoyment, potential stays hidden.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

 —George Eliot

When you’re stuck, it’s usually because you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’re taking the wrong path, or you’re running out of fuel. 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. It might be unfamiliar, winding, and bumpy. Progress rarely happens in a straight line; it typically unfolds in loops.

Before you can speed up, you have to slow down. It takes time to learn the keys by heart.

Psychologists find that achieving a sense of progress doesn’t require huge gains. Fuel can come from small wins. When you make headway, even if you’ve turned off the main road, it reminds you that forward movement is possible. Instead of feeling daunted by the long road ahead, you’re ready to make the next turn.

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. When we treat barriers as challenges to conquer, we rise to the occasion.

In Finnish schools, a popular mantra is “We can’t afford to waste a brain.” This ethos makes their educational culture distinct.

Research demonstrates that when organizations have cultures that prize results above relationships, if they have a leader who puts people first, they actually achieve greater performance gains. When everyone is scrambling to make a rapid rescue, you want someone in charge who cares about everyone.

Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.

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.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles . . . overcome while trying to succeed.

—Booker T. Washington

When we confuse past performance with future potential, we miss out on people whose achievements have involved overcoming major obstacles. We need to consider how steep their slope was, how far they’ve climbed, and how they’ve grown along the way. The test of a diamond in the rough is not whether it shines from the start, but how it responds to heat or pressure.

The key question is not how long people have done a job. It’s how well they can learn to do a job.

If natural talent determines where people start, learned character affects how far they go.

We all know that performance depends on more than ability—it’s also a function of degree of difficulty. How capable you appear to be is often a reflection of how hard your task is.

BUILD CHARACTER SKILLS

Unleash hidden potential through character skills. The people who grow the most aren’t the smartest people in the room. They’re the ones who strive to make themselves and others smarter. When opportunity doesn’t knock, look for ways to build a door—or climb through a window.

A. Become a creature of discomfort

Don’t be afraid to try a new style. Instead of focusing on the way you like to learn, embrace the discomfort of matching the method to the task. Reading and writing are usually best for critical thinking. Listening is ideal for understanding emotions, and doing is better for remembering information.

Use it or never gain it at all. Put yourself in the ring before you feel ready. You don’t need to get comfortable before you can practice your skills—your comfort grows as you practice your skills. As polyglots show us, even experts have to start from day one.

Seek discomfort. Instead of just striving to learn, aim to feel uncomfortable. Pursuing discomfort sets you on a faster path to growth. If you want to get it right, it has to first feel wrong.

Set a mistake budget. To encourage trial and error, set a goal for the minimum number of mistakes you want to make per day or per week. When you expect to stumble, you ruminate about it less—and improve more.

B. Become a sponge

Increase your absorptive capacity. 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.

Ask for advice, not feedback. 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?”

Figure out which sources to trust. Decide what information is worth absorbing—and which should be filtered out. Listen to the coaches who have relevant expertise (credibility), know you well (familiarity), and want what’s best for you (care).

Be the coach you hope to have. Demonstrate that honesty is the highest expression of loyalty. Model effective coaching by being forthcoming in what you say and respectful in how you say it. Show people how easy it is to hear a hard truth from someone who believes in their potential and cares about their success.

C. Become an imperfectionist

Strive for excellence, not perfection. 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?

Enlist judges to gauge your progress. To figure out whether you’ve created a minimum lovable product, ask a few people to independently rate your work on a scale of 0 to 10. Whatever score you receive, ask them how you can get closer to 10. Be sure to set an acceptable as well as aspirational result —and don’t forget that to get high scores on your top priorities, you may have to be satisfied with lower scores on the others.

Be your own last judge. It’s better to disappoint others than to disappoint yourself. Before you release something into the world, assess whether it represents you well. If this was the only work people saw of yours, would you be proud of it?

Engage in mental time travel. 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?

SET UP SCAFFOLDING TO OVERCOME OBSTACLES

Look outward for the right support at the right time. Every challenge requires its own support. The support you need isn’t permanent—it’s a temporary structure that gives you a foothold or a lift so you can keep climbing on your own.

Turn practice into play

Turn the daily grind into a source of daily joy. To maintain harmonious passion, design practice around deliberate play. Set up fun skill-building challenges—like Evelyn Glennie learning to play a Bach piece on a snare drum, Steph Curry trying to score twenty-one points in a minute, or medical residents honing their nonverbal communication skills by using nonsense words in improv comedy games.

Compete against yourself. Measure your progress over time, not against an opponent. The risk of competing against others is that you can win without getting better. When you compete against yourself, the only way to win is to grow.

Don’t hold yourself hostage to a fixed routine. It’s possible to avoid burnout and boreout by introducing novelty and variety into your practice. You can alternate between different skills you’re practicing or switch up the tools and methods you use to learn those skills. Even small tweaks can make a big difference.

Be proactive about rest and recovery. Don’t wait until you’re burned out or bored out to take breaks—build them into your schedule. Taking time off helps to sustain harmonious passion, unlock fresh ideas, and deepen learning. Relaxing is not a waste of time; it’s an investment in well-being.