Are geniuses born with their gifts? What’s the book Hidden Potential about?
A common assumption is that talent is something that you’re born with. However, Adam Grant’s book Hidden Potential says that you can tap into your potential by building your skills and connecting with other people.
Read below for a brief Hidden Potential book overview.
Overview of Hidden Potential
People often assume that to accomplish something truly great, you must be one of a few “gifted” geniuses born with extraordinary talent. However, psychologist Adam Grant argues in his book Hidden Potential that the world’s top performers weren’t extraordinary geniuses from birth; rather, they built their skills over time using the right techniques. The capacity to achieve isn’t rare—everyone has more potential to accomplish great things than they think they do.
Grant is an organizational psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He’s written a number of best-selling books exploring the secrets to living a rewarding and creative professional life, including Give and Take, which is about the power of generosity in the workplace, and Originals, which is about how to generate and act upon contrarian, world-changing ideas. He also hosts the podcasts Re:Thinking and WorkLife.
How to Tap Into Your Potential
Grant contends that to accomplish great things, you need to spend a lot of time honing your skills by engaging in fun, yet uncomfortable practice. Let’s explore this idea more deeply.
Learning Should Be Fun
According to Grant, to maximize your potential, you need to cultivate the passion and playfulness required to have fun while building your skills. Why? Because becoming a master at anything requires you to devote countless hours of your life to practice. If you don’t enjoy yourself while practicing, at some point you’ll get burnt out and lose the energy and motivation to continue toward your goals.
Grant offers two ways to make your practice more fun. First, find a way to add variety to your routine. It’ll be much harder for you to get bored or become demotivated if you free yourself to switch between several kinds of practice in a given session. Frequently varying your practice also increases your ability to retain what you learn.
Second, find a way to track your performance and compare it to what you’ve done in the past. Invent rules for tracking your “points” and constantly seek to beat your high score. The pressure to “win” motivates you to focus and try your best during practice, accelerating your learning.
Grant explains that to add enough variety and exciting performance-tracking to your practice, you’ll typically need to completely reimagine your practice routine. For example, say you’re trying to get better at delivering presentations at work. Instead of repeatedly practicing in the mirror, you might decide to alternate between three kinds of practice:
- To improve your speaking skills, you read the scripts of TED Talks aloud and make as few mistakes as possible.
- To get better at organizing persuasive arguments, you start a competitive debate club with your friends and see how many debates you can win.
- To boost your confidence, you go out to bars or events and see how many strangers you can talk to in one night.
Learning Should Be Uncomfortable
Just because you learn more when you’re having fun doesn’t mean that the path to your full potential will be a walk in the park. Grant notes that the most effective learning is fun, but it’s also uncomfortable.
He contends that the number one determinant of whether someone reaches their full potential is their ability to stay focused on their goals when it’s uncomfortable to do so. If you focus on strengthening this ability, it’ll pay off more than any other skills or expertise. This is because uncomfortable obstacles are inevitable on the path to any major goal. Without this skill, you’ll give up as soon as you encounter these obstacles.
For instance, starting a business is a difficult, uncomfortable process, but if you care about your goal of providing for yourself and your loved ones, you’ll be able to push through this discomfort and eventually succeed. In contrast, if you don’t know how to tolerate this discomfort, you might endlessly procrastinate instead of taking action to launch your business.
Grant breaks down the practice of staying focused on your goals into strategies for coping with the three distinct forms of discomfort on the path to mastery. Let’s discuss these kinds of discomfort and explain how to overcome them.
Discomfort #1: Making Mistakes
The first kind of discomfort you must overcome to stay focused on your goals is making painful mistakes, argues Grant. Most learners do whatever they can to avoid awkward, uncomfortable failures when acquiring a new skill. However, doing so sets them up for inevitable failure. Why? To learn anything, you have to practice it before you’re good at it. This is naturally uncomfortable and sometimes downright embarrassing, so most learners avoid this kind of practice. They prepare indefinitely or try to teach themselves solely through abstract theory, in hopes that they can become competent without trying and failing along the way.
Instead, Grant recommends taking the opposite approach. Put your skills into practice as soon as possible: The very first day you start learning how to do something, try your best to successfully do it. When you inevitably make mistakes, take each one as an opportunity to learn what you’re doing wrong. Make it a habit to expand the most uncomfortable parts of your training—the parts where you make the most mistakes—rather than minimize or avoid them. For example, if you’re learning how to draw and feel embarrassed because the faces and hands you draw always look bad, challenge yourself by drawing more faces and hands.
Additionally, the more mistakes you make and learn from, the more comfortable you’ll become with making further mistakes. If you can connect your feelings of discomfort to the knowledge that you’re making progress, you’ll discover that the effort you’re putting in is satisfying in itself, even if it continuously results in awkwardness and failure. This mindset is called learned industriousness.
Discomfort #2: Acknowledging Your Flaws
The second kind of discomfort you must overcome to stay focused on your goals is acknowledging your flaws. Grant explains that many people suffer from perfectionism, which counterintuitively prevents them from doing their best work. When you aim to create flawless work, you exhaust yourself trying to fix unimportant problems that don’t need to be fixed.
Perfectionism also causes you to emotionally punish yourself for your mistakes. This self-flagellation makes you more afraid of making mistakes, which in turn teaches you to avoid mistakes rather than learn from them. As we’ve discussed, trying to avoid mistakes is one of the most common ways people stunt their personal growth.
Grant argues that perfection shouldn’t be your ultimate goal. It’s impossible to create perfect work, he says. Once you embrace this fact, you can direct your efforts strategically rather than putting maximum effort into everything. Focus on improving the aspects of your work that will have the greatest impact on its overall quality, and let go of everything else.
Your work doesn’t need to be perfect to be groundbreaking; it just needs to have some excellent qualities. For instance, when Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, critics derided it for being far too expensive and locked onto AT&T’s slow 2G network. If Apple had obsessed over optimizing their supply chain to lower the price of the iPhone, or tried to build their own perfect cellular network, they might have wasted millions of dollars chasing these unnecessary and potentially impossible goals. Instead, the iPhone’s user-friendly touchscreen, multitude of functions, and sleekly designed software were excellent enough for it to sell six million units in its first year and revolutionize the smartphone industry.
Discomfort #3: Proving Yourself Wrong
The third kind of discomfort you must overcome to stay focused on your goals is proving yourself wrong. Grant contends that to reach your full potential, you have to actively seek out errors in your thinking and identify aspects of your work that you could do better.
To do this, first take responsibility for your own growth, advises Grant. Many people don’t bother trying to learn how to improve—when they want to do something, they wait for someone else to show them how to do it. If you want to tap into your potential, this isn’t good enough. Aim to educate yourself rather than passively accept whatever information you happen to encounter.
To further discover how to improve at a task, become comfortable with humility, recommends Grant. Even when someone is actively trying to get better, they’ll often make the mistake of reflexively denying or ignoring information that challenges their ego. Learning that you’re totally wrong about something can be uncomfortable and embarrassing, but it’s a necessary step if you want to grow.
According to Grant, the best way to prove yourself wrong is by getting advice from experts who know more than you about what you’re trying to do—a strategy we’ll discuss in the next section.
How Other People Can Tap Into Your Potential
So far, we’ve explored various ways that fun yet uncomfortable training can fuel your personal growth. That said, however you optimize your training, reaching your full potential is much more difficult when you try to do it alone. Grant explains that other people can assist your personal growth by giving you guidance, inspiring a sense of purpose in you, and working with you as a team. Let’s explore these three benefits in more detail.
Benefit #1: Guidance
Grant notes that your ability to teach yourself has limits. Often, you’ll need guidance from others, especially if you’re trying to learn to do something complex where “success” is subjective, like composing a symphony or starting a political career.
To ensure that the advice you receive will actually help you, choose your guides carefully. Find someone who knows what they’re talking about, is familiar enough with you and your work to give an accurate assessment, and truly wants you to succeed. Otherwise, you could end up with bad advice, advice that doesn’t fit you, or advice that isn’t intended to be helpful.
Benefit #2: Purpose
Another way that others can help you reach your full potential is by giving you a motivating sense of purpose, according to Grant. When you feel like someone else is relying on you to achieve something, you can reframe the situation in a way that gives you strength. Instead of second-guessing your skills and worrying about the possibility of failure, you resolve to try your best, no matter what. Ultimately, this will help you do better work. For example, an entrepreneur will find it easier to put their heart in their business if they believe doing so will help them provide enough money for their children to go to any college they want.
Furthermore, Grant contends that when someone doubts your ability to accomplish something, the desire to prove them wrong can also be a powerful source of motivation. As long as you don’t let them undermine your confidence, you’ll naturally put in more effort and perform better than if there hadn’t been naysayers at all.
Benefit #3: Teamwork
Finally, being on a team can help you reach your full potential, argues Grant. In a team that’s centered on a unifying goal, everyone can help the other members by teaching skills in their particular area of expertise. When you’re on a team like this, you not only learn from a variety of skilled people but also enhance your skills by teaching others. When you explain something to someone else, you re-examine and reinforce your understanding of it, leading to significant personal growth.
Similarly, teaching someone how to achieve something makes you feel more capable of achieving your own goals. When you successfully teach someone, it’s proof that you know what you’re doing, and internalizing this proof helps you feel more confident. Research even shows that giving encouraging advice is more motivating than receiving such encouragement from others.
How Organizations Can Tap Into Their Potential
So far, we’ve discussed how each of us can reach our full potential through smart practice and by connecting with others. We’ll conclude this guide by exploring what organizations can do to achieve more on a larger scale. Here are two tips that organizations can use to identify and utilize all their workers’ potential.
Tip #1: Encourage Good Ideas From Everyone in the Organization
Grant argues that if organizations want to achieve the best results, they need to encourage and empower all their employees to share their best ideas with workers who can act on them. In most organizations, however, this doesn’t happen. When an employee suggests a way to improve the organization, their boss will typically ignore it. Why? They may feel threatened by the idea that their subordinate could offer better ideas than them. Alternatively, they may worry that if the idea fails, they’ll be held responsible.
To fix this problem, Grant proposes a system where employees can freely share ideas with multiple leaders across the organization, increasing the odds that someone will approve and implement those ideas. In this system, even if many high-ranking managers reject your idea, all it takes is one “yes” to get your idea tested and implemented. Consequently, the organization acts on many more valuable ideas, allowing it to rapidly innovate and improve.
Tip #2: Hire on the Basis of Potential, Not Superficial Success
Grant contends that when organizations are hiring, they often overlook the applicants with the most potential to help them achieve their goals. This happens for two reasons:
First, organizations typically place too much value on prestigious college degrees, which Grant suggests are poor predictors of future performance. Studies show that on a technical level, there are few differences between the work done by graduates of elite universities and the work done by graduates of less prestigious ones.
Furthermore, job postings that require college degrees exclude large segments of the workforce. Many people gain valuable, employable skills outside of college. For instance, they might learn directly from experts or teach themselves.
Second, Grant argues that organizations often make the mistake of judging candidates solely by their prior work experience: how long they’ve worked a similar job or how well they did at that job. However, this experience doesn’t necessarily translate to success in a new role—the years someone has worked don’t prove that they learned anything during that time. Additionally, you can only judge candidates by the quality of their past work if you’re hiring them for a job that requires those exact same skills. Often, organizations falsely assume that if an applicant did well in their previous job, they’ll similarly thrive in any job.
