How can you tap into your potential? What should learning be like?
Adam Grant contends that to accomplish great things, you need to spend a lot of time honing your skills. To do this, you need to engage in fun, yet uncomfortable practice.
Let’s explore this idea more deeply.
Make Learning Fun
According to Grant, to tap into 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.
Make Learning 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.
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.
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.
