#885 - Adam Grant - How To Overcome Your Fear Of Failure & Unlock Your Potential

Many people think that to accomplish something truly great, you must be one of a few “gifted” geniuses born with extraordinary talent. However, psychologist Adam Grant argues that the world’s top performers weren’t extraordinary geniuses from birth; rather, they built their skills over time using the right techniques. By employing these techniques, you too can become the type of person who achieves wildly ambitious goals.

In this guide, you’ll learn why you have to practice in a way that’s both fun and uncomfortable to maximize your personal growth. Additionally, you’ll discover three ways to tap into your potential by connecting with the right people. In our commentary, we’ll supplement Grant’s advice for how to reach your full potential with ideas from books on personal growth like Peak and The Motivation Myth. We’ll also expand on Grant’s information about the potential of organizations with tips from management books like Rework and No Rules Rules.

Peak explores how peak performers in music, athletics, and other fields develop their abilities. Through purposeful practice and the development of effective mental representations, nearly anyone can become an expert in whatever field they choose. The book shatters many illusions about expertise—chiefly, that it comes from genius or “natural” talent. Instead, it comes from rigorous practice and a willingness to improve slowly over time through a series of baby steps. By embracing these principles, you can become whatever it is you wish to be. Your future is entirely in your hands.

In Talent Is Overrated, business journalist and speaker Geoff Colvin explores the origins of excellent performance—how some people can perform at a globally impressive level while the average person falls far short. Most people attribute this excellence to talent (an inherent high level of ability in a specific area), but Colvin says there’s little evidence supporting this theory. Instead, he says the quality of a person’s performance depends on how much they practice: Excellent performers achieve amazing results by practicing drastically more than average.

In this guide, we’ll first cover how shifting your mindset from talent to training can help you excel. Then, we’ll explore Colvin’s definition of practice, how it works, and how you can implement it in your life. In our commentary, we’ll look at the psychology behind Colvin’s ideas. We’ll also compare his ideas with those of other experts, like Malcolm Gladwell, and with the experience of excellent performers, like former Olympian Matthew Syed.

Many successful leaders and businesspeople are lauded as “great geniuses,” but psychologist Angela Duckworth argues that talent and intelligence matter less to success than grit: the personality trait behind perseverance, hard work, and goal-setting. In Grit, she explores what grit is, where it comes from, how it drives success, and how you can develop it.

Duckworth is primarily interested in how to raise gritty kids, and her insights have inspired parents and educators around the globe since the book’s publication in 2016. However, she believes that adults, too, can develop grit, and she lays out specific, measurable ways to do so.

Her work has fueled debates about which matters more—talent or effort. In this guide, we examine these controversies and consider insights from other psychologists who either support Duckworth’s ideas or reveal nuances of them.

Are you feeling unmotivated in your job and life? Are you finding your current goals unsatisfying to keep working toward? Drive believes your work structure is to blame. Historically, employers have motivated employees through financial rewards and kept workers on a tight leash. These principles worked well when people were primarily working in assembly lines, but today’s creative work demands more: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

If you haven’t thought about your inevitable death today, Jodi Wellman suggests it’s time to start. In her book You Only Die Once, Wellman champions the principle of memento mori—the intentional recognition of our mortality—as the key to leading a better life. According to Wellman, regularly meditating on your mortality motivates you to live more deliberately and meaningfully, balancing vitality and meaning.

In this guide, we’ll explain why Wellman argues that contemplating death will help you live a better life. We’ll then discuss what it means to live a good life and how to reflect critically on the life you’re living, before outlining Wellman’s steps to improve the quality of your life right away. We’ll also provide additional commentary on the history of memento mori, different cultural perspectives on death, and insights from other experts in positive psychology, including Martin Seligman (Flourish) and Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning).

Many people want to be more innovative. But how do you generate good ideas? And do you execute to make them real? Originals studies the habits and practices of innovators so you too can innovate. You’ll learn the most important factor in generating more good ideas, how procrastination can actually help you generate better ideas, and how to rally an organization to your new idea.

Do you constantly start ambitious projects only to run out of steam halfway through? You’re not alone. Although it’s easy to be enthusiastic about your goals while setting them, many people find that this motivation fades quickly. But it doesn’t have to—in Finish What You Start, psychology expert Peter Hollins explains how to develop mindsets and habits that will empower you to follow through on your life goals.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to spur yourself into action by identifying your existing sources of motivation and designing an environment that constantly reminds you of them. You’ll also discover valuable tips for resisting distractions and defeating procrastination. In our commentary, we’ll add to Hollins’s advice for maximizing your motivation with tips from books like Drive and High Performance Habits. We’ll also draw on books like Atomic Habits and The Willpower Instinct to explain some of the neurobiology behind sustained motivation.

Usually, when we see someone fabulously successful, we attribute her success to skill. But skill will generally only earn a person moderate success. Wild success, the kind that comes with outsized wealth and lasting fame, is usually due to luck: a fortunate rare event plus a lack of negative rare events.

In Fooled by Randomness, former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb examines the outsized role luck plays in success, how and why people don’t generally understand luck, and how we can accommodate randomness in our lives once we’re aware of it. Taleb primarily focuses on examples from the world of investing, but his principles are applicable to any field ruled by unpredictability (such as economics or politics) and demonstrate how we’re fooled by randomness in many aspects of our lives.