I discovered Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant through a leadership program’s recommended reading list for 2024. Having admired Grant’s insights in Give and Take and Think Again, my respect for him deepened with this latest book.
Grant builds on a powerful premise: potential isn’t defined by where we start but by how far we are willing to go. This resonates deeply with me – I’ve seen friends achieve extraordinary success over the years, surpassing what once seemed unimaginable.
Skills of Character: Getting Better at Getting Better
The starting point to unlock hidden potential is character. The stereotype is to think of character as a set of principles that people acquired and enacted through sheer force of will. We have the opportunity to view character less as a matter of will and more as a set of skills. It is the learned capacity to live by our principles.
Character is often confused with personality. Personality is our predisposition – basic instincts for how we feel, think and act. Character is our capacity to prioritise our values over instincts. If personality is how we respond on a typical day, character is how we show up on a hard day.
- Creatures of Discomfort: Embracing the unbearable awkwardness of learning. Summoning the courage to face discomfort is a character skill – an especially important form of determination. It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon our tried-and-true methods, to put ourself in the ring before we feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts. The best way to seek growth is to embrace, seek and amplify discomfort.
- Human Sponges: Building the Capacity to Absorb and Adapt. Growth is less about how hard we work and more about how well we learn. Absorptive capacity is the ability to recognise, value, assimilate, and apply new information. It depends on two key habits – first is being proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills and perspectives (rather than being reactive), and second is focusing on information that fuels our growth (rather than feeding our ego).
- The Imperfectionists: Finding the Sweet Spot between Flawed and Flawless. Perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. First, they obsess about details that don’t matter. They are so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Second, they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Third, they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realise that the purpose of reviewing their mistakes isn’t to shame their past self. It’s to educate their future self. They key is to shift our attention from impossible ideas to achievable standards – and then adjust those standards over time.
Structures for Motivation: Scaffolding to Overcome Obstacles
- Transforming the Daily Grind: Infusing Passion into Practice. Whereas burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when we are overloaded, bore out is the emotional deadening we feel when we are under-stimulated. Deliberate play and timely breaks are some of the ways to bring joy to our daily work.
- Getting Unstuck: The Roundabout Path to Forward Progress. Skills don’t grow at a steady pace. Improving is like driving up a mountain. As we climb higher and higher, the road gets steeper and steeper, and our gains are smaller and smaller. When we run out of momentum, we start to stall. To move forward, we may have to head back down the mountain. Once we have retreated far enough, we can find another way – a path that will allow us to build the momentum to reach the peak.
- Defying Gravity: The Art of Flying by Our Bootstraps. When we are facing a daunting task, we need both competence and confidence. One way to build competence to teach what we want to learn. We remember it better when we recall it and we understand better after we explain it. We can build confidence by coaching – that is offering encouragement to others that we need for ourselves.
Systems of Opportunity: Opening Doors and Windows
- Every Child Gets Ahead: Designing Schools to Bring Out the Best in Students. Changing the school culture from winner take all to opportunity for all can create an education system that helps all students reach their potential.
- Mining for Gold: Unearthing Collective Intelligence in Teams. Collective intelligence is a group’s capacity to solve problems together. It depends less on people’s cognitive skills than their prosocial skills. Collective intelligence raises as team members recognise one another’s strengths, develop strategies for leveraging them, and motivate one another to align their efforts in pursuit of a shared purpose. Unleashing hidden potential is about more than having the best pieces – it’s about having the best glue. Meetings are hijacked by people who talk and some of the best ideas may never be heard. To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we are better off shifting to brain-writing where everyone write down their ideas before they are taken up for discussion. Instead of a hierarchical organizational structure that is based on a ladder system, building a lattice system where employees have access to multiple leaders can unlock hidden ideas among introverts.
- Diamonds in the Rough: Discovering Uncut Gems in Job Interviews and College Admissions. Instead of looking at past experience or past performance, we should find out what they have learned and how well they can learn.
Hidden Potential challenges the notion that talent is innate, emphasizing instead the power of character, motivation, and opportunity in unlocking growth. Adam Grant explores how embracing discomfort, fostering adaptability, and rethinking perfection can accelerate personal development. He also highlights structural changes—both in organizations and education—that can help individuals and teams achieve more than they ever imagined. The book is a compelling guide to transforming potential into performance.