Hidden Potential cover

Hidden Potential

The Science of Achieving Greater Things

byAdam M. Grant

★★★★
4.21avg rating — 48,661 ratings

Book Edition Details

ISBN:0593653149
Publisher:Viking
Publication Date:2023
Reading Time:8 minutes
Language:English
ASIN:0593653149

Summary

"Hidden Potential (2023) by Adam Grant challenges the notion that only those born with exceptional natural talent can excel, arguing that progress depends more on character development and how well we learn. Supported by groundbreaking research, it offers a framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations by building character skills and motivational structures, enabling anyone to achieve greater things."

Introduction

What if everything we believe about talent and success is wrong? We live in a world obsessed with natural ability, where we celebrate child prodigies and assume greatness is mostly born, not made. Yet groundbreaking research reveals a startling truth: the people who achieve the most extraordinary things aren't necessarily those who start with the most obvious gifts. They're the ones who travel the greatest distances from their starting points. Consider the story of the Raging Rooks, a chess team from Harlem whose members had only learned the game in sixth grade. Despite facing opponents with a decade of training, these young players defied all expectations to become national champions. Their secret wasn't superior intellect or privileged backgrounds—it was something far more powerful and accessible to all of us. Through rigorous scientific investigation, we discover that hidden potential lies not in our initial abilities, but in our capacity to grow, adapt, and overcome obstacles. This book will transform how you think about achievement, revealing the character skills that fuel extraordinary progress, the support systems that help us overcome setbacks, and the opportunity structures that unlock potential in entire communities.

Character Skills: The Foundation of Growth and Achievement

Character skills are the psychological tools that enable us to learn, adapt, and persevere when faced with challenges. Unlike cognitive abilities or personality traits that remain relatively fixed, character skills are learnable capacities that we can develop throughout our lives. Think of them as the software that runs on the hardware of our brains—they determine how effectively we use whatever natural abilities we possess. The most crucial character skills include the willingness to embrace discomfort, the capacity to absorb new information like a sponge, and the wisdom to pursue excellence rather than perfection. Research consistently shows that these skills matter more for long-term success than raw intelligence or talent. When polyglots start conversations in new languages from day one despite inevitable embarrassment, they're demonstrating the courage to embrace discomfort. When master architect Tadao Ando creates earthquake-resistant buildings by accepting certain imperfections while maintaining uncompromising standards where it truly matters, he's practicing selective perfectionism. What makes character skills so powerful is their compound effect over time. When you learn to seek out challenges that make you uncomfortable, you accelerate your growth rate. When you become skilled at filtering useful feedback from noise, you avoid costly mistakes and identify opportunities others miss. When you focus on progress rather than perfection, you maintain motivation through inevitable setbacks. These skills create a virtuous cycle where each improvement makes the next one easier to achieve. The beauty of character skills lies in their accessibility. While we can't all be born with genius-level IQs or Olympic-caliber physical abilities, we can all learn to be more curious, more resilient, and more willing to step outside our comfort zones. A kindergarten teacher who helps students develop persistence and curiosity can increase their lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars, even if those students never become the smartest kids in the room.

Scaffolding Systems: Creating Support for Sustained Progress

Scaffolding refers to the temporary support structures that enable us to reach heights we couldn't achieve alone. Just as construction workers use scaffolding to build skyscrapers before removing it once the structure is complete, we need psychological and social scaffolding to build our capabilities. The key insight is that effective scaffolding is designed to be gradually removed as we develop the strength to stand on our own. One of the most powerful forms of scaffolding involves transforming practice from drudgery into play. Evelyn Glennie, the world's first solo percussionist who happens to be profoundly deaf, exemplifies this approach. Rather than grinding through monotonous drills, she and her teacher created engaging challenges that made skill development joyful. They varied instruments, introduced creative constraints, and turned every lesson into an adventure. This deliberate play approach maintains what psychologists call harmonious passion—the joy that comes from the process itself rather than external rewards. Sometimes the most effective scaffolding involves taking a step backward to move forward. R.A. Dickey's transformation from a failing baseball pitcher to a Cy Young Award winner illustrates this perfectly. After years of struggling with conventional pitches, he had to completely deconstruct his approach and learn the knuckleball—a pitch so different it required unlearning everything he thought he knew about pitching. This willingness to retreat and find alternative routes often separates those who break through barriers from those who remain trapped by them. The most sophisticated scaffolding involves collaborative support systems. The Golden Thirteen, the first Black naval officers in U.S. history, demonstrate this beautifully. Facing enormous prejudice and an accelerated training program, they created their own support system by teaching each other their respective expertise. Each member became both student and teacher, and their collective success exceeded what any individual could have achieved alone. This shows how scaffolding becomes most powerful when we build it together rather than trying to construct it in isolation.

Opportunity Structures: Building Inclusive Pathways to Success

Opportunity structures are the systems and processes that determine who gets access to resources, recognition, and advancement. Unlike individual character skills or personal scaffolding, opportunity structures operate at the organizational and societal level, shaping the landscape in which talent can emerge and flourish. The most successful systems don't just identify existing talent—they actively cultivate potential in unexpected places. Finland's educational transformation provides a compelling example of how systems can unleash collective potential. In just one generation, they went from educational mediocrity to world leadership by creating a culture of opportunity for all students. Rather than sorting children into winners and losers early on, Finnish schools operate on the assumption that every child has potential worth developing. They achieve this through practices like looping, where teachers stay with the same students for multiple years, building deep relationships that enable truly personalized learning. The most innovative organizations are discovering similar principles in their hiring and team-building practices. Instead of relying solely on credentials and past performance—which often reflect privilege more than potential—they're developing new ways to assess candidates' capacity for growth. Some companies now use work samples that let people demonstrate their abilities in real-time, while others create lattice structures that give good ideas multiple paths to the top rather than allowing single gatekeepers to shut them down. Perhaps most importantly, these opportunity structures recognize that talent is distributed far more widely than opportunity. José Hernandez's journey from migrant farmworker to astronaut illustrates how traditional selection systems can miss extraordinary potential simply because they don't account for the obstacles people have overcome. When NASA finally understood his background—working nights to pay for college, mastering English as a second language, supporting his family while pursuing his dreams—they realized they weren't just getting a qualified engineer, but someone whose determination and resilience had been forged through years of overcoming adversity.

Summary

The most profound insight from studying hidden potential is that achievement isn't about where you start, but how far you travel. We've been asking the wrong questions about success, focusing on initial talent rather than growth trajectory, on credentials rather than character, on performance rather than potential. The science reveals that extraordinary achievement comes from developing specific learnable skills, creating supportive structures during challenging periods, and building systems that recognize talent in all its forms. This shift in perspective has profound implications for how we think about our own development and how we structure our schools, teams, and organizations. Instead of searching for the naturally gifted few, we can focus on creating conditions that help everyone grow. Instead of being limited by our starting points, we can measure ourselves by the distance we've traveled and the obstacles we've overcome. The question isn't whether you have what it takes to achieve greater things—it's whether you're willing to develop the character skills, seek the right scaffolding, and create the opportunities that make extraordinary growth possible.

Book Cover
Hidden Potential

By Adam M. Grant

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