I recently read “Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things” by Adam Grant. Here’s the quotes I found most interesting. If you like them, buy the book.
“If they were singled out by their coaches, it was not for unusual aptitude but unusual motivation. That motivation wasn’t innate; it tended to begin with a coach or teacher who made learning fun.” (5)
“People who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They’re usually freaks of nurture.” (6)
“Personality is your predisposition-your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.
If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.
Personality is not your destiny-it’s your tendency. Character skills enable you to transcend that tendency to be true to your principles.” (20)
“*If you’re aiming to improve your social and emotional intelligence, you’re probably better off paying attention to audio than visual cues. Research reveals that if you can hear the voice of a friend or stranger, closing your eyes doesn’t make you any less accurate in reading their emotions, We re con stantly misreading facial expressions and misinterpreting body language. The tone of voice is a more accurate, purer signal of what people are feeling.” (32)
“Surprisingly, we’re better off actively seeking out discomfort. Comfort in learning is a paradox. You can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until you’ve practiced it enough to master it. But practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it.” (33)
“Once people saw discomfort as a mark of growth, they were motivated to stretch behind their comfort zones.” (34)
“The best cure to feeling uncomfortable about making mistakes is to make more mistakes.” (40)
“If we wait until we feel ready to take on a new challenge, we might never pursue it all. There may not come a day when we wake up and suddenly feel prepared. We become prepared by taking the leap anyway.” (41)
“Growth is less about how hard you work than how well you learn.” (44)
“Being polite is withholding feedback to make someone feel good today. Being kind is being candid about how they can get better tomorrow.” (54)
“Instead of seeking feedback, you’re better off asking for advice. Feedback tends to focus on how well you did last time. Advice shifts attention to how you can do better next time.” (55)
“Tolerating flaws isn’t just something novices need to do—it’s part of becoming an expert and continuing to gain mastery. The more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable.” (65)
“The real world is far more ambiguous. Once you leave the predictable, controllable cocoon of academic exams, the desire to find the “correct” answer can backfire.” (67)
“In their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re 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. Two: 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. Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.” (67)
“traveling great distances depends on recognizing that perfection is a mirage-and learning to tolerate the right imperfections.” (68)
“Do your best is the wrong cure for perfectionism. It leaves the target too ambiguous to channel effort and gauge momentum. You’re not sure what you’re aiming for or whether you’ve made meaningful progress. The ideal foil for perfectionism is an objective that’s precise and challenging.” (73)
“if I wanted to get closer to right, it had to feel wrong.” (74)
“Eric likes to ask two questions: Did you make yourself better today? Did you make someone else better today? If the answer to either question is yes, it was a good day.” (74)
“It turns out that when people assess your skills, they put more weight on your peaks than on your troughs.” (75)
“People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?” (75)
“My proudest moment, though, was when Eric told me I’d gotten further with less talent than any diver he’d coached.” (75)
“excellence is a higher standard: for me, that means aiming for a minimum lovable product.” (77)
“one of the best ways to gauge the value of other people’s judgments is to look for convergence between them. If one person raises a red flag, it might be idiosyncratic. If a dozen people independently have the same issue, it’s more likely to be an objective problem. You have inter-rater reliability.” (77)
“A great deal of research shows that perfectionists tend to define excellence on other people’s terms. This focus on creating a flawless image in the eyes of others is a risk factor for depression, anxiety, burnout, and other mental health challenges.” (79)
“Before releasing something into the world, it’s worth turning to one final judge: you. If this was the only work people saw of yours, would you be proud of it?” (80)
“One: Scaffolding generally comes from other people. It would never have occurred to me to ward off unwelcome images by playing Tetris-the idea came from people with relevant experience and expertise. When our circumstances threaten to overpower us, instead of only looking inward, we can turn outward to mentors, teachers, coaches, role models, or peers. The scaffolding they provide looks and feels different depending on the type of challenge we’re facing, but it has the same effect: giving us a foothold or a boost.
Two: Scaffolding is tailored to the obstacle in your path. When psychologists suggest Tetris, it’s because it has a specific benefit: it changes how your brain constructs mental imagery. Brain scans suggest that Tetris blocks intrusive images by activating our visual-spatial circuits-we’re too busy processing falling shapes to attend to the threat of unnerving images. Different kinds of games, like trivia, don’t reduce the flashbacks.
Tetris is effective scaffolding because it helps you bypass a particular challenge.
Three: Scaffolding comes at a pivotal point in time. It doesn’t do any good to play Tetris before you watch the movie-there’s no imagery yet to disrupt. The structure becomes useful after the disconcerting scene, and the critical period seems to be the next 24 hours. If you wait longer, the memory has already consolidated, so you need to first reactivate the memory of the scene before you turn to Tetris to block it.
Four: Scaffolding is temporary. It doesn’t take a lifetime of Tetris therapy to recover from a horror movie. Playing for just ten minutes is enough to interfere with memory consolidation and curtail flashbacks.
Once you’ve gotten the support you need, you’re no longer dependent on it—you can move forward without it.” (84-85)
“Continually varying the task and raising the bar made learning a joy.
“There was never a distinction between fun and hard work,” she tells me.
“I was like a sponge.” (89)
“We’re often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice. But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind. It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.” (89)
“Research demonstrates that people who are obsessed with their work put in longer hours yet fail to perform any better than their peers. They’re more likely to fall victim to both physical and emotional exhaustion. The monotony of deliberate practice puts them at risk for burnout-and for boreout. Yes, boreout is an actual term in psychology. Whereas burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when you’re overloaded, boreout is the emotional deadening you feel when you’re under-stimulated.” (90)
“Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome. You’re no longer practicing under the specter of should. I should be studying. I’m supposed to practice. You’re drawn into a web of want. I feel like studying. I’m excited to practice.” (91)
“Deliberate play has become especially popular in sports. Extensive evidence shows that athletes who specialize early in a single sport tend to peak quickly and then flame out.” (93)
“In a small experiment in Brazil, sports psychologists compared deliberate play and deliberate practice as strategies for teaching basketball to young players. Some of the athletes spent over half their training time in deliberate practice. Their coaches took them through dribbling, passing, and shooting drills with regular feedback, with and without defenders.
The remaining athletes spent nearly three quarters of their training time in deliberate play. To develop their skills, their coaches designed games instead of drills. Sometimes players had a teammate who was allowed to pass but not shoot. Other times they played at a disadvantage—one against two, or three against four. Several months later, the psychologists tested the basketball intelligence and creativity of both groups, measuring their ability to move to open spots on the court and make passes that eluded defenders. It was deliberate play-not deliberate practice-that propelled significant improvement.
By fueling harmonious passion, deliberate play can prevent boreout and burnout. Although it might sound similar to gamification, deliberate play is fundamentally different. Gamification is often a gimmick-an attempt to add bells and whistles to a tedious task. The aim is to offer a dopamine rush that distracts from boredom or staves off exhaustion.
Sure, a leaderboard might motivate you to push through the pain, but it’s not enough to trick you into liking a routine you hate.” In deliberate play, you actually redesign the task itself to make it both motivating and developmental.” (94)
“Passion for one task can lead us to neglect the less exciting ones on our plate.” (96)
“Hundreds of experiments show that people improve faster when they alternate between different skills.” (99)
“It turns out that taking breaks has at least three benefits. First, time away from practice helps to sustain harmonious passion. Research indicates that even micro-breaks of five to ten minutes are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy. It’s not just about preventing burnout: research reveals that when we work nights and weekends, our interest and enjoyment in our tasks drop.” (102)
“Relaxing is not a waste of time-it’s an investment in well-being.
Breaks are not a distraction-they’re a chance to reset attention and incubate ideas. Play is not a frivolous activity —it’s a source of joy and a path to mastery.” (103)
“A rut is not a sign that you’ve tanked. A plateau is not a cue that you’ve peaked. They’re signals that it may be time to turn around and find a new route. When you’re stuck, it’s usually because you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’re taking the wrong path, or you’re running out of fuel.” (107)
“When our performance stagnates, before it improves again, it declines.” (108)
“But the data showed the opposite: students who took their initial class with an expert ended up with poorer grades in the next class.
The pattern was robust across fields: students learned less from introductory classes taught by experts in every subject.” (115)
“As you get better and better at what you do, your ability to communicate your understanding or to help others learn that skill often gets worse and worse.” (115)
“It’s often said that those who can’t do, teach. It would be more accurate to say that those who can do, can’t teach the basics. A great deal of expert knowledge is tacit-it’s implicit, not explicit. The further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals.” (116)
“Just as it’s unwise to seek rudimentary instruction from the most eminent experts, it’s a mistake to rely on a single guide. No one else knows your exact journey. But if you collect directions from multiple guides, they can sometimes combine to reveal routes you didn’t see. The more uncertain the path and the higher the peak, the greater the range of guides you’ll need. The challenge is to piece the various tips together into a route that works for you.”
“instead of asking to pick their brain, you ask them to retrace their route.” (118)
“Sometimes you end up stuck, and it’s not because you’re on the wrong path. It’s because your path is taking you in long circles toward the top, and you can’t even tell that you’re gaining ground. You’re not seeing enough progress to maintain your motivation.
There’s a name for that feeling: it’s called languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. The term was coined by a sociologist (Corey Keyes) and immortalized by a philosopher (Mariah Carey).
Languishing is the emotional experience of stalling. You may not be depressed or burned out, but you definitely feel blah.” (121)
“Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health: the void between depression and flourishing.” (122)
“Of all the factors that have been studied, the strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress. You can’t always find motivation by staring harder at the thing that isn’t working. Sometimes you can build momentum by taking a detour to a new destination.” (123)
“when we view hurdles as threats, we tend to back down and give up. When we treat barriers as challenges to conquer, we rise to the occasion.” (132)
“In one experiment, high schoolers earned higher report-card grades in multiple subjects-including math-after being randomly assigned to give advice to younger students on how to stay motivated and avoid procrastinating. In another, middle schoolers spent more time on homework after they were randomly assigned to give motivational advice to younger students-rather than receive motivational advice from expert teachers. And people who were struggling to save money, lose weight, control their tempers, and find jobs all came away more motivated after giving advice than receiving it.
This is different from the tutor effect, which highlights how we can learn through sharing the very knowledge that we want to acquire. The coach effect captures how we can marshal motivation by offering the encouragement to others that we need for ourselves. By reminding us of the tools we already possess, coaching others raises our expectations of ourselves.” (138)
“In trying times, our first instinct is to pick up the phone and ask for advice. We’re better off pausing to reflect on the advice we’ve provided in the past or calling someone in a similar situation and offering them some suggestions. We should listen to the advice we give to others—it’s usually the advice we need to take for ourselves.” (139)
“Being disrespected presents a particular barrier to growth and requires a particular kind of scaffolding to overcome.” (140)
“It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants.
Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it’s to improve conditions for our successors.” (150)
“In the United States, if you ask people what career they respect the most, the most common answer is doctor. In Finland, the most admired profession is often teaching.” (160)
“Putting people in a group doesn’t automatically make them a team.” (183)
“When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect. Research shows that groups promote the people who command the most airtime-regardless of their aptitude and expertise. We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility, and quantity for quality. We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.” (183)
“Research demonstrates that when organizations have cultures that prize results above relationships, if they have a leader who puts people first, they actually achieve greater performance gains.” (185)
“To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.” (189)
“My research shows that when you bring a suggestion to managers, if you don’t have a reputation for being prosocial and levelheaded, that can be enough to turn the tide against you.” (193)
“Managers know that if they bet on a bad idea, it might be a career-limiting move, but if they pass on a good idea, it’s unlikely anyone will ever find out. And even if managers are supportive of an idea, if they perceive leaders above them as opposed to it, they tend to see it as a losing proposition. All it takes is one gatekeeper to close off a new frontier.” (194)
“Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.” (196)
“It’s often said that talent sets the floor, but character sets the ceiling.” (206)
“Yet when we judge potential, we often focus on execution and ignore degree of difficulty. We inadvertently favor candidates who aced easy tasks and dismiss those who passed taxing trials. We don’t see the skills they’ve developed to overcome obstacles-especially the skills that don’t show up on a resume.” (209)
“Young people with grander dreams went further in school and climbed higher at work.” (225)
“In the spring, as I met my future classmates at events and online, I saw a pattern. Harvard seemed to attract two extremes of students: those who were sure they were a gift to the world, and those who feared they were the one mistake.” (227)
“Impostor syndrome says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.”
Growth mindset says, “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s only a matter of time until I figure it out.”” (230)
“Writing like I teach has been my compass ever since.” (232)
“Not long ago, it dawned on me that impostor syndrome is a paradox:
* Others believe in you
* You don’t believe in yourself
* Yet you believe yourself instead of them
If you doubt yourself, shouldn’t you also doubt your low opinion of yourself?” (232)
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