Unlocking Your Hidden Potential with Adam Grant

Must read book for 2024

I just got done reading my favorite book for 2023. Today, I want to share with you why I loved the book and my goal is to convince you to read the book in three quotes. So if you are looking for a great book to read, here it is.

The Book

The book is Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. I picked up this book because, as a professor and as a mentor of the Haile Fellows program, I am always looking for ways to improve our ability to identify potential. I am concerned that relying on GPA as an identifier of success and potential makes us overlook so many talented individuals. In my next episode, I will talk more about the problems I have with GPA as a determinant of success. On a personal level, had my undergraduate GPA determined my success, I wouldn’t be here today. In addition, I am also interested in identifying environments that help students, faculty, and staff grow and uncover their full potential. This book focuses on how to unlock that hidden potential.

I Won’t Stop Talking About It!

If you have been in my personal circle in the past month, you have heard me speak about this book or share quotes. It is hard to summarize the book into three quotes but here is my try. At the end, I will tell you what I see is the common tie between all the quotes.

Leverage Deliberate Play

By fueling harmonious passion, deliberate play can prevent boreout and burnout. Although it might sound similar to gamification, deliberate play is fundamentally different.

Adam Grant discusses the difference between deliberate play and deliberate practice. We are often taught in education to leverage deliberate practice, but deliberate play may help spark innovation and improve productivity more. So, what is deliberate play?

Let us take the example of writing. Deliberate practice, like we teach in most writing courses, would’ve involved taking a paragraph and revising it over and over. We would practice varying sentence structure to make the sentences more interesting. On the other hand deliberate play would involve writing the paragraph in a fun way, maybe try to write in the voice of your favorite author or imitate others. The goal is to try something fun and different; to play with the assignment.

This might seem like a slight modification, but what I like about this mental exercise is it removes failure from the discussion. When I write, or create content, there is so much pressure to get it right. When the pressure is high, the process becomes overwhelming. By making the process playful, it reduces anxiety of perfection and allows creativity to take over.

We are trying this exact thing on my team. In 2024, one of our goals is to play more with the content we produce. We hope experimentation will lead to new things and push our boundaries, but most importantly we will have fun!

Celebrate Every Win!

What looks like a big breakthrough is usually the accumulation of small wins.

I like this quote because it is a reminder that our success is made of small accomplishments and that the breakthrough is the aggregate of those actions. However, when celebrating breakthroughs, we neglect the many small steps we took to reach our goal. When working in teams, it is important to celebrate every step of the process.

As a professor, this is also important to me as I mentor students. Our current generation is under so much pressure to succeed, to find the success that their parents have or want of them. However, rarely do my students stop to think, ‘Where were my parents at my age?’ Everyone seems to be chasing the final product, but rarely do they realize that they are on that path and actually might be doing better than their parents at their age. This quote is also about reducing the stress of the journey by appreciating every step of it.

On Perfectionism

[Perfectionists] fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.

This quote resonates with me because I consider myself to be a “recovering perfectionist.” When you are so focused on being perfect, mistakes are a sign of failure, and that failure is extremely shameful. The mistakes become signals that you should stop trying, that you are too far out of your comfort zone. This is a dangerous sentiment because mistakes are in fact the opposite, as Adam Grant is adamant about. Mistakes are a sign that you are learning and they make the future you better. Lean into your mistakes. Shift your mindset away from ‘mistakes indicate failure’ and into ‘mistakes indicate growth,’ recognizing that failure is actually a lack of trying.

Bonus Quote

I now believe that impostor syndrome is a sign of hidden potential. It feels like other people are overestimating you, but it's more likely that you’re underestimating yourself. They've recognized a capacity for growth that you can't see yet. When multiple people believe in you, it might be time to believe them.

A couple of episodes back I interviewed Becca Wilson. During the interview she said something similar to this quote. In her interview she said “Where is your track record of failing, everything you have done has been successful. What evidence do you have that you will fail?”

When we experience imposter syndrome, we are afraid that we are pretending to be something we are not and the expectations people begin to form of us feel unobtainable. In actuality, their expectations are not meant for our present selves but for our future selves. They are expectations to grow into; other people are able to step back and see the path you are on when you are only able to see what is right in front of you. Take a leap of faith and believe in yourself when the people around you are giving you every indication that you should.

The Takeaway

The common thread between these quotes is that to uncover your hidden potential, you have to put yourself out there and try new things. We need to reduce the barriers around developing new experiences, whether they are internal or external factors that are holding us back. Innovation and growth require a culture that embraces failure as a learning experience rather than a scarlet letter that defines you for the rest of your life.

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