Hidden Potential

Introduction

Similar to his book Think Again, Adam Grant's Hidden Potential challenges our self-limiting assumptions that greatness is mostly born, not made.

• When we assess potential, we make the cardinal error of focusing on starting points - the abilities that are immediately visible.
• In a world obsessed with innate talent, we assume the people with the most promise are the ones who stand out right away.
• However, high achievers vary dramatically in their initial aptitudes; hence, you cannot tell where people will finish from where they begin.
• With the right opportunity and motivation to learn (the initial scaffolding, which is later removed), we can all improve until we achieve great things.

Adam Grant observes that admiring those with innate advantages - such as gifted students, natural athletes, and child prodigies - often leads us to overlook our own capacity for change.

• Remember, the early advantages of cognitive skills dissipate over time.
• By neglecting the impact of nurture, we underestimate the range of skills we can learn and how good we can become.
• As a result, we limit ourselves by clinging to our narrow comfort zone, missing out on broader possibilities and opportunities.

Ultimately, Grant argues that everyone has hidden potential because growth is not about the genius you possess, but the character you develop.

• Potential is not a matter of where you start, but of how far you travel.
• This means we need to focus less on starting points and more on distance travelled.
• After all, progress is not merely a means to the end of excellence, but getting better is a worthy accomplishment itself.

Character Skills to Greater Heights

Personality is your predisposition - your basic instincts for how to think, feel and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over those instincts.

• Knowing your principles does not necessarily mean you know how to practice them, particularly under stress or pressure.
• To illustrate, it is easy to be proactive and determined when things are going well, but the true test of character is how you show up on hard days.

For too long, character skills like leadership, teamwork, proactivity, discipline and determination have been dismissed as "soft skills".

• Contrary to common beliefs about the importance of career skills, these social, emotional and behavioural skills are the greatest source of strength and ensure success.
• With technological advances placing a premium on interactions and relationships, the skills that make us human are increasingly important to master.

To unleash our hidden potential requires the courage to seek out the right kinds of discomfort, the capacity to absorb the right information, and the will to accept the right imperfections.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

Creatures of Discomfort

Polyglots prove that it is possible to master new languages well into adulthood, far beyond the scope of merely natural ability.

• In other words, the decline in the rate of language learning around age 18 is not a feature of our biology, but a flaw in our education system.
• The acceptance of early mistakes is essential to motivate us to keep learning, yet our education system often trains us to aim for correctness all the time.
• To pick up a foreign language requires overcoming a cognitive block: getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

Despite the potential to unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning, becoming a creature of discomfort requires three kinds of courage:

• To abandon your tried-and-true methods
• In the 1970s, the theory of learning styles exploded in popularity, suggesting that children may prefer certain methods for acquiring and retaining information (e.g., reading/writing, visual, auditory, kinaesthetic). Yet, the truth is, the way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it is not necessarily how you learn best. Sometimes, you even learn better in the mode that makes you the most uncomfortable, because you have to work harder.
• Many people shy away from writing because it does not come naturally to them. However, writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic, pushing you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments. Unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking.
• To put yourself in the ring before you feel ready
• The popular adage is: use it or lose it. If you do not use it, you might never gain it in the first place.
• To understand a new language, you have to listen to it with your ears. And if you want to speak, you have to practice saying the words out loud.
• You cannot become truly comfortable with a skill until you have practiced it enough to master it.
• If we wait until we feel ready to take on a new challenge, we might never pursue it all.
• To make more mistakes than others make attempts
• Children are learning foreign languages faster than adults, not primarily due to greater brain plasticity or less interference from prior knowledge, but more importantly, because they are largely immune to the fear of embarrassment and the discomfort of making mistakes. They are not scared of feeling stupid or being judged.

The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek and amplify discomfort.

• Procrastination is a common problem whenever you are pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone.
• When you procrastinate, you are not avoiding effort, but avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up.

NOTE: Therapists treat phobias using two kinds of exposure therapy: systematic desensitization (starting with a microdose of the threat and gradually increasing it) and flooding (suddenly facing the fear, where, having survived the immediate terror, the dread melts away).

Human Sponges

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest... The species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt.

• Improving depends not on the quantity of information you seek out, but the quality of the information you take in.
• Growth is less about how hard you work than how well you learn.

Absorptive capacity is the ability to recognize, value, assimilate, and apply new information. Increasing it means being proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills, and perspectives to fuel your growth - not feed your ego. Adam Grant contrasts four different mindsets in learning:

• Reactive and Ego-Driven: These individuals limit their access to information and reject any input that threatens their image.
• Proactive and Ego-Driven: These people are active seekers of feedback, but they are impervious to constructive criticism.
• Reactive and Growth-Oriented: Learning is more likely here. Although they embrace discomfort and internalize whatever input might help their development, they often don't make much progress until someone intervenes and guides them.
• The Sweet Spot (Proactive and Growth-Oriented): To become a human sponge means consistently taking the initiative to expand themselves and adapt.

It is easy for people to be critics or cheerleaders; it is much harder to get them to be coaches.

• A critic sees your weaknesses and attacks your worst self. A cheerleader sees your strengths and celebrates your best self. A coach sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself.
• Instead of just seeking feedback, you are often better off asking for advice. Feedback tends to focus on how well you did last time, while advice shifts attention to how you can do better next time.

A key element of being a sponge is determining what information to absorb versus what to filter out.

Finally, being a sponge is not just about soaking up nutrients to help us grow, but also about releasing nutrients to help others grow.

NOTE: Many people fail to benefit from constructive criticism because they overreact and under-correct.

The Imperfectionists

Perfectionism is the desire to be impeccable. The goal is zero defects: no faults, no flaws, no failures.

• The new generation, posting curated images on social media in an increasingly competitive world, learns to judge their worth by the absence of inadequacies.
• In school, all multiple-choice tests have a single right answer, but 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.

When it comes to mastering tasks, perfectionists are no better than their peers, and sometimes even perform worse. In their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong:

• They obsess about details that do not matter. They are so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problem to solve. They cannot see the forest for the trees.
• They avoid unfamiliar or difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones.
• 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 is not to shame your past self, but to educate your future self.

Perfectionism traps us in a spiral of tunnel vision and error avoidance: it prevents us from seeing larger problems and limits us to mastering increasingly narrow skills.

• Traveling great distances depends on recognizing that perfection is a mirage and learning to tolerate the right imperfections.
• We have to be disciplined in deciding when to push for the best and when to settle for good enough.
• Tolerating flaws is not just something novices need to do - it is part of becoming an expert and continuing to gain mastery. The more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable.

NOTE: Wabi-sabi is the art of honouring the beauty in imperfections. It is not about creating intentional flaws; it is about accepting that flaws are inevitable - and recognizing that they do not stop something from becoming sublime.

"Do your best" is the wrong cure for perfectionism.

• It leaves the target too ambiguous to channel effort and gauge momentum. You are not sure what you are aiming for or whether you have made meaningful progress.
• The ideal foil for perfectionism is an objective that is precise and challenging.
• It focuses your attention on the most important actions and tells you when enough is enough.
• Stop waiting for the perfect approach, and start acting!

Expectations tend to rise with accomplishment.

• The better you are performing, the more you demand of yourself and the less you notice incremental gains.
• In psychology, mental time travel is a technique for appreciating progress that depends on remembering how your past self would see your current achievements.
• Ask yourself: if you knew five years ago what you had accomplished now, how proud would you have been?
• Beating yourself up does not make you stronger - it leaves you bruised.
• Being kind to yourself is not about ignoring your weaknesses.
• It is about giving yourself permission to learn from your disappointments.
• We grow by embracing our shortcomings, not by punishing them.

Perfectionists often worry that failing even once will make them a failure.

• But people do not judge your competence based on one performance, as illustrated by the overblown implications effect.
• It turns out that when people assess your skills, they put more weight on your peaks than on your troughs.
• People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?

NOTE: Impostor syndrome is a paradox: Others believe in you, you do not believe in yourself, yet you believe yourself instead of them. Perhaps this is not a flaw, but a sign of hidden potential - a signal that others recognize a capacity for growth in you that you have yet to see in yourself.

Research indicates that 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 is more likely to be an objective problem. You have inter-rater reliability.
• Hence, it is recommended to set up a committee of judges to help with quality control.

Striving for social approval comes with a cost: the focus on creating a flawless image in the eyes of others is a risk factor for depression, anxiety, burnout, and other mental health challenges.

Ultimately, excellence is more than meeting other people’s expectations.

• It is also about living up to your own standards.
• After all, it is impossible to please everyone. The question is whether you are letting down the right people.
• It is better to disappoint others than to disappoint yourself.

Creating Structures to Sustain Motivation

On the path to any goal, roadblocks are inevitable.

• The daily grind starts to bore us and eventually leads to burnout.
• Stagnation leaves us discouraged. Difficult tasks lead to failure, dejection and doubt. We begin to question whether we can bounce back, let alone move forward.
• Clearly, character skills are not always enough to travel great distances.

The steeper hills to success often require scaffolding - a temporary support structure that enables us to scale heights we could not reach on our own.

• It helps us build the resilience to overcome obstacles that threaten to overwhelm us and limit our growth.
• This scaffolding enables us to find motivation in the daily grind, gain momentum in the face of stagnation, and turn difficulties and doubts into sources of strength.

Transforming the Daily Grind

We are often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice.

• Although deliberate practice is effective for improving skills in predictable tasks with consistent moves, those who rely solely on it are more likely to fall victim to both physical and emotional exhaustion (burnout and boreout).
• Hence, the best way to unlock hidden potential is not to suffer through the daily grind, but to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.
• This transformation is driven by harmonious passion - taking joy in the process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome. You are drawn into the web of want: I feel like studying; I am excited to practice.

A powerful tool for this is deliberate play, a structured activity that combines learning and mastery with recreation and fun.

• It is designed to break complex tasks into simpler parts so you can hone a specific skill while staying engaged.
• Deliberate play often involves introducing novelty and variety into practice.
• That can be in the ways you learn, the tools you use, the goals you set, and the people you interact with.
• Depending on the skill you are trying to build, deliberate play might take the form of a game, a role-play, or an improvisational exercise.
• When defining success within this play, the goal might be defeating an opponent, outdoing your past self, or beating the clock.
• Hundreds of experiments show that people improve faster when they alternate between developing different skills (interleaving), especially for complex or similar skills.

Nonetheless, taking regular breaks is essential to:

• Sustain harmonious passion by replenishing energy and avoiding burnout.
• Unlock fresh ideas by keeping the problem active in the back of your mind.
• Deepen learning through periods of rest and consolidation.

Worthwhile practice is where progress is made. It is about quality, not quantity.

Getting Unstuck

One of the most frustrating parts of honing a skill is getting stuck.

• Instead of continuing to improve, you start to stagnate. It feels as if you have reached the upper bound of your mental or physical capacities.
• Since stagnation often marks the end of growth, it seems to spell the beginning of decline: "My best days are behind me. It is all downhill from here."

A rut is not a sign that you have tanked. A plateau is not a cue that you have peaked.

• They are signals that it may be time to turn around and find a new route.
• When you are stuck, it is usually because you are heading in the wrong direction, you are taking the wrong path, or you are running out of fuel.
• Gaining momentum often involves backing up and navigating your way down a different road - even if it is not the one you initially intended to travel.
• It might be unfamiliar, winding, and bumpy.
• Progress rarely happens in a straight line; it typically unfolds in loops.

Skills do not grow at a steady pace. Improving them is like driving up a mountain:

• As we climb higher and higher, the road gets steeper and steeper, and our gains get smaller and smaller.
• When we run out of momentum, we start to stall.
• When we reach a dead end, 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 needed to reach the peak.
• It is often difficult to accept this need to retreat. Backing up means scrapping our current plan and starting over. That is what causes a temporary decline in performance: we have chosen to give up the gains we have made. Plus, finding the right method involves trial and error.
• Remember, we are regressing in order to progress.

It is a familiar mantra: if you want to be great, learn from the best.

• You might assume that students would be better off learning the basics from an expert (a tenure-track or tenured professor) than a nonexpert (a lecturer with less specialized knowledge). But the data showed the opposite: students who took their initial class with an expert ended up with poorer grades in the next class.
• There are at least two reasons why experts struggle to give good directions to beginners:
• The Curse of Knowledge
• Experts have travelled too far to remember what it is like being in your shoes. The more they know, the harder it is for them to fathom what it is like to not know, to clearly communicate their understanding, or to help others learn that skill. Experts often have an intuitive understanding of a route, but they struggle to articulate all the steps to take.
• Difference in Starting Points
• You do not share the same strengths and weaknesses as theirs. You might be heading for the same destination, but you are starting far from their position. This makes your path as unfamiliar to them as theirs is to you.

Just as it is unwise to seek rudimentary instruction from the most eminent experts, it is a mistake to rely on a single guide.

• No one else knows your exact journey.
• Different mentors are able to share different titbits on how to advance.
• When you collect directions and the key landmarks or turning points from multiple guides, they can sometimes combine to reveal routes you did not see.
• The more uncertain the path and the higher the peak, the greater the range of guides you will need.
• The challenge is on yourself to piece the various tips together into a route that works for you.

Getting discouraged is a common obstacle after turning around. That is because going backward does not always lead directly to a new peak.

• Sometimes you end up stuck, not because you are on the wrong path, but because your path is taking you in long circles toward the top, and you cannot even tell that you are gaining ground. You are not seeing enough progress to maintain your motivation.
• Languishing - a sense of stagnation and emptiness - disrupts your focus, dulls your motivation, and keeps you stuck. You know you need to do something, but you doubt whether it will do anything. That is when you need to take a break and take a detour.
• When people are asked what it takes to achieve greater things, one of the most common answers is that you need to be laser-focused and single-minded in your dedication. They often advise: If you want to excel at your job, spend more time at work: get in early, go home late. Put your hobbies on the back burner.
• On the contrary, taking on serious hobbies in an area different from your job often motivates you much more than it distracts you. You can build up momentum by taking a detour to a new destination, which provides the sense of progression instead of leaving you daunted by the long road ahead.

In the short run, a straight line brings faster progress. But in the long run, loops lead to the highest peaks.

Defying Gravity

In the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, it can be tempting to give up.

• Yet, we need to look inside ourselves for hidden reserves of confidence and competence.

When we view hurdles as threats, we tend to back down; when we treat barriers as challenges to conquer, we rise to the occasion.

• Seeing obstacles as challenges depends partly on having a growth mindset - believing in your ability to improve.
• However, pioneering psychologist Carol Dweck recently demonstrated that a growth mindset alone does little good without scaffolding to support it.

Without scaffolding from others, we may have to assemble it ourselves.

• Bootstrapping is using our existing resources to pull ourselves out of a difficult situation, such as schooling each other.
• The tutor effect demonstrates that the best way to learn something is to teach it: you remember it better after you recall it, and you understand it better after you explain it.
• Teaching others can build our competence, but it is coaching others that elevates our confidence.
• When we encourage others to overcome obstacles, it can help us find our own motivation. Rather than immediately ask others for advice, we are better off pausing to reflect on the advice we have provided in the past.

Surprisingly, the impact of expectations depends on who is setting them:

• High expectations lead to greater effort and performance if they come from someone knowledgeable about the task.
• Being doubted by experts is a threat; it shatters your confidence and stifles your growth, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• People actually end up trying harder and doing better when they are doubted by people who lack credibility. You become driven to defy them, turning it into a challenge, thus creating the underdog effect.

It is also easier to overcome difficulties when we are carrying a torch for people who matter to us.

• When others are counting on us, we find strength we did not know we had.
• Having a partner can prevent rumination about your own abilities ("Can I do this?") and boost determination ("I won't be the reason you fail.").
• The determination is even stronger when we are paving the way for others.

Building Systems to Expand Opportunity

Character skills and strategic support (scaffolding) help us unlock the hidden potential in ourselves and those around us.

• However, to give more people the chance to achieve great things, we must create opportunities on a larger scale.

When we think of geniuses as solely possessing extraordinary innate abilities, we neglect the profound importance of life circumstances and environments in shaping their development.

Every Child Gets Ahead

Our experiences in school can either fuel or stifle our growth.

• Education in Finland is rooted in a fundamental belief in the potential of every student.
• Instead of singling out only the "best and brightest", Finnish schools are designed to give every student the opportunity to thrive. This philosophy is captured in the popular mantra, "We can’t afford to waste a brain".
• They understand that nurturing hidden potential is not about investing only in students who show early signs of high ability, but about investing in every student, regardless of their apparent ability.

In organizational psychology, culture has three core elements: practices, values and underlying assumptions.

• Practices are the daily routines that reflect and reinforce values.
• Values are the shared principles defining what is important and desirable - what gets rewarded versus what is punished.
• Underlying assumptions are the deeply held, often unconscious, beliefs about how the world works.
• Our assumptions shape our values, which in turn drive our practices.

The Finnish education system puts its philosophy of “opportunity-for-all” into practice in several key ways:

• The Finnish education system employs a practice called looping, where teachers move up a grade with their students for multiple years. This continuity is designed to foster deep, individualized relationships. With more time to get to know each student personally, teachers gain a profound grasp of their unique strengths and challenges, allowing them to tailor both instructional and emotional support.
• Every school in Finland has a dedicated student welfare team. This team - which includes a psychologist, social worker, nurse, special education teacher, and the principal - works alongside the classroom teacher. This comprehensive support system acts as a social safety net, providing an alternative to holding students back when they struggle. By identifying challenges early, the team can intervene and prevent bigger problems from developing.
• In Finnish early education, students spend most of their time engaged in play, such as board games, field trips, and arts and crafts. Formal academic lessons are typically capped at 45 minutes and are followed by a 15-minute recess. Finnish educators operate on the assumption that the most important lesson is that learning is fun. They value play because it fosters a love of learning early on, which ultimately builds both cognitive and character skills.

While a love of learning is a key ingredient for intrinsic motivation, cultivating a desire to read is essential for nourishing individual interests.

• Reading is a gateway to all other learning; without the motivation to read, it is difficult to study any other subject.
• However, in today's world, books face increasingly stiff competition from television, video games, and social media.

To encourage children to enjoy reading, we must make books an integral part of their lives.

• This can be done by talking about books during meals or car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and, crucially, letting them see us read. Children pay attention to what we value.
• Allowing them the freedom to choose the books they want to read, rather than limiting them to a list of "classics", is also vital for fostering a vibrant reading culture.

In many elite education systems today, students are often expected to sacrifice their mental health for academic excellence, putting performance above well-being.

• However, an education system is not truly successful until all children - regardless of their background or resources - have the opportunity to reach their potential.
• Building schools where students achieve great things is not about focusing on a select few and pushing them to excel. It is about fostering a culture that allows all students to grow intellectually and thrive emotionally.

Mining for Gold

When we face complex and pressing problems, we know we cannot solve them alone.

• We often assume our most important decision is to assemble the most knowledgeable people, and once we have found the right experts, we put our future in their hands.
• A better approach is to build a system that brings a broader and deeper pool of ideas and intelligence to the surface, including contributions from those outside the core team.

Unlocking the hidden potential in groups requires leadership practices, team processes, and systems that harness the capabilities of all members.

• The best teams are not necessarily the ones with the smartest individuals; they are the teams that unearth and utilize the best thinking from everyone.
• Without this dynamic, most teams end up being less than the sum of their parts.
• In other words, collective intelligence depends less on individual cognitive skill than on members' prosocial skills.
• The best groups have the most team players - people who excel at collaborating with others. Being a team player is not about forced harmony or ensuring everyone gets along all the time. It is about figuring out what the group needs and enlisting everyone’s unique contribution to meet that need.
• When members have strong prosocial skills, they bring out the best in one another. Collective intelligence rises as team members recognize each other’s strengths, develop strategies to leverage them, and motivate one another toward a shared purpose.

True teams emerge when people recognize that they need one another to succeed on an important mission.

• Instead of operating as lone wolves, they move as a cohesive unit.
• Otherwise, a group is just a collection of individuals assigned to the same unit, with a boss and a common assignment, never spending enough time exchanging ideas, coaching one another or learning together.

Leaders play a critical role in establishing this cohesion, as they have the authority to turn independent individuals into an interdependent team.

• When we select leaders, however, we do not usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most - a phenomenon called the babble effect.
• Research shows that groups often promote people who command the most airtime, regardless of their actual aptitude. We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility, and quantity for quality. As a result, we get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.
• This is why, as one meta-analysis showed, highly narcissistic people are more likely to rise into leadership roles but are ultimately less effective in them. They tend to make self-serving decisions and instill a zero-sum view of success, provoking cutthroat behaviour that undermines collaboration.

Collective intelligence is best served by a different kind of leader.

• The right people to promote are those with the prosocial skills to put the mission above their ego and team cohesion above personal glory.
• They know that the goal is not to be the smartest person in the room; it is to make the entire room smarter.
• Research shows that even in organizations with cultures that prize results over relationships, a leader who puts people first can drive greater performance gains.

Effective leadership, however, is not one-size-fits-all; it often depends on how proactive a team is.

• When teams are reactive and waiting for direction, extroverted leaders tend to drive the best results by asserting their vision.
• However, when teams are proactive and bring their own ideas to the table, introverted leaders often achieve greater success.
• Reserved leaders are perceived as more receptive to input, which gives them access to better ideas and leaves their teams more motivated.
• With a team full of proactive thinkers, the best leader is not the person who talks the most, but the one who listens best.

When confronting a vexing problem, our first instinct is often to gather a group to brainstorm.

• While the goal is to generate the best ideas quickly, traditional brainstorming usually backfires.
• In these meetings, many good ideas are lost while few are gained.
• In fact, brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that individuals often produce more and better ideas when working alone.

This failure to maximize collective intelligence happens for several reasons.

• In any given meeting, people bite their tongues due to ego threat (fear of looking stupid), production blocking (we can’t all talk at once), and conformity pressure (jumping on the boss’s bandwagon).
• The result? Goodbye diversity of thought, hello groupthink.
• These challenges are amplified for people who lack power or status, such as the most junior person, a member of an underrepresented group, or an introvert in a room of extroverts.

To unearth the hidden potential in teams, we are better off shifting from brainstorming to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are done alone:

• Everyone is asked to generate ideas separately.
• The ideas are pooled and shared anonymously with the group.
• To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates the ideas on their own.
• Finally, the team comes together to select and refine the most promising options.

This method works because a key to collective intelligence is balanced participation.

• Brainwriting ensures that all ideas are brought to the table and all voices are heard, preventing the conversation from being dominated by the biggest egos, the loudest voices or the most powerful person.

A leader is also responsible for creating a climate for voice (psychological safety) - a system that ensures unconventional ideas are carefully considered rather than immediately dismissed.

In most workplaces, opportunity exists on a ladder.

• The person immediately above you - your direct boss - is in charge of decisions about your growth, from vetting suggestions to determining promotions.
• This system gives one individual far too much power to shut down creativity. A single "no" is enough to kill an idea or stall a career.
• Managers often find reasons to say no because unproven ideas carry risk and uncertainty; they know that betting on a bad idea can be a career-limiting move, while passing on a good one will likely go unnoticed.

A powerful alternative to the corporate ladder is a lattice.

• A lattice is an organizational structure with channels that run across levels and between teams.
• Rather than a single path of reporting, a lattice offers multiple pathways for ideas and influence.
• This system rejects the unwritten rule that dominates ladder hierarchies: "don’t go above your boss’s head”.
• The purpose of a lattice system is to remove the fear of reprisal for bypassing a direct manager, preventing good ideas from being shut down prematurely or unfairly and ensuring that every proposal gets due consideration.

Diamonds in the Rough

In schools and workplaces, selection systems are typically designed to detect existing excellence and then make forecasts about future success.

• That means people who are still developing their excellence often do not make the cut.
• By favouring applicants who have already excelled, selection systems systematically underestimate and overlook candidates who possess greater potential.
• We do not pay enough attention to the paths of these individuals, whose achievements were forged by overcoming major obstacles.
• We need to consider how steep their trajectory was, how far they have climbed, and the amount of growth they demonstrated along the way
• The true test of a diamond in the rough is not whether it shines from the start, but how it responds to heat and pressure.

Our errors in identifying potential occur at multiple stages of the assessment process as we struggle with limited time and large applicant pools.

• During an initial screen, it is impossible to truly get to know every candidate.
• Evaluators end up making life-altering decisions for candidates who have been reduced to thin slices of information.
• In the early stages of hiring, employers frequently address this challenge by relying on credentials, operating under the assumption that the best colleges admit and produce the best candidates. This systematically disadvantages candidates who acquire skills through alternative routes - at trade schools or two-year community colleges, through apprenticeships or military service, or by teaching themselves or learning on the job.
• Beyond college degrees, many managers turn to prior experience to get an initial sense of candidates’ qualifications. However, the amount of experience is often borderline irrelevant, as a candidate with 20 years of experience on a resume may have just repeated the same year of experience 20 times.
• Prior performance can give us a good sense of their ability in the present, but it can lead us to overlook the potential in too many people. Furthermore, past performance is only helpful if the new job requires skills similar to the old one.
• The Peter Principle describes the phenomenon that employees tend to be promoted to their "level of incompetence". They keep advancing based on success in a previous job until they get trapped in a role that is beyond their abilities. For instance, the best salespeople may not be good at managing people.

Performance depends on more than just ability; it is also a function of the degree of difficulty.

• How capable you appear to be is often a reflection of how hard your task is.
• Yet when we judge potential, we often focus on execution and ignore the degree of difficulty, favouring those candidates who aced easy tasks and dismissing those who successfully navigated taxing trials.
• For example, when choosing a financial advisor, we might pick one who earned high returns in a bull market over one who achieved good returns in a bear market.
• We do not seek out the skills they developed to overcome obstacles, especially the skills that do not show up on a resume.
• Some have tried to measure the difficulty of life challenges but have failed miserably because people can have dramatically different reactions to the same event, and there is no universal formula to quantify the degree of difficulty in a life.

If natural talent determines where people start, learned character affects how far they go.

• However, character skills are not always immediately apparent.
• If we do not look beyond the surface, we risk missing the potential for brilliance beneath.
• When we evaluate people, there is nothing more rewarding than finding a diamond in the rough. Our job is not to apply the pressure that brings out their brilliance. It is to make sure we do not overlook those who have already faced that pressure, and to recognize their potential to shine.

Skills are best gauged by what people can do, not what they say or what they have done before.

Summary

Reaching the end of the book should leave you with the realization that anyone can rise to achieve great things.

• Everyone possesses hidden potential that remains unexplored and undeveloped because of self-limiting beliefs about their own capabilities.
• To unlock it, remember that people with bigger dreams go on to accomplish more.
• Let's all aspire to be better tomorrow than we are today.

Adam Grant structures the book by first exploring the character skills (e.g. discipline, determination, proactivity, prosocial) that must be equipped to catapult us to greater heights.

• Even with strong character skills, however, no one is immune to burnout, doubt or stagnation; hence, the next step involves creating scaffolding to sustain motivation.
• The book concludes by focusing on building systems to expand opportunity.

The achievement is in the growing.