Introducing "Hidden Potential"

Hidden Potential was recommended to me by my career coach when I told her I was starting this blog.

And for a good reason.

Apart from being a knowledgeable educator, Adam Grant is a great storyteller. He masterfully weaves useful concepts and practical advice into engaging stories – not the other way around. The stories he shares do not illustrate his point – they reveal it – and stay with you longer after you finish the book.

“Hidden Potential” is not another “motivational” book that will leave you with nothing but inspiration.

It is an insightful page-turner, full of inspiring ideas that are actually supported by science and real-life examples and that you can apply right away to reveal your hidden potential.

So let’s dive into it.

Freaks Of Nurture

(This, by the way, was one of the draft titles of the book).

In my favorite teen movie, Step Up, the director of the performing arts school tells Tyler Gage, the troubled teenager and aspiring hip-hop dancer: “It’s not that you don’t have talent, it takes so much more than that.”

Most people agree that talent is not enough.

Without hard work and the right opportunities, talent is nothing more than a tool left gathering dust in your toolbox. A book purchased but never read, a plan never followed through, a diamond left in the rough.

But what we do not realize is that very often, what we perceive as talent is actually a product of nurture, not nature.

"In a landmark study, psychologists set out to investigate the roots of exceptional talent among musicians, artists, scientists, and athletes… They were stunned to discover that only a handful of these high achievers had been child prodigies.”

For every Mozart, there are many late-blooming Bachs, and even when it comes to Mozart, nothing is quite obvious. His father was quite a fanatic making his son practice for multiple hours every day. Not to mention that Mozart had an older sister who was herself a child prodigy and apparently influenced him quite a lot. And yet, I bet you do not know her name (I didn’t until I looked it up) because despite her incredible talents when Marianne Mozart reached marital age, she was forced to stop her musical “career” and look for a husband.

So if a talent given at birth is not enough and might not even be required – what does it take to achieve great things?

Adam Grant outlines 3 key components: character skills, support structures (aka “scaffolding”), and systems of opportunity.

The first component – character – is the center of this week’s article.

What Is Character?

Hidden Potential says the following –

"Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.”

And –

"If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.”

You might know character skills as “soft” skills from your resume.

When describing skills, the adjective?soft?was first introduced by military psychologists in the 1960s: as opposed to the?hard?skills which implied working with the military weapons and equipment which is made out of metal and therefore is – you guessed it – hard.

By this logic, financial modeling or programming skills are soft skills – but of course, nowadays nobody classifies them as such.

If the book?Time Off?that we reviewed last month sees the future as a triumph of human creativity,?Hidden Potential?claims that?“we are in the midst of character revolution.”?The authors agree that the development of new technologies requires from us to be even more “human” than ever, and for Adam Grant, character building is the essential way for our hidden potential to reveal itself.

How To Build Character?

If character skills are so important, how can we develop them?

Hidden Potential offers 3 pieces of advice.

1. Seek Discomfort

“I need to leave my comfort zone!” – we tell ourselves when we start feeling a little stale in our jobs or our lives. This usually implies bracing ourselves for new job applications and networking or taking on a new hobby.

Sometimes we say it when we need to talk to a stranger at a party or before making our first cold call in sales.

But we rarely tell this to ourselves when we need to learn something.

"Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill – an especially important form of determination.”

Hidden Potential suggests that there are 3 kinds of courage you should develop to embrace discomfort while learning:

1. To abandon your habitual methods of learning and instead use the learning method that is best for the task. For instance, when learning a new language, even if you consider yourself a visual learner, you will have to listen to the native speakers if you want to learn to say the foreign words correctly.
2. To use the skill you are working on before you feel like you mastered it. The early works of any great writer are usually subpar at best. If Leo Tolstoy (who, by the way, reworked his Anna Karenina at least 4 times) had aimed to write War and Peace right the first time, he would have never written a single sentence. We all start somewhere.
3. To make a lot of mistakes – intentionally seek discomfort because this is the only way to learn something new. If you are doing everything right from the first try, are you sure you are learning?

"Sometimes you even earn better in the mode that makes you the most uncomfortable, because you have to work harder at it.”

2. Become A Sponge

The picture above shows a sea sponge. What looks like a bunch of sunk jugs is actually the oldest animal on Earth that first appeared about 500 million years ago.

Some sea sponges live more than 2,000 years. They were able to survive and live this long due to their incredible ability to adapt and regenerate. Sea sponges soak everything around them, filter out toxins, and absorb nutritional elements. They even produce anticancer, antibacterial, antiviral, and anti-inflammatory biochemicals playing a vital role in saving human lives. (You can learn more about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge).

Adam Grant takes the sea sponge metaphor and applies it to the human ability to learn and adapt.

"Being a sponge is more than a metaphor. It’s a character skill – a form of proactivity that’s vital to realizing hidden potential.”

How to become a human sponge?

1. Improve the quality of information you absorb. Proactively seek new information but don’t intend to fuel your ego by trying to confirm your existing knowledge and beliefs. Seek to enlarge your perspective and broaden your horizons.
2. Instead of seeking feedback, ask for advice. This will help you to filter out unnecessary praise and unhelpful critique.
3. Find trustworthy sources. The best pieces of advice would come from someone who cares for you, knows you, and has relevant expertise.

3. Embrace Imperfection

Finally, if you want to reach your hidden potential, you need to come to terms with the fact that perfection is indeed your greatest weakness!

"Perfectionists excel at solving problems that are straightforward and familiar.”

Ouch.

There is more to it too.

"Research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter… [and] lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve… Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure… Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them.”

When outlined this way, it is obvious that being a perfectionist is quite debilitating. If making mistakes is the way to acquire new skills, avoiding them, buries our potential even further. Adapting to new circumstances becomes impossible simply because new circumstances are strongly avoided.

What’s the remedy then?

"Wabi sabi is the art of honoring the beauty in imperfection… Wabi sabi is a character skill. It gives you the discipline to shift your attention from impossible ideals to achievable standards – and then adjust those standards over time.”

Hidden Potential offers a couple of ways to follow wabi sabi philosophy:

1. Aim for excellence, not perfection. Be careful with external standards and establish your own. Ask yourself this: “If this was the only work people saw of yours, would you be proud of it?”
2. Mental time travel. Ask yourself this: “If you knew five years ago what you’d accomplish now, how proud would you have been?”

Personal Illustration

Adam Grant has a great number of wonderful stories throughout his book which I will not put in this article out of (1) copywriting infringement concerns and (2) strong encouragement for you to get a copy of Hidden Potential and discover them for yourself.

But as I was preparing this article, I did realize I have my own story that illustrates quite well the ideas above.

I wasn’t born with a natural talent to be a good parent.

As an only child, I had little experience with little kids.

I vaguely remember being eight or nine and telling my mom that my kids would probably hate me because “I am such a rude daughter, I will be a horrible parent.” As a teenager, I found babies and toddlers annoying at best.

But when I decided to be a mom, I decided to be a good mom (whatever it means and help me God).

What I’ve learned so far is that being a parent means proactively seeking discomfort.

Just recently I listened to a parenting psychologist who said that if after the age of 5, your kid is “convenient” and “doesn’t cause you any discomfort”, something is deeply wrong – most likely with you as a parent. Kids are here to be themselves and our job as parents is to help them with that.

Which means we need to start with ourselves and figure out who we are. Put on your mask first – right?

To be a good parent you need to be a sponge.

You need to listen. You need to absorb information coming at you from everywhere and especially from your kid. You need to filter that information, leave what matters, reject the rest, and act accordingly. You need to adapt – constantly (and there is no chance you will live for 2,000 years so you don’t have that much time to figure things out).

Finally, to be a good parent you need to forget about perfection.

First of all, you cannot possibly require it from your kid, so the first thing you learn as a parent is how ridiculous and helpless you look and feel when you are trying to be perfect yourself.

And secondly, you need to embrace the fact that you will never know all the answers. And the answers you will know, might not be the best ones. They might not even be the optimal ones.

I remember nagging my daughter’s pediatrician, her teachers, my husband, two sleep trainers, a nursing coach, and my own mother to tell me the one?right?way to make this or that decision. I watched videos, read books and articles, I really REALLY wanted to know.

It took a while to come to terms with the fact that nobody truly knew the right way (including myself).

Outside of the obvious health-related recommendations (vaccines, vitamins, Tylenol dosage), nobody could or should tell me how to raise my kid correctly. The first one who figures out the right answer to this question will be the one to figure out life itself. Well, it won’t be me, that’s for sure…

Yet I am still determined to unlock my hidden potential of being a good parent.

And this means that I need to build quite a lot of character skills: get out of my usual learning routines (clearly, books and experts do not have all the answers), put my skills to the test as I am developing them, make mistakes, seek advice not feedback (how can I do better? vs. Am I a good mom?), find trustworthy sources (no, I don’t care about your opinion, random parent at a playground!), and learn how to make decisions on what matters and what doesn’t.

I need to find my very own parental wabi sabi.

What follows?

We all have hidden potential.

Unlocking it takes a great deal of character. And to build our character skills takes the following: seeking discomfort, being a sponge, and striving for excellence over perfection.

Next week we will talk about support systems we can build to keep our motivation, get unstuck, and even fly by our bootstraps. Make sure to visit my blog https://knowledge-in-action.com/ next Monday or check in here next Friday!

(1) The title photo is by Rob Schouten on Unsplash

(2) Photo by Feri & Tasos on Unsplash

(3) Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash