Hidden Potential Quotes

“personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily how you learn best.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. 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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Being polite is withholding feedback to make someone feel good today. Being kind is being candid about how they can get better tomorrow”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“It’s often said that where there’s a will, there’s a way. What we overlook is that when people can’t see a path, they stop dreaming of the destination.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Not long ago, it dawned upon 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?”
― Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“A coach sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“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. If perfectionism were a medication, the label would alert us to common side effects.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“This is the first form of courage: being brave enough to embrace discomfort and throw your learning style out the window.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Beating yourself up doesn't make you stronger- it leaves you bruised. Being kind to yourself isn't about ignoring your disappointments. We grow by embracing our shortcomings, not by punishing them.”
― Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“The Tennessee experiment contained a startling result. Chetty was able to predict the success that students achieved as adults simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“To figure out what students were carrying with them from kindergarten into adulthood, Chetty’s team turned to another possible explanation. In fourth and eighth grade, the students were rated by their teachers on some other qualities. Here’s a sample: Proactive: How often did they take initiative to ask questions, volunteer answers, seek information from books, and engage the teacher to learn outside class? Prosocial: How well did they get along and collaborate with peers? Disciplined: How effectively did they pay attention—and resist the impulse to disrupt the class? Determined: How consistently did they take on challenging problems, do more than the assigned work, and persist in the face of obstacles? When students were taught by more experienced kindergarten teachers, their fourth-grade teachers rated them higher on all four of these attributes. So did their eighth-grade teachers. The capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles. Character skills equip a chronic procrastinator to meet a deadline for someone who matters deeply to them, a shy introvert to find the courage to speak out against an injustice, and the class bully to circumvent a fistfight with his teammates before a big game. Those are the skills that great kindergarten teachers nurture—and great coaches cultivate.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Personality is not your destiny—it’s your tendency. Character skills enable you to transcend that tendency to be true to your principles. It’s not about the traits you have—it’s what you decide to do with them. Wherever you are today, there’s no reason why you can’t grow your character skills starting now.”
― Adam Grant, Hidden Potential

“To master a new concept in math, science, or a foreign language, it typically takes seven or eight practice sessions.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“But learning is not always about finding the right method for you. It’s often about finding the right method for the task.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill—an especially important form of determination. It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon your tried-and-true methods, to put yourself in the ring before you feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts. The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek, and amplify discomfort.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“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.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Although listening is often more fun, reading improves comprehension and recall. Whereas listening promotes intuitive thinking, reading activates more analytical processing. It’s true in English and Chinese—people display better logical reasoning when the same trivia questions, riddles, and puzzles are written rather than spoken. With print, you naturally slow down at the start of a paragraph to process the core idea and use paragraph breaks and headers to chunk information.”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“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.”
― Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.”
― Adam Grant, Hidden Potential

“What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn,”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“Making progress isn't always about moving forward. Sometimes it's about bouncing back. Progress is not only reflected in the peaks you reach-it's also visible in the valleys you cross. Resilience is a form of growth.”
― Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“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.”
― Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“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. —Helen Keller”
― Adam M. Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things