#1 “This brilliant book will shatter your assumptions about what it takes to improve and succeed. I wish I could go back in time and gift it to my younger self. It would’ve helped me find a more joyful path to progress.” --Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam singles tennis champion The #1 We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door. Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

Autorentext

Adam Grant

Klappentext

**#1 New York Times Bestseller

“This brilliant book will shatter your assumptions about what it takes to improve and succeed. I wish I could go back in time and gift it to my younger self. It would’ve helped me find a more joyful path to progress.”
—Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam singles tennis champion

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again illuminates how we can elevate ourselves and others to unexpected heights.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

Leseprobe
GOING OUT OF STYLE

For decades, many American schools were run like assembly lines in a factory. Students were treated as interchangeable parts in the mass production of young minds. Despite having different strengths, they were stuck absorbing uniform knowledge through the same standardized lessons and lectures.

In the 1970s, a new wave of thinking upended the world of education. The core premise was that when students struggled, it was because the method of instruction wasn’t tailored to their learning style—the cognitive mode in which they were best at acquiring and retaining information. To grasp new concepts, verbal learners needed to read and write them; visual learners needed to see them illustrated in images, diagrams, and charts; auditory learners needed to hear them out loud; and kinesthetic learners needed to experience them through acting them out with body movements.

The theory of learning styles exploded in popularity. Parents were thrilled that their children were being recognized for their individuality. Teachers loved having the freedom to vary their methods and personalize their material.

Today, learning styles are a foundational element of teacher training and student experience. Around the world, 89 percent of teachers believe in matching their instruction to students’ learning styles. Many students have told me they prefer podcasts to books because they’re auditory learners. Did you decide to read this book with your eyes because you identify as a verbal or visual learner?

There’s just one small problem with learning styles. They’re a myth.

When a team of experts conducted a comprehensive review of several decades of research on learning styles, they found an alarming lack of support for the theory. In controlled experiments with specific lessons and longitudinal studies over the course of a semester, students and adults didn’t do any better on tests when their teachers or study habits aligned with their abilities or their preferences. “There is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice,” the researchers conclude. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is . . . striking and disturbing.”

We don’t want to go back to the rigid factory model of learning. But people shouldn’t be pigeonholed in a rigid learning style either. Of course, you might still have a preferred style of acquiring new knowledge and skills. What we now know is that your preference isn’t fixed, and playing only to your strengths deprives you of the opportunity to improve on your weaknesses.
The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it isn’t 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 at it. This is the first form of courage: being brave enough to embrace discomfort and throw your learning style out the window.

One of the best examples I’ve seen is in comedy. When Steve Martin first started doing stand‑up performances in the 1960s, he bombed over and over. During one show a heckler actually stood up and threw a glass of red wine at him. “I was not naturally talented,” Steve reflects. His early critics agreed: one wrote that he was “the most serious booking error in the history of Los Angeles.”

If you think about how great performers master their craft, it seems natural that they would learn through listening, watching, and doing. That’s what Steve did: he would listen to other people’s material, watch their mannerisms, mix in some of his own stories, and practice deliver­ing the concoction. Despite pouring countless hours into preparing for them, his performances were lackluster. One night he went five minutes without a single laugh . . . and another five minutes . . . and another. As he sweated onstage, there wasn’t even a chuckle for twenty straight minutes. Watching, listening, and doing weren’t enough to drive his growth.

The one approach to comedy that Steve had written off was writing—it wasn’t his style. He hated writing, because it didn’t come naturally to him: “It was hard, so hard.”

If you feel that way about writing too, you’re not alone. Even some of the best writers I know will do almost anything to put off writing.

Procrastination is a common problem whenever you’re pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone. As blogger Tim Urban describes it, your brain gets hijacked by an instant gratification monkey, who picks what’s easy and fun over the hard work that needs to be done. All you have to…