Hidden Potential

Author: Adam Grant
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023
Pages: 304
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: 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 distances 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 re 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.

Review: This book was a voted on by members of a corporate-wide book club. It's our first book selection, and I have to say, a disappointing one at that. My supervisor and I were discussing it, and I think she said it perfectly, this should have been condensed into a long essay.

In a different place in my career maybe this book would have unlocked some secrets, but I have almost 30 years of professional working experience behind me. There was one key takeaway for me though, "strive for excellence, not perfection." Perfection is unattainable. Excellence is a goal. 

I also strongly agree with his conclusion that giving yourself permission to try and even fail is okay. Some personalities do a lot better with this concept than others. I'm a person who grew up believing that failure is not an option. I haven't failed to catastrophic levels, but I've learned a lot in my "failures," when outcomes weren't what I expected, in my missteps. 

It was a lot of reading to be affirmed in areas that I didn't need it.