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Steph Curry wasn’t a big-time recruit coming out of high school. But he has turned into the greatest basketball shooter of all time in part because he practices in a fun and challenging way that doesn’t get monotonous. R.A. Dickey spent many years in the minor league baseball system before finally, after tremendous work, becoming a star in the big leagues.
And Adam Grant wasn’t a great athlete in high school. He went out for the diving team and struggled early but ultimately became a highly regarded diver. And when he got accepted to Harvard University, he didn’t know if he was smart enough to be among those gifted intellectuals. Soon after his entrance writing exam he was told the prose wasn’t good enough and he needed to take a remedial writing class instead of the one most other incoming freshmen would take.
He declined that option and went with the regular group. He wrote and rewrote and took professor feedback again and again, and ended up with an A.
Adam Grant is the author of a new book about people like him, R.A. Dickey, Steph Curry, and many others who were not initially regarded as especially gifted and on the path to high achievement and success – yet overcame all that to do astounding things. His new book called Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.
This author, who is now an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s revered Wharton School of Business, focuses this book on the flaws in current society’s educational, job hiring, and value systems that don’t give enough opportunities to people who aren’t obviously born super smart and don’t probe enough to find their abilities and potential to achieve great things.
He’s critical of the widespread tendency to celebrate and promote the naturally gifted based on a narrow set of performance metrics to the detriment of all the other less obvious and harder-to-measure and identify gifts many people have.
His book is about giving hope to the underdogs of this world who feel they’re being ignored and overlooked, and about getting people making hiring, college admissions, and other professional decisions to look through a different and more enlightened lens through which to evaluate people’ intellectual, social, interpersonal character traits.
I found the book’s most counter-intuitive and uplifting insights to be focused on the many incomplete and flawed assumptions talent evaluators make in sizing up who can accomplish the most and deliver the most positive contributions and change to companies, teams, and academic institutions.
The jolting point, from my perspective, was about the value of someone’s work experience. We too often emphasize the importance of a person’s work experience in evaluating them for a new career opportunity.
Many managers turn to prior experience to get an initial sense of candidates’ qualifications. But it turns out that the amount of experience is borderline irrelevant. A candidate with 20 years of experience on a resume may have just repeated the same year of experience 20 times. So you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience…and that reveals little about your potential. The key question is not how long people have done a job. It’s how well they can learn to do a job.
A learning gem this is. It’s not about what you’ve done, after all, it’s about how well you are able to learn something new. In other words, if you have 20 years under your belt writing news releases, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will be able to learn how to write a blog.
These are two different types of writing. Your news release writing experience may help you learn how to write a blog, but there’s no guarantee. You will have to go through a learning curve. You will have to show you know how to learn something new, and that’s important and not always what’s emphasized in job interviews and hiring decisions.
Best Job Candidates Don’t Necessarily Come From Best Colleges
There is almost invariably an assumption that the best job candidates are the ones who went to the most elite universities. Smarter people can learn faster and add more value to the company. They’ll be easier to train and get up to speed quicker than those with college degrees from non-elite universities.
While this may be what most people think, this book delivers a different message.
The assumption is that the best colleges admit and produce the best candidates. Yet pedigrees aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. In a study of over 2,800 students, those who attended higher-ranking universities performed only slightly better than their peers on consulting projects. A Yale student was just 1.9 percent better than a Cleveland State student.
While plausible in several cases, I don’t buy this point wholeheartedly. The truth is that, on average, graduates of elite universities process information faster than those from non-elite universities. This precise skill, fast processing, and synthesizing of data is becoming more valuable than ever in this ever-expanding Information Age that will only accelerate with generative artificial intelligence.
Companies will continue to prefer, other factors being equal, hiring students from elite universities regardless of the statistics above comparing Yale and Cleveland State students. It’s the safer hiring bet to make, and organizations will continue to, in general, want the students who were accepted to elite schools because it’s a less risky and better investment.
Average Students Tend to Excel Professionally
There’s a tendency to think students with the highest grade point averages coming out of college will be the most successful in their professional careers. Sound reasoning this is. They proved they were smart, disciplined, and competitive – all crucial in the professional ranks.
But this book plays up the long-term success of students with average college grades.
The people who go on to become masters in their fields often start out with imperfect transcripts in school. The skills and inclinations that drive people to the top of their high school and college classes may not serve them well after they graduate. These tend to be perfectionists and they get three things wrong: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. They berate themselves for making mistakes.
My sense is perfectionists tend to have more difficulty when things go wrong than the average students who have a higher tolerance and are less hard on themselves when things go off the rails.
While I generally can see the author’s point, there’s still a strong demand for people who want to be extremely accurate and have a low tolerance for making mistakes – perfectionists. But I can see how a non-perfectionist, and average student, would be able to emotionally handle all the ups and downs and miscues of professional life.
They didn’t get all the questions right on exams so built up a tolerance for not always being right, and that’s a valuable experience to have when in professional life we’re often not right, or unsure, or off base.
Longer Hours Don’t Work
The older I get the more I realize that it’s not so much how long you work on a given day; it’s the quality of the work you’re doing while at work. I learned this concept from one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time, Morgan Wootten, who said; “It’s not how hard you work. It’s what you emphasize.” In practices, he spent inordinate amounts of time going over last-second shots – and his teams often made them to win games.
What I’m doing right now is a good case study in emphasizing the sharpening of my writing skills. I am writing this article and it’s taking me a few hours to pull the research, organize the flow, and write these sentences.
My productivity would wane if I spent more than an hour or two at a time on this without taking a break. And it wouldn’t improve this article much if I spent eight hours on it today. I would get tired and my efficiency would decline.
The key is to pack as much punch, add as much value, and use as much clear-minded brainpower and focus in a relatively short period of time, and then take breaks and not work late into the evening just to say “I’m working long hours.”
Working long hours isn’t nearly as productive nor prudent as some people seem to make it out to be and often brag about. A strong few hour stint each day is better for your mind, health, and emotions than 10 or 12 hours on the same project that wears you out in every way. It zaps your energy to produce effectively the next day.
We’re often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice. But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind. It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.
I can relate to this. The other day I was writing about a subject and it wasn’t giving me pleasure. It felt drudgery, plowing through piles of snow. So I decided to stop writing about that and chose to opine about a subject I would find more enjoyable.
This is a good book if you want to be inspired that you have plenty of gifts to share with the world that have so far not been appreciated. This author, whom I have also watched speak for hours on podcasts, is my kind of guy: intense, unpretentious, a bit silly, and genuine. A giant heart he has and it oozes from his speaking and writing.
His obvious desire is not becoming famous and selling books as much as helping people find and unleash their hidden potential. He is a sincere human being trying to do good, a humble Harvard graduate, and a high achiever who isn’t impressed with himself because his focus is serving people.
He inspired me most in this book for enabling me to re-think the progress I am making in my life viewed through the lens of the past.
When you’re struggling to appreciate your progress, consider how your past self would view your current achievements. If you knew five years ago what you’d accomplish now, how proud would you have been?
It’s a worthwhile thought experiment. If I imagined five years ago having done what I’ve done in this time span, I would feel satisfied. Yes, the past five years have been productive and aligned with what I wanted to accomplish. It hasn’t all gone exactly to plan – nothing ever seems to – but I have done a lot that I hoped I would have and put forth genuine effort. I could have done more.
Mistakes were made, detours taken, and setbacks came up. But on the whole, I am at peace and that is a gift this author gave me by thinking about this topic in a different way.
Make Your Children Proud
Credit goes to the author for making an important point that I haven’t been focused on enough. Even though my parents have passed on, I still think about accomplishing things professionally that my Dad would be proud of. I wanted him to think I was hard-working and smart and was doing work that helped people.
I realize now I’ve been thinking too much about my parents in this regard and not enough about leaving my children a better world because of what I have left for them. The author writes:
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.
A wealth of wisdom this is. Of everything in this book I found insightful, this point is the most lasting to me. Leave this world better for my children.
A beautiful insight, an important aspiration.
Author Profile
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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