Review: Hidden Potential
Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam M. Grant
My rating: 3.5/5
Blurb:
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.
Review:
[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]
A pretty interesting read in general. Maybe not the most original theme, nor anything that hasn’t been written about aplenty, but as a condensate of examples illustrating how we have plenty of hidden potential we could tap with (but don’t always realise we can), I found it inspiring nonetheless. Inspiring for myself, that is, but also as a resource for deeper thoughts when it comes to making my way on the path of leadership, since all in all, I’m still fairly new to it. And, perhaps, it was simply also a book that reached me at the right time, in the right frame of mind? (Hello, Impostor Syndrome my old friend? Can you go back into the closet again? Thank you!)
To be fair, for someone who has read several books on this theme already, this one won’t bring anything really new, even though it reads easily and is engaging. Otherwise, it will provide food for thought.
Conclusion: 3.5 stars