Unlocking Hidden Potential with Adam Grant

My good friend Adam Grant, author and psychology professor at UpEnN, has a new book out, Hidden Potential The Science of Achieving Greater Things. He sent me a draft months ago. I told Adam. I love it so much that when it comes out, I want to sit down and interview you about it and we'll run the interview. In the revisionist history feed, sure enough, Hidden Potential has now come out. And on Adam's publication day, he came to New York and joined me on stage at the 92nd Street. Y for what turned out to be a really, really fun conversation, as we always have whenever we get together.

So here it is.

Thank you, thank you all for coming, Adam, thank you for coming to New York. You know, we have done this many times, we have.

This is like, you know, in basketball, this is like someone ceding, you know, home territory and saying, Oh, let's just do it at your arena.

But I didn't want to hurt your feelings, so I ate it. I feel like we're even.

World's greatest tennis player. The second blurb is from Mark Cuban, the famous owner of the Dallas Mavericks, The guy who was on Shark Tank. The third quote is from Malcolm Gladwell Me, the fourth quote is from Yo-yo Ma, world's famous cellist, and the fourth quote is from U..S.

Navy Admiral William McRaven Okay now.

What's the theory behind the order?

Why does Serena? did she say I'll give you a blurb if you put me first? Who decided she goes first? Did Cuban say I'm willing to go second to Serena? But no, if I'm behind Gladwell, I'm.

You're not getting it. What happened? How did that work?

Why would I be ahead of Yo-yo Ma? Yo-yo Ma, in every way, is more culturally significant than I am. I will be dead and forgotten if people will be listening to Yo-yo Ma. William McRaven defends this country. And you have a blast. What are your priorities, by the way?

All right, let's talk about your book, which I like a lot, by the way. Otherwise I would not have blurbed it. You're interested in character, which is sort of an interesting twist, isn't it? You would think an organizational psychologist would be someone who would be interested in structures and procedures and those kinds of things.

And it seems to me a lot of what you're doing in your books is this a fair summary of them? Is you are continuing on that path of kind of interrogating our intuitive notions about psychology?

I'm a bomb thrower, you're not a bomb thrower.

What would I want the next Trump or Musk to learn? And, strangely, humility is very, very high on that list.

I wonder how you could, yeah.

So tell me about the thought process that led you to think, okay? The next stage in this journey through character, I want it to be about hidden potential. How did you get there?

They're like, nope, you must take an extra semester of writing and you can't explain your thoughts coherently, and you don't know how to structure an argument.

And I was like, I think I don't belong here, and I think that's the point, right? That's why I wanted to write this book. Is we make so many judgments of other people's potential.

And if the answer is no, you think you should give up. Yeah, because you don't have what it takes. And I think that's a huge mistake. I think it counts out a ton of late bloomers.

I think it overlooks many, many slow learners. And I think it also prevents us from stretching beyond our strengths and actually achieving more than we believe we're capable of.

I did not get a perfect sat score.

What I'm getting at with all these questions about your college years is to what extent this book strikes me. Each one of your books is steadily a little more personal. Some of the best parts of this book are where you illustrate some of your points of personal stories. And I'm wondering whether, in some sense, this book is a personal, is a more personal project than your previous books.

I'm like, they're not a crutch. That's literally what I do. It's how I think, like, if you ask me a question about anything, I'll be like, Well, what is the best randomized controlled trial on that? Yeah.

So this is not me avoiding sharing, it's that I consider systematic evidence to be a better source of knowledge than my idiosyncratic lived experience. But I realize that a lot of people's brains don't work that way. And I think I've come around to the idea that, yes. If I'm sharing my story in service of explaining an idea or revealing a lesson, then that's not about me. That's actually me trying to offer a gift from my life to theirs.

I think this book is a personal project because I've realized over the course of writing it that all my achievements that I'm actually proud of were things that I started out bad at.

But, in fact, what the evidence suggests is that many of the most important accomplishments.

We have are not about what we start with, but what we acquire along the way. And what I want to know is what I'm curious about is, why do we have, in this specific respect, a lay notion that's so clearly at odds with the facts? Where did it? Why do we? Why would we venerate innate ability if innate ability is not nearly as important as...?

Like, what's the reason for that?

That's unsettling to think about. And so I think, just, you know, kind of blaming, right? A lack of progress on raw talent and lets us off the hook a little bit, would be one thought. I think the second thought is that when we see natural talent, we're just blown away by it. You know, if you've ever watched a four-year-old play Mozart, you know it's mind-boggling. And you realize that is a human that's cut from a different cloth than me.

And so it's hard to ever see yourself in that person. I remember. Actually, I'll give you a personal example on this since you invited me to talk more about myself. So this is about to become the Adam Grant show.

I have a dream speech. It was completely demoralizing. I mean, I watched this and I'm like, I will never. No matter how hard I work at this, I will never get that good. So I'm like, I might as well quit now.

And I think that I mean it just. It feels unfathomable, right? When you see that the innate ability, differences between you and someone else could be that great. It just seems impossible for you. And so you assume then that that is what is required.

He used to do good. It's impossible. What we don't see is the history you're describing. We admire people at their peak, we don't get to see the distance they've traveled.

We don't see the fact that he started entering public speaking competitions when he was 15 years old, that he had 20 years of deliberate practice under his belt. That the year he gave the Dream Speech alone, he gave over 350 speeches, which is probably as many speeches as you've given in your career. I would imagine. So I think we have unfortunate access to greatness.

We see people at their peak and we assume that they started far ahead of us.

Is there something uniquely American about this idea? There may be.

I think about what we do culturally in the U.

S That's different from other parts of the world, there is a tendency to make the fundamental attribution error more in the U.S.

And I think you're right, I think in Finland, I think in Estonia, I think in we could probably make a whole list of other countries. There's a stronger sense that every child has hidden potential, and it's the job of parents and teachers and coaches to realize it. In two senses of the word, one to recognize it, and then two to develop it.

It doesn't make any sense at all that we should have it backwards of all cultures.

That allows us to believe in the notion of meritocracy. It allows us to feel like we've earned all the success that we've achieved, as opposed to partially lucking into it. I think there is a function there. It allows us to think that America when we talk about the American Dream and we say that anybody can live the American dream. This is the land of opportunity. We are justifying our system, and I think that serves a soothing function for a lot of people.

It's sort of your critique of where perfectionism leads us and what it costs us. You start with a really interesting discussion of your time as a diver in high school and how you were a perfectionist. Can you talk a little bit about how your perfectionism manifested itself and how you came to believe it was self-defeating?

There are a whole bunch of things that I did that were counterproductive. One was I just wasted a lot of time trying to perfect easy dives as opposed to learning harder ones, which limited my degree of difficulty. I actually got an award one year from my teammates, it was the if only award. There was a little drawing of me on a paper plate with a cartoon. That said, If only I had pointed my left pinky toe on that dive, I would have gotten an eight and a half instead of an eight.

That's not what mattered. I should have been stretching so I could actually touch my toes without bending my knees, that would have made me a better diver.

Not only did I focus on the wrong things, I ruminated a lot, I beat myself up a lot. I was constantly shaming my past mistakes as opposed to trying to educate my future self from those lessons, that was not helpful. Probably the worst thing that I did, though, was the balking.

Diving When you're going to take off forward, you walk down the board and then jump to the end. If my hurdle, if my takeoff, if my approach wasn't perfect, I would just stop and start over, stop and start over. Then there's a two-balk rule, then I have to get off the board.

Then I'm not doing dives. All practice. What's the point of...?

What's going on inside your head? Are you enjoying being a diver?

Kind of.

The reason I ask this question is, forgive me, Adam, if I could play Dr. Freud for a moment, if you'd like to recline.

I feel there's a lot more.

There's a lot more of your books are a lot more of a personal project than you let on this one in particular. You have these little moments where you start talking about diving.

If I was a psychoanalyst, I would say, Adam, this book is really about you trying to make sense of the mistakes that little Adam made and the experiences that little Adam had. Is that not fair?

I mean, his approach was so unscientific, and if you disagree with him, well, you're in denial. How is that helpful to anyone?

Anyway.

I will not be paging, Dr. Freud.

And I also think there's a point at which you stop blaming your behavior on the sins of your parents and start taking responsibility for your adult choices.

How old are you now?

That's like me calling you a jogger as a runner. I think there's a difference between trying to work out the problems of Little Adam, which is how Malcolm Freud would approach this discussion. And trying to figure out if there are lessons from my biggest struggles, and also my greatest moments of growth, that could become teachable moments for me and others. I'm trying to reflect on the fact that I really was my own worst enemy. For a good part of my diving career, but then I ended up ascending to a much greater height than I ever thought possible. I should not have gotten where I got as a diver.

What was I doing in the junior Olympic Nationals as somebody who literally was called Frankenstein because I didn't bend my knees when I walked? Something about this does not add up. I think that juxtaposing those kinds of moments with what does the social science tell us? is really powerful.

If you had been this kind of non-nerdy golden boy who was a diving prodigy and to whom things came easily, we don't get this book.

When you're 40 and you're interested in writing about hidden potential, it starts to matter then.

I think the fundamental problem there, if you look at the research, is they have not built the character skills that are necessary to face obstacles. They don't know how to embrace discomfort, they don't know how to accept the right imperfections and say these mistakes are actually part of my growth. I think that sometimes early success does a major disservice to our future selves.

She got into Cornell. Isn't that fantastic? I emailed Adam and I was like, how does this guy get it completely backwards? Why doesn't he boast about his daughter? That my daughter's having an amazing time in medical school? Isn't it amazing that she's the kind of person who can go into an institution and find what's meaningful to her and flourish?

He was focused on Cornell and he wasn't interested in the character traits his own daughter had. That allowed her to flourish and be happy and find meaningful.

There's something about parents. What you're describing is why are parents so bad at kind of decoding the psychology of their own children? It just strikes me as like, why are we making these mistakes? Then? Why on earth are we so in love with Prodigies again? I mean, I'm just baffled by this.

As a parent, you should be much more concerned with who your kids become and how they treat other people. Being a great parent is not about how much prestige your kids attain in their school choices or in their jobs. It's not about career success, it's about character.

I think you might have found someone who had not yet internalized.

By avoiding failure, they actually avoid risk-taking, and they avoid learning and challenging themselves. That means they end up with a static or even ever-narrowing comfort zone, as opposed to an expanding domain of expertise.

S.

In the U.

K.

And the great nation of Canada. I think if you look at why it's increasing, what everybody does is, they say, social media, it's got to be social media. Everybody has a perfect image of themselves on Instagram, and that's leading our kids to have unrealistic expectations. That may be part of the story, but guess what?

Perfectionism started rising a generation before social media existed. It started rising when Mark Zuckerberg was in diapers. So there's got to be something else going on. And my read of the evidence is there are two things that seem to be contributing to it, and both of them are parental behaviors. One of them is rising parental expectations for kids, holding children to increasingly impossible standards. Two is increasingly harsh criticism of kids who don't meet those standards.

Let's take one step further. Why would parents? It seems like an obvious question, but I don't know that I know a good answer. Why would parents? Expectations have risen? ...?

We're talking about the 80s, 90s, what's driving parental expectations in that era.

However hard it was to get into college in the 80s, it got a little bit harder in the 90s, and it got increasingly difficult over time. In a world that feels more and more zero-sum, I think we've probably seen a lot of talk about how. The current generation of kids is the first in America that might not outdo their parents or have a better standard of living than their parents. When you see that world, when you see a world of scarcity, you think I've got to do whatever it takes to help my kids succeed. Forgetting that the very things you're doing to try to help your kids succeed are just turning them into achievement robots who one day realize this is no way to live a life and burn out.

Would you think your parents were guilty of that?

She said it with a smile. I think she was half kidding, but I took it seriously. I guess there was a little. I didn't get the harsh criticism, though, but I definitely felt like expectations were high.

On the other hand, if you enter a university or a workplace that is known to have affirmative action, you perform worse if you are a beneficiary of that program than if the program didn't exist. We see this with women, we see it with racial minorities. What happens is, and I don't think this will shock anyone. People start to doubt whether they really deserve that spot. Am I qualified?

Do I belong here? It's a massive version of imposter syndrome and not the healthy kind. And then other people question it, too. They're like, Well, I don't think you really got in on your own merit. And that self-doubt and constantly being doubted by others, that takes a toll.

It's exhausting to deal with, it's distracting to constantly question your capabilities, day in, day out. And so I came away from this evidence, thinking I don't know where I stand. I think that we're sort of damned if we do, and we're damned if we don't. But I do think there's an alternative approach that might be helpful to think about.

Are white people exempt? Can we just pause?

If you're on equal footing with somebody whose parents didn't go to an elite institution, then you already had an advantage. So the other person should get it. I think, first of all, a lot of people don't know who the legacies are. I think. Also there's not the same stigma. Historically, there hasn't been the same stigma associated with legacy admission.

So affirmative action is seen as lowering standards, and in most cases, it's not. It's just saying, we're going to look at people who all meet the qualifications and requirements. And then we're going to make sure that those whose groups have been historically disadvantaged get a shot. But I think in the case of legacy, there hasn't been that stigma, it's been assumed. Oh, you come from a genius family.

You belong here.

And I think that that seems like a much more fair way to give people who have been disadvantaged a real shot.

I mean, there's much to be said for that idea, and that's a longer conversation, but we're running out of time. But I have one last thing I want to say. So this is I'm asking you to give me some advice because I'm working on a book right now. And this is very....

I deal with this very question we're talking about in this book.

Ambitious African-American student who's interested in.

Stan wants to be a doctor or engineer, or scientist of some kind who has.

Are you trying to?

Lead a life you can be proud of. Are you pursuing happiness or meaning? I think there are lots of different outcomes, I think the big mistake that I see. I've had a lot of students come by office hours with these kinds of dilemmas over the years. Often they're grad school dilemmas or they're job dilemmas, but sometimes it's high schoolers trying to choose a college.

The main advice that I find myself giving them is to say, you don't want to just define your success. By achieving your goals, you should think about success as living your values.

If you have a career target that you hit, but it requires you to compromise your principles, that's not success. That's failure. It's the worst kind of failure because you've abandoned what matters most to you. Why don't we talk about what your values are? is one of your core principles. To break glass ceilings? Do you want to prove to people that other people can follow in your footsteps?

Karen Knowlton is here, Karen did some brilliant work on. Being a trailblazer is one of your core priorities in life, to open a door and clear a path for other people. If so, you can ask, Do I want to do this by starting out in an Ivy League school, or do I want to go to an environment where I might be more supported? And maybe it's easier to blaze a trail later, I don't know.

I can't predict the future. That's the kind of conversation I'd want to have, and it wouldn't end with advice. It would end with me asking, What have you learned through this conversation about your values? And which path do you think is going to help you avoid straying from them?

In one chapter after another, you're just saying, Wait a minute. We're starting with this perspective, and it's just like, why that kind of need to go back to.

Fundamentals and re-ask some really basic questions is what is really wonderful about this book? And please go and buy Adam's book. Thank you all.