Adam Grant stuffs Hidden Potential with loads of anecdotes and research on growth, learning, and performance.

Excellence

Excellence relies less on our natural talent.

It’s more about proactiveness, collaboration, discipline, and determination.

It’s never too late to build character traits in life to get this benefit.

Learning styles aren’t fixed

There are lots of different ways to learn. Mixing them up is worth it.

Sometimes working in your least preferred way is better for learning as it forces you to work harder.

Human sponges

Ask loads of questions and take notes. Seek and soak up information.

Asking others for one thing you can do to improve will help surface up lessons and ways to improve faster.

Don’t aim for perfection

Take small steps or slices and build gradually.

Not aiming for perfection can unlock good solutions.

Incorporate play and variety into practice

Adding play makes practice more effective.

Also ensure you take regular breaks as that’s a more effective way of internalising lessons and practice.

Getting stuck

Progress isn’t linear.

A rut or plateau or stagnation isn’t a signal you’ve hit your peak. It’s a chance to back up and try a different approach.

You will need to regress to progress.

Defying gravity

Pooling study resources in a group leads to higher collective outcomes.

The tutor effect: teaching others improves your understanding.

Being doubted by experts can have a demoralising effect. Being doubted by non-experts can drive higher performance.

When someone ignorant doubts you it feels like a challenge.

If credible people believe in us it is a signal that we should believe in ourselves.

It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants.

Designing schools

The Finnish education system was focused on early intervention.

All kids are given attention—not just those that show early potential.

Teachers can stay with student for multiple years in a row—this is known as “looping”.

Teachers get more break time so they can better prepare.

Play leads to a love of learning.

Mary C. Murphy on the culture around growth mindsets.

Charity Majors:

The strategy for a fulfilling, lifelong career in tech is not to up the ante every interval. Nor is it to amass more and more power over others until you explode. Instead:

1. Train yourself to love the feeling of constantly learning and pushing your boundaries. Feeling comfortable is the system blinking orange, and it should make you uneasy.
2. Follow your nose into work that lights you up in the morning, work you can’t stop thinking about. If you’re bored, do something else.
3. Say yes to opportunities!! Intensity is nothing to be afraid of. Instead of trying to cap your speed or your growth, learn to alternate it with recovery periods.
4. If you aren’t sure what to do, make the choice that preserves or expands future optionality. Remember: Most startups fail. Will you be okay with your choices if (& when) this one does too?

Camille Fournier:

Either way, it is important to realize that these more senior levels are not a measure of betterness, or quality, or raw intelligence and technical skills. They are instead a measure of demonstrated impact and confidence in the scope of work that the person can be tasked to accomplish. The people who get these promotions are trusted to navigate the systems of the company, to understand what is valued by the people around them and where to spend their time, because they have done just that.

Derek Thompson:

Role-switching is important not because quitting is so wonderful, but rather because sampling from different skills and fields is helpful, provided that you’re prepared to pounce on an area that clicks for you. Explore, then exploit.

…

He argues at one point that artists and other professionals feel happiest when their “body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Dave Anderson:

A promotion to a higher job level puts you in a more influential position. You are being given more responsibility. It’s not a reward. Instead, it’s the company granting you more influence.

Of course, increased pay often accompanies a promotion. However, the added responsibility is the reason the company did the promotion, not the compensation.

Those who run the company are always looking for people to take on more responsibility. They’re looking for people who can come up with the next business idea, lead larger spaces, identify opportunities, and fix recurring problems. It is relatively easy to find people who are good at their jobs, and hard to find people capable of doing the next level job.

Circling back, companies promote people into larger responsibilities when that person looks like a leader. Leaders identify their own opportunities.

Cindy Sridharan:

Unless you understand “why” things are the way they are (and there often is a method to every madness, if you’re patient to dig deep enough), any proposal you might have on “how” to improve the situation might end up very much going against the grain, making it that much more of an uphill task for your proposal to be accepted. Furthermore, it’ll make it seem as though you put in no effort to understand the history of the system, which doesn’t exactly breed a lot of confidence into why you should be entrusted with fixing the system.

Yaniv Bernstein:

Once I took on board that it was my job as an engineer to actually deliver impact, provide value, then I became a lot more engaged with my cross-functional partners.

Liz Keogh:

As the Peter Principle suggests, we tend to rise to the level of our incompetence… but that’s not actually such a bad thing, as long as we can learn fast, safely. The best way to do that is to make sure things are safe-to-fail, which usually means putting appropriate feedback loops in place. In a human system, that usually means feedback.

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Sometimes it’s the simplest thing in the world, and we forget to do it. Clarifying why you want something allows people to make autonomous decisions about how best to work towards the outcome you want; or (even more important) give you information about the context you were unaware of that will cause difficulty getting that outcome.

A look at how Skyscanner support their people’s transition from individual contributer to managers.

Rolling up your sleeves is magic.

Rands:

The fourth role is by far the most important. It’s the role the vast majority of engineers will follow in their careers, and I’m going to call it “This. Forever.” The role you have right now is the thing you are going to do be doing forever.

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A depressing thought? Not when you remember you’re on a quest.

Richard Hamming giving advice to researchers in 1995, plenty of which serves as general career advice.

Here’s a selection:

• Work on important problems.
• Luck favours a prepared mind.
• Work on problems you’re committed to.
• Talk to people outside of your field.
• Pursue opportunities when they’re presented.
• Schedule regular time for deep reflections.
• Take a step back to see the larger problem.
• Every defect can be looked at as an asset.

John Barton:

In my very first programming role my manager said to me “You can make any mistake you like once. You’ll have my full support the first time you screw anything up. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning, and if you’re repeating mistakes you aren’t either”.

A look at radical transparency at the hedge fund Bridgewater.

Embrace the power of compounding.

Tyler Cowen:

Learning something new all the time, and staying healthy. Getting paid. Interacting with smart people. Having the chance to pass something along to others.

Solid.

There’s hope yet that I can draw me some comics one day.