Adam, welcome to Talks at Google. Thank you. Such a thrill.
So your new book, Hidden Potential, it's all about cultivating the genius in everyone. You talk about champion chess players, artists, business leaders, NASA astronauts. And through these stories, I started to see that success comes in many forms. It's not just for those who have... you know, natural aptitude or a headstart, you talk about with the right motivation, mindset, and support, each of us can achieve a lot more than we think.
So I'm wondering, Adam, what do we need to do? What do we need to do to get started on that journey? I mean, I don't know. I just studied this.
So good luck. I'm not sure. No, I think for me, the starting point is to recognize that we're often the worst judges of our own potential because we're seeing ourselves from the inside. And very often that means we don't just have blind spots. We're also, we're unaware of our own strengths.
And I think the bias that exists, especially in the Western world, toward thinking about potential in terms of natural talent, leaves us to think that if I'm not good at something right away, then this is not a strength for me. And therefore, I should focus on something else. And the reality is, it doesn't really matter where you start.
The ultimate question of potential is. How far can you travel? And so given that your own judgment is going to be biased, I think the best thing you can do is find knowledgeable people who are capable of holding up a mirror and letting you know what might be in your future five, 10 years down the road and take that as a better parameter than your own judgment of yourself. The playful spirit has always been a really core part of Google's DNA. And I'm curious from your research, how do you square this with the need for hard work?
and persistence. At the surface, it can feel a little bit like they're at odds. Talk to us a little bit more about that. It does feel like they're at odds, but I actually think that deliberate play is how you make hard work motivating and how you sustain your energy and enthusiasm over time.
And it's very googly to say, look, we're not going to assume that there's a fundamental choice. You can either work hard or you can play and have fun, right? We actually want hard work to become fun.
And I can tell you the way to do that is not to turn practice into a grind. And I think that, unfortunately, that's how a lot of people have approached deliberate practice to say, okay, I know I need to hone a skill. It's probably not going to be 10,000 hours because it turns out to be a lot more complicated depending on the person and the skill. The number of hours and reps is going to vary dramatically.
What we do know, though, is that you need a given number of reps to move toward expertise. And a lot of people just think they have to push themselves to do that. The problem with that is you're at risk for burnout over the long haul. And even before you get to burnout, there's another syndrome that psychologists call bore out, which is exactly what it sounds like.
It's so monotonous that you're just bored out of your mind and you don't want to do it anymore. And you start to disengage. Evelyn Glennie is one of my favorite examples that I wrote about.
She's a musician who found going through percussion drills a little bit dull. And so she started giving herself challenges like, I'm going to try to harmonize Bach on a snare drum. And that maintained her interest.
And she's won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize of Music. She's been a superstar for almost half a century now. And that's, to me, what deliberate play looks like.
It's saying, I'm not just going to accept that the daily grind has to be miserable. I want to turn it into a source of daily joy. What are some of the skill sets and mindsets you think that we should be thinking about instilling in our leaders here and in other places? Well, I think one of the things I saw when I was doing research for the book was there's some sort of kindergarten level character skills that every leader needs.
I think about them as being proactive, pro-social, disciplined, and determined. And those are table stakes. But I think we need to go a little bit further if we want to ask, what is it that separates great leaders from their peers?
And I think there, what I'm really interested in is, you know, not just being indiscriminately pro-social, not just being a servant leader, but being focused on the mission and saying, okay, how am I going to help make a group more than the sum of its parts, right? That's what pro-social skills are about. When it comes to being proactive, I think that what proactive leaders do most effectively is they are human sponges, which means they're not just seeking out and absorbing information from everywhere.
But just like a sea sponge, they also have highly tuned filters to weed out particles that are harmful and ultimately keep nutrients in. And so I want leaders who, you know, instead of silencing critics, will engage their critics, but also recognize that not all critics are thinking critically or speaking constructively. And that requires initiative.
And then I think, you know, when it comes to discipline and determination, what I'm really interested in there is leaders who are not content to stay within their comfort zones and play to their strengths, but who want to stretch beyond their strengths and continue evolving and adapting. And that requires them to embrace some discomfort. It requires them to have the discipline to say, there are times when I need to aim for the best and times when it's okay to settle for good enough.
And maybe even tolerate some minor mistakes that are part of growth, that are part of risk-taking, that are part of challenging myself and experimenting. And so I guess those are the kinds of character skills that I'm looking for. Talk to us a little bit more about this idea of perfectionism and how it gets in the way.
Yeah, what the research on perfectionism shows pretty consistently is perfectionists do tend to do better in school. You can see this in meta-analyses, studies of studies. If you are a perfectionist, you will get better grades on average. But... When you send them out into the real world, there is no relationship between perfectionism and job performance and career success.
Perfectionists are really good at mastering known problems. So if you know what's on the test, you can continue studying until you've really committed the material to memory, and then you're more likely to ace it. The problem is, in the real world, we don't tell you what's going to be on the test, and you may not even get graded on a regular basis.
So perfectionists end up... making the mistake of basically trying to fix the flaws that are controllable and predictable instead of being open and flexible. And that limits their learning. What you see is that perfectionists are so concerned about getting the right answer that they end up asking the wrong questions.
They're so worried about the one detail that they might get incorrect that they end up missing the forest and the trees. And so, yeah, where I've landed is I think we all need to develop the character skill of being imperfectionists. And by that, I mean we have to tolerate the right imperfections. You don't want to fire the wrong person.
You don't want to make a catastrophic high stakes decision. But there are mistakes that we're all going to make that are not only tolerable, but necessary on the path to growth. And we need to figure out how to identify those so that then we can invest in them and learn from them.
Well, I'll give you one that I learned from my diving coach, Eric Best. So I, by the way, I thought perfectionism was going to be an asset as a diver. I thought, yes, like the fact that I want perfect is going to get me closer to perfect ends.
And it turned out to be a huge liability for me as a diver because I was constantly beating myself up for falling short of perfection. And that rumination was counterproductive. I was also, I would balk halfway down the diving board.
I would stop and turn around because I messed up my approach. And then I got fewer dives in. So I was actually limiting my own practice and my own development by trying to get it right every time, as opposed to just doing it and getting better over time. If nothing else, what would it be?
What would be the one thing that you hope this inspires? That's a great question. I'm curious to hear your reaction to that.
What was the one thing you took away from it? For me, it was really working on character. and thinking about how we show up on those hard days.
I think the underpinning of that was around courage. I don't think we've talked a lot about that in recent years, but this need to really figure out how to step into that discomfort, not knowing all the answers, not relying on what we've been taught, being okay, being wrong, says a lot about who we are. And no longer is it a nice to have, it's a must have. And seeing the research that backs that was... was really helpful.
It was really helpful. And I think it could unlock so much in organizations and in society if we did that better. Well, that's the answer I clearly want to give.
Like, done. Maybe to build on that, I think the main thing that I want people to take away is that your potential is not just the peaks you reach. It's also the valleys you cross. And what that means is you can't judge your future possibility by where you are today. You can't judge it by what you've achieved yesterday.
What you can do is pay attention to the obstacles you've overcome and take that as a signal that there's going to be an upward slope in your future. How can someone first build the confidence and belief that they can achieve greater things now than that we've already done? I think that what most people believe is that in order to realize their hidden potential, They need to build their confidence and then they can start to pursue a new challenge or take on a new risk.
And empirically, I think that's backward. The causal effect flows more strongly in the other direction. In other words, it's through taking on the challenge.
that you actually start to build your confidence. It's through making progress that you start to realize, oh, I'm more capable than I thought. If you know you're going to do it one day, there's no reason why today couldn't be that day.
And I wasn't just going to become magically ready to take the leap. I needed to take the leap in order to feel ready. Yeah. I think a lot of people end up self-limiting. So imposter syndrome comes up.
immediately, whenever this topic is raised. I wrote about it a little bit in Think Again. Basima Tufek did this brilliant research showing that, why do we turn this into a syndrome? Why do we have to act like it's a chronic debilitating disease where people will walk around thinking, you've heard of imposter syndrome, but I am an actual fraud, and it's only a matter of minutes until everyone finds out.
What Basima said is, we ought to think about this more. I mean, yes, there are people who experience it. as that debilitating. But what most of us could do is say, okay, you feel like an imposter when there's a gap between other people's expectations of you and your expectations of yourself. It's like imposter syndrome is a paradox.
On the one hand, you're saying, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't believe in myself. On the other hand, you're saying, but I definitely know that I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm going to trust my own judgment of myself. That does not make any sense. Like those two things should not coexist.
If you know you don't know what you're doing, you should discount your own judgment of whether you know what you're doing. And you should trust the other people who have an independent, neutral, more objective view of what your capabilities are. And so Brian, I think the message that Basima sends on that is, when you feel like an imposter, it's a sign that other people think you're pretty amazing.
And it's a chance to earn those impressions. I would even go further. I would say if multiple people believe in you, it is probably time to believe them.
Can you share any more about how we can think about an individual's journey to mastery across all three of these? And is there one particular skill relevant more than others, given the current pace of change in the tech industry? Interesting. So I didn't have good data on the... prevalence of these character skills when I finished writing the book.
But last month, I launched a hidden potential quiz on my website where we've had over 38,000 people in the last few weeks take the quiz. And it's a short, fun assessment. You can take it if you go to adamgrant.net for those of you who are interested. But what it does is it assesses you on your tendency to be a sponge, an imperfectionist, and a discomfort seeker. And then it gives you feedback on which of those character skills is your strongest.
which one might be an area for growth. And what I can tell you from analyzing the data last week, actually, is the most common character strength of those three is being a sponge. And the least common is being an imperfectionist.
That seems to be the one that people struggle with the most worldwide across industries. And my guess is this is a little bit less of a challenge for people in tech where you've heard over and over again, the perfect is the enemy of the good. We talk about how we want to fail fast. We want to ship as opposed to always perfecting.
I wonder if it's not discomfort seeking that's the biggest challenge in tech. I think from the time I've spent at Google and also the time I've spent in Silicon Valley and more generally doing research, gathering data, giving talks, advising, I think that very often people sort of end up almost putting themselves in a version of the Peter Principle. So Brian, you know the Peter Principle well as the phenomenon where every time people are good at a job, they get promoted.
And then they keep getting promoted until they're not good at a job anymore. And then they get stuck there and they're stranded at their level of incompetence. My experience of the tech world is that people are extremely afraid of not being competent. And so oftentimes what they do is they say, okay, I'm going to play to my strengths and I'm going to do the things that I'm really good at. And when they start to get that pang of discomfort, it could be a new leadership challenge in front of them.
It could be a new product that they're tasked to build. It could be selling in a domain that they're not familiar with. It might even be managing a hybrid or remote team as opposed to an in-person team for the first time.
They often kind of feel this knee-jerk, reflexive. Like, well, I don't know if I'm good at that. And so like, I don't want to embarrass myself.
I don't want to be in an awkward situation. So I'm going to avoid that altogether. I actually set a goal now to launch a couple of projects every year that fail. And let me be clear, I'm not aiming for failure.
What I'm doing is I'm treating that as a gauge that I'm embracing discomfort and that I'm accepting imperfection. I feel like if everything I do succeeds, then I've been playing it too safe. I haven't been taking risks.
I haven't been stretching myself. I haven't been pushing myself to learn something new. And so I guess it's not a goal so much as an expectation. I have an expectation that I will launch a few things that... you know, that flop or disappointments or don't go as planned.
What if we gave everyone the permission to do that? What really inspired you to write this book from the beginning? And was there anything that you had to unlearn?
Definitely. There always is. That's, I mean, for me, that's one of the highlights of writing a book is I have to abandon some old beliefs and adopt some new ones through, through the research process.
And there's nothing like, by the way, there's nothing like telling other people. here's what the science says, to convince yourself, in fact, that you were wrong. So that's a joy for me as part of the writing process.
I think the reason I took on Hidden Potential is I just have gotten sick of seeing potential squander. And I've noticed that so many of the people that I've seen extraordinary capability in have either felt underqualified or overlooked. at various points in their lives. And I wanted to try to do something about that at scale.
What's one piece of advice that you want the listeners here today to walk away with? I'll start there and say that, you know, the problem with asking for feedback if you look at the data is that you tend to elicit a lot of critics and cheerleaders. The critics attack your worst self.
The cheerleaders applaud your best self. And you don't always learn a lot from them. The critics can demoralize you.
The cheerleaders can leave you complacent also. So there's a risk that not only do you fail to grow as much as you wanted, but you failed to get the motivation you were looking for. When you ask for advice, you shift the time horizon. Instead of asking, what did I do right or wrong yesterday?
You put the focus on what can I do better tomorrow? And that leads to more constructive, more actionable suggestions. Because instead of being critics or cheerleaders, you are turning people into coaches.
And that's what we all need. A great coach is somebody who sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself. And I think that's what we all need in our lives to realize our own hidden potential.
So my advice would be to find a coach who believes you're capable of more than you think you are and who's able to give you guidance about how to reach that potential.