Book Review: “Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things” by Adam Grant 4/5
"The ultimate mark of potential is not the height of the peak you've reached, but the distance you've travelled - and helped others travel" - Adam Grant
The book leads us through different aspects of exploring potential, ours or that of others, hidden in plain sight. We start with character skills, go through the process of learning, the obstacles we overcome, and finish with environments in which we can thrive.
Adam Grant backs up each chapter with stories of people who achieved great things. Among many, my favourite one (just look at this page's header) is about someone who wanted to become an astronaut. Part of the book describes the initial phase of the NASA recruitment process, where they filter out thousands of candidates for around ten available spots every two years1. To make the book more personal the author shares a bit of his own life, and thanks to this we feel more connected to him and his story.
My favourite side story from the book is the origin of the terms soft and hard skills. They were introduced by a US army training program in the late 1960s2 to clearly distinguish skills whilst training soldiers. Skills related to work with metal were labelled as hard and the rest as soft. Hard skills included dealing with weapons, repairing guns, etc, and the soft ones remained as everything that didn't touch metal at any point. They wanted to change the naming afterwards as soldiers complained about the word ‘soft’ because of its stigma, but unfortunately it has stayed with us since. The key is to remember that soft skills are not less important, it’s quite the contrary, and the book presents them as more valuable to explore our hidden potential.
I felt that the book could have gone deeper into the examples, and due to the sole focus on positive examples it lacked possible counter-examples. Also, I do not know much about the rules of US sports, references to which were used a few times which may have caused me to miss details.
It is well structured, it keeps the reader entertained with a lot of humour, and it delivers valuable insights. The last chapter is a summary with 40 practical takeaways and action points from everything featured in the book. I will go back to them frequently as food for thought.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in exploring the topic of potential, and how it is possible to achieve our goals. To assess people’s potential we should focus on how far they have come and not necessarily where they are right now.