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There are a lot of books out there purporting to unlock the keys to improved “performance.”
You’ve got overt self-help like “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey and Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek.” Books like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” or Angela Duckworth’s “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” look at social science research to give us things like Gladwell’s “10,000 hour rule” or Duckworth’s “Grit Scale” that provide metrics by which we may gauge the potential for success. When it comes to being better than whatever we are, there seems to be an inexhaustible desire for information and advice.
I normally avoid these books because, in my view, they take something enormously complicated — the variability of human motivation, behavior and individual circumstance — and attempt to boil them down to something oversimplified like, if you just practice for 10,000 hours you’ll achieve mastery of the thing you’re practicing.
But I recently heard a podcast interview with organizational psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant about his new book “Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.” In many ways, I see Grant’s book as an antidote to Duckworth’s “Grit,” which was used — in many cases against Duckworth’s explicit cautions — as a cudgel to blame struggling people for their own struggles because they lacked this ineffable quality known as “grit.”
As someone who was known as congenitally lazy when it came to certain activities (homework, chores, etc.) but who also read just about the entire “World Book Encyclopedia” for fun, and has managed to turn his interests into a fulfilling and sustainable career, I always thought that “fit” mattered more to perseverance and success than grit.
While Grant’s book still explores the kinds of individual mindsets that pave the way to successful development — most notably becoming a sponge of the information and experience others have to give — the bulk of the book explores the conditions that allow for people to have the best possible chance of success.
For example, Grant explores the “structures for motivation” examining how important it is to make practice literally fun by making it fresh and novel, rather than relentlessly repeating the same actions over and over. He also illuminates the necessity of experiencing productive failure where the attempt is valued above the result in order to motivate subsequent trials.
In his chapters on “systems of opportunity” he, distressingly, identifies all the ways our schools, our workplaces, and our processes for identifying and nurturing “talent” are woefully misaligned with the goals we claim. His work on schooling is particularly important and suggests that the practices of standardization and competition that undergird our American system need fundamental rethinking, a position I’m sympathetic to having witnessed the harm of these things firsthand as a teacher of writing.
While there’s dozens of pages of sources drawn from academic research and Grant’s own original interviews in the back matter, the book is relentlessly breezy, larded with narrative examples like how Steph Curry became a basketball savant, what makes Finnish schools so successful and how the Chilean miners were saved.
At times, Grant commits what I see as a couple of misdemeanors when it comes to flattening some complexities regarding his main points, but as compared with my reading of most books of this genre, which have me banging my head at the desk because of the oversimplification, “Hidden Potential” is rather nuanced.
I hope it’s a book that penetrates among the classes of people who get to set the rules the rest of us live by. For the rest of us, it’ll be nice to have to validate your suspicions when you know what you’re being asked to do doesn’t make sense.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “Leave the World Behind” by Rumaan Alam
2. “Everything I Don’t Remember” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
3. “Circe” by Madeline Miller
4. “Five Tuesdays in Winter” by Lily King
5. “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” by David Grann v
— Marie J., Wilmette
I think Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” is going to be a perennial seller for the foreseeable future, and in this case, it’s a good bet for Marie.
1. “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson
2. “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus
3. “Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett
4. “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty” by Patrick Radden Keefe
5. “The President is Missing” by James Patterson and Bill Clinton
— Christine S., Downers Grove
For Christine, a deeply felt family story that lets us get close to these characters: “Morningside Heights” by Joshua Henkin.
1. “The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin” edited by Lisa Yaszek
2. “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” by David W. Blight
3. “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States” by Sarah Vowell
4. “The Waste Land and Other Poems” by T.S. Eliot
5. “The Wright Brothers” by David McCullough
— Arturo M., Mount Prospect
The abolitionist John Brown has been a frequent source for interesting novelizations, including James McBride’s “The Good Lord Bird” but for Arturo, I’m going back further to a book that I think is unfortunately overlooked, “Raising Holy Hell” by Bruce Olds.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.