Hidden Potential

We’re often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice. But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind. It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy. It’s not a coincidence that in music, the term for practice is play.

Perfectionists often worry that failing even once will make them a failure. But take it from eight studies: people don’t judge your competence based on one performance. It’s called the overblown implications effect. If you cook one bad dish, people rarely think you’re a terrible chef. If you leave a finger over the camera lens, they don’t conclude you’re a bad photographer. They know it’s only a snapshot from a single moment in time.

their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.

The more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable.

Fans of learning styles would have us believe that verbal learning is good for one person and auditory learning is good for another person. But learning is not always about finding the right method for you. It’s often about finding the right method for the task

What counts is not how hard you work but how much you grow.

I. BUILD CHARACTER SKILLS

If you doubt yourself, shouldn’t you also doubt your low opinion of yourself?

I now believe that impostor syndrome is a sign of hidden potential. It feels like other people are overestimating you, but it’s more likely that you’re underestimating yourself. They’ve recognized a capacity for growth that you can’t see yet. When multiple people believe in you, it might be time to believe them.

Many people dream of achieving goals. They measure their progress by the status they acquire and the accolades they collect. But the gains that count the most are the hardest to count. The most meaningful growth is not building our careers—it’s building our character.

Success is more than reaching our goals—it’s living our values. There’s no higher value than aspiring to be better tomorrow than we are today. There’s no greater accomplishment than unleashing our hidden potential.

Not long ago, it dawned on me that impostor syndrome is a paradox:

Others believe in you
You don’t believe in yourself
Yet you believe yourself instead of them

The worst kind of success is achieving other people’s goals.