How does a self-proclaimed introvert become renowned for his confidence? “Become a creature of discomfort,” says Adam Grant. “Ask for advice rather than feedback. Doing your best is the wrong cure for perfectionism.”
Organisational psychologist and “recovering perfectionist” Grant has a string of best-selling books behind him and TED talks viewed by millions. The Financial Times and Fortune magazine have hailed him as one of the world’s most influential management thinkers.
Yet at 14, when he underwent his first diving lesson, he was told he “walked like Frankenstein”. Three years later, Grant was a state finalist and two-time US Junior Olympics qualifier in springboard diving.
Grant became the youngest tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton business school at age 28. But he says prodigy isn’t predetermined and everyone has the capacity for greatness.
While he was a Harvard first-year student, an ad sales role inspired Grant’s interest in psychology at work. He became set on addressing a common social problem: although people spend most of their waking lives at work, many fail to find their jobs motivating and satisfying.
“The best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind,” he says in his latest book, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. “It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.”
Grant doesn’t fall into the trope of preachy self-help in his new work, which we excerpt below. Instead, he describes stories of those who have already lived what he’s suggesting – a show rather than tell of real-life people and groups: the Harlem middle school chess team beating the reigning champion private school with exorbitant tuition costs, or the startling statistic that being assigned a more experienced kindergarten teacher as a child leads to a higher income as an adult.
Grant’s phone book is almost as impressive as his credentials and the book is peppered with US household names: basketballer Steph Curry’s personal trainer, Brandon Payne; mountaineer Alison Levine, one of fewer than 30 people to have climbed the tallest peaks on all seven continents and ski to both the North and South Poles. But everyone has hidden potential, he says, from the best shooter in NBA history to a young, deaf Scottish girl with only a pair of drumsticks. Her story follows.
– Alana Rae
Play in practice: Evelyn Glennie
An excerpt from Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
As she put the finishing touches on her application, a teenager named Evelyn Glennie felt butterflies in her stomach. Growing up on a farm in Scotland, she had dreamed of becoming a musician.
She was drawn to the rhythm of the sounds around her: the beat of the tractor, the low hum of the cows, the clanging of the blacksmiths, the rustling of the trees in the wind. After four years honing her percussion skills and several more practising the piano, Evelyn felt ready. She applied to one of the most prestigious conservatories in the United Kingdom. The Royal Academy of Music accepted only the cream of the crop. Alumni included Elton John and Annie Lennox.
When Evelyn arrived in London for her audition, she had 20 minutes to demonstrate her skills. She played the Overture to William Tell on the timpani, various pieces on the snare drum and the xylophone, and a Mozart sonata on the piano. The academy didn’t accept her. Multiple expert panellists voiced concerns about a lack of ability. They concluded she had no hope of making it as a professional musician.
Less than a decade later, Evelyn became the world’s first full-time percussion soloist. Normally, drummers aren’t the musicians crowds flock to see. They play in the background of an orchestra or band, like Ringo sitting in the shadow of John and Paul. But Evelyn was so talented that when she toured the world alone, she routinely sold out 100 concerts a year.
She has won three Grammy Awards, for Best Classical Instrumental Solo, Best Chamber Music Performance and Best Classical Crossover Album. She has performed with Björk, played on Sesame Street, and was made a dame by the late Queen Elizabeth. In 2015, she was the first percussionist to win the Polar Music Prize – the musical equivalent of a Nobel Prize – joining the company of Elton John, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder.
When the Royal Academy of Music decided that Evelyn was lacking in ability, they weren’t wrong. Technically, she didn’t have an ear for music – she couldn’t really hear it at all. The world’s first and finest solo percussionist is profoundly deaf.
Evelyn’s ears had begun failing her when she was 8. By the time she was 12, when people spoke to her, she could barely make out a sound. An audiologist diagnosed her with degenerating nerves and said it would be impossible for her to play music. The degree of difficulty was too high and the distance to travel too far.
Being profoundly deaf made mastering music unusually hard work. But Evelyn didn’t slave over scales for endless, cheerless hours. Her school’s percussion teacher, Ron Forbes, didn’t push her through a tedious practice schedule of drills. They worked together to create the scaffolding for her to enjoy the process of learning.
When Evelyn first visited Ron, he asked how she would hear music. She had no choice but to adopt a different learning style. She explained that although she couldn’t hear all the different pitches with her ears, she could feel the vibrations in her arms, her stomach, her cheekbones and her scalp. She started to think of her body as a giant ear. As Ron played the timpani, Evelyn put her hands on the wall, learning to associate different pitches with different body parts. Some of the higher notes resonated around her face and neck. The lower notes mostly reverberated in her legs and feet. She started practising barefoot to feel the vibrations more intensely.
At the start of every lesson, Evelyn relished the challenge of sensing the sounds. As she gained mastery, Ron narrowed the pitch intervals. It was like levelling up in a video game: she was making increasingly fine distinctions between notes, using only her fingertips. Soon Ron was stoking her enthusiasm by giving her a whole new set of challenges to master.
“See this piece by Bach? Do you think you can play it on a snare drum?”
Continually varying the task and raising the bar made learning a joy. “There was never a distinction between fun and hard work,” she tells me. “I was like a sponge.” She went on to develop her own versions of Bach’s music in contemporary drum style.
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.
Harmonious passion
Ever since the notion of achieving mastery through 10,000 hours of practice took the world by storm, coaches, parents, and teachers have been fascinated by a particular kind of practice. Deliberate practice is the structured repetition of a task to improve performance based on clear goals and immediate feedback. How much of that you need, however, is more nuanced than the 10,000-hours idea would have us believe.
Research reveals that the actual number of hours required for excellence varies dramatically by person and activity. What is clear is that deliberate practice is particularly valuable for improving skills in predictable tasks with consistent moves – swinging a golf club, solving a Rubik’s Cube, or playing a violin.
Even child prodigies have been known to dedicate long, obsessive hours to deliberate practice. Mozart’s violinist father put him through rigorous drills and a performance schedule so gruelling that one biographer called it “unconditional slavery”. But that kind of fanatical practice takes a toll. Mozart wrote letters about how drained he felt, confessing as a teenager that “my fingers are aching from composing so many recitatives” and in his late 20s that he was “tired … from so much performing”.
There is reason to believe that he succeeded in spite of his compulsive practice, not because of it. Research demonstrates that people who are obsessed with their work put in longer hours yet fail to perform any better than their peers. They are more likely to fall victim to physical and emotional exhaustion. The monotony of deliberate practice puts them at risk of burnout – and of boreout.
Yes, boreout is an actual term in psychology. Whereas burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when you are overloaded, boreout is the emotional deadening you feel when you’re under- stimulated. Although it takes deliberate practice to achieve greater things, we shouldn’t drill so hard that we drive the joy out of the activity and turn it into an obsessive slog.
Elite musicians are rarely driven by obsessive compulsion. They are usually fuelled by what psychologists call harmonious passion. Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome. You are no longer practising under the spectre of should. “I should be studying. I’m supposed to practise.” You’re drawn into a web of want. “I feel like studying. I’m excited to practise.” That makes it easier to find flow: you slip quickly into the zone of total absorption, where the world melts away and you become one with your instrument. Instead of controlling your life, practising enriches your life.
Play by play
The importance of passion isn’t unique to music. Across 127 studies with more than 45,000 people, persistence was more likely to translate into performance when passion was present. The question is how to build the scaffolding to bring that passion into practice. My favourite answer is called deliberate play.
Deliberate play is a structured activity that is designed to make skill development enjoyable. It blends elements of deliberate practice and free play. Like free play, deliberate play is fun, but it is structured for learning and mastery along with recreation. It is built to break complex tasks into simpler parts so you can hone a specific skill.
When I asked Evelyn Glennie how she practises, she said she spends nearly all her time in deliberate play. When she gets bored, she switches instruments, gracefully bouncing back and forth between different percussion tools. “If I’m trying to stay interested in a new marimba skill, I’ll transfer it to a drum kit,” she tells me. Mixing it up breaks up the monotony and keeps her passion in harmony.
“There is absolutely no routine,” she says, laughing. “That spells hostage to me.”
Deliberate play often involves introducing novelty and variety into practice. That can be in the ways you learn, the tools you use, the goals you set, and the people with whom you interact. Depending on the skill you’re trying to build, deliberate play might take the form of a game, a role-play, or an improvisational exercise.
When I first read the research on deliberate play, it opened my eyes to the possibility of bringing harmonious passion into any kind of skill practice. I started wondering if I could transform the grind in more traditional job training. In an experiment with healthcare professionals, my colleagues and I found that their burnout dropped after we nudged them to inject a bit of deliberate play into their most stressful tasks. An allergy nurse started introducing herself as Nurse Quick Shot, which immediately put her young patients at ease. She let them time her, and when they came back for their next visit, they would ask for Nurse Quick Shot and challenge her to beat her previous time.
There’s a movement to bring deliberate play into professional development. Medical schools have started offering improvisational comedy courses to bring levity into the challenge of learning to interpret nonverbal cues. In one exercise, students watch their classmates shout out nonsense words and try to decipher their meaning by observing their gestures and facial expressions. Students report that along with being enjoyable, deliberate play makes them better doctors. After these kinds of improv sessions were added to a communication course in a pharmacy school, students performed better on patient examinations. They were better equipped to identify a patient’s chief complaint and empathise with a patient’s concerns.
The scaffolding for deliberate play is often set up by a teacher or coach, but it’s possible to make real strides on your own. If you want to improve your sight reading at the piano, you could challenge yourself to see how many notes you get right on new pieces and track your progress week by week. If you’re a Scrabble player hoping to improve your anagram aptitude, you can practise drawing random sets of tiles and see how many words you can spell in a minute.
By fuelling harmonious passion, deliberate play can prevent boreout and burnout. But can that passion be maintained over long periods of time? Evelyn Glennie thinks so – she has felt it for half a century. She knows what research shows: even deliberate play shouldn’t be done all day, every day. She learned this lesson the hard way.
I first saw Evelyn play in 2012 during the opening ceremony of the Olympics. To build to a crescendo, she was invited to lead 1000 drummers. Standing in front of an array of multi-drums, she progressed from rhythmic taps to rapid pounds, and the stadium crackled with energy.
Later, when a gold medallist entered the stadium carrying the Olympic torch, Evelyn introduced the world to a new sound on an instrument she helped design, the Glennie Concert Aluphone. It looked like a set of mushroom- shaped bells, and as she struck it with four mallets, it sounded like a warmer, more uplifting version of orchestral chimes. I had no idea she had a physical disability, let alone one that prevented her from hearing the music she made.
When Evelyn was auditioning for the Royal Academy of Music, the experts on the panel simply didn’t believe a deaf girl could become a professional musician. She challenged them to pay attention to the calibre of the performance rather than the impairment of the person delivering it.
After a second audition, the academy didn’t just admit her – it ended up changing the rules for the entire United Kingdom to evaluate applicants on their musical skills, not their physical abilities.
As a full-time music student at the academy, Evelyn loved to practise. She started off playing two or three hours a day, but it wasn’t long before she felt the pressure to take on more. When she saw her peers putting in longer hours, she noticed a sense of compulsion creeping into her mind.
She asked herself how long she should be practising, and wondered if she should do more. She started waking up an hour earlier and practising later into the evening. But the feeling of obligation sucked the playful rhythm out of percussion, and she saw her creativity and progress evaporate with it. She began to realise that there was such a thing as over-practice. To make sure music didn’t become a grind, she decided to take regular breaks.
It turns out that taking breaks has at least three benefits. First, time away from practice helps to sustain harmonious passion. Research indicates that even micro-breaks of 5-10 minutes are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy. It’s not just about preventing burnout: research reveals that when we work nights and weekends, our interest and enjoyment in our tasks drop. Even just reminding you that it’s Saturday is enough to reduce your intrinsic motivation – you realise that you could be doing something fun and relaxing instead.
Second, breaks unlock fresh ideas. Taking breaks boosts creativity when you feel harmonious passion toward a task. Your interest keeps the problem active in the back of your mind, and you’re more likely to incubate new ways of framing it and unexpected ways of solving it.
Lin-Manuel Miranda dreamed up his blockbuster musical Hamilton while daydreaming on vacation, sitting on a pool float with a margarita in his hand. It’s why Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler all regularly took walks nearly as long as their workdays.
Third, breaks deepen learning. In one experiment, taking a 10-minute break after learning something improved recall for students by 10-30% – and even more for stroke and Alzheimer’s patients. Once about 24 hours have passed, information starts to fade from our memories – we fall down a forgetting curve. It’s well established that we can avoid that forgetting curve with spaced repetition – interspersing breaks into practice. At first, you might practise once an hour, and then start taking longer breaks until you’re practising once a day.
Finding joy
If you watch Evelyn today, you’ll see that she exudes the same joy practising alone as she expresses performing in front of the entire world. But she rarely practises in more than 20-minute intervals before taking a break.
“Sometimes I feel like I really want to pick up a pair of sticks and do something, and other times I think, ‘No, I just want to sit here and stare at the walls.’ Other times I might want to write a little something in my notebook, or read a good book.”
She tells me that when she loses interest or focus, she just stops playing altogether. “Worthwhile practice is where progress is made. It’s about quality, not quantity. You need to feel there’s a shift – something is different when you walked out of the room.”
Not long ago, a mother contacted Evelyn for a consultation. After going through a series of music exams, her daughter had lost interest in practising the violin. The mother was hoping Evelyn would give her a pep talk and motivate her to keep practising.
Instead, Evelyn improvised some deliberate play. She challenged the girl to play pieces backwards, to come up with 10 ways not to play the violin, and to incorporate sounds from her favourite TV show and her favourite animal. The girl left the session beaming. Before, her practice time was focused on “an outcome of being judged”, Evelyn says. Deliberate play taught her that “the real outcome is her enjoyment”. Without enjoyment, potential stays hidden.
