Hidden Potential – Adam Grant

Introduction

Skills of Character

Getting Better at Getting Better

In the late 1800s, the founding father of psychology made a bold claim.
“By the age of thirty,” William James wrote, “character has set like
plaster and will never soften again.” Kids could develop character, but
adults were out of luck.

Recently a team of social scientists launched an experiment to test that
hypothesis. They recruited 1,500 entrepreneurs in West Africa—a mix of
women and men in their 30s, 40s, and 50s—who were running small
startups in manufacturing, service, and commerce. They randomly assigned
the founders to one of three groups. One was a control group: they went
about their business as usual. The other two were training groups: they
spent a week learning new concepts, analyzing them in case studies of other
entrepreneurs, and applying them to their own startups through role-play
and reflection exercises. What differed was whether the training focused on
cognitive skills or character skills.

In cognitive skills training, the founders took an accredited business
course created by the International Finance Corporation. They studied
finance, accounting, HR, marketing, and pricing, and practiced using what
they learned to solve challenges and seize opportunities. In character skills
training, the founders attended a class designed by psychologists to teach
personal initiative. They studied proactivity, discipline, and determination,
and practiced putting those qualities into action.

Character skills training had a dramatic impact. After founders had
spent merely five days working on these skills, their firms’ profits grew by
an average of 30 percent over the next two years. That was nearly triple the
benefit of training in cognitive skills. Finance and marketing knowledge
might have equipped founders to capitalize on opportunities, but studying
proactivity and discipline enabled them to generate opportunities. They
learned to anticipate market changes rather than react to them. They
developed more creative ideas and introduced more new products. When
they encountered financial obstacles, instead of giving up, they were more
resilient and resourceful in seeking loans.

Along with demonstrating that character skills can propel us to achieve
greater things, this evidence reveals that it’s never too late to build them.
William James was a very wise man, but in this case he was very wrong.
Character doesn’t set like plaster—it retains its plasticity.
Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same.
Personality is your predisposition—your basic instincts for how to think,
feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your
instincts.

Knowing your principles doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to
practice them, particularly under stress or pressure. It’s easy to be proactive
and determined when things are going well. The true test of character is
whether you manage to stand by those values when the deck is stacked
against you. If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is
how you show up on a hard day.

Personality is not your destiny—it’s your tendency. Character skills
enable you to transcend that tendency to be true to your principles. It’s not
about the traits you have—it’s what you decide to do with them. Wherever
you are today, there’s no reason why you can’t grow your character skills
starting now.