Modern Wisdom
#885 - Adam Grant - How To Overcome Your Fear Of Failure & Unlock Your Potential
04 Jan 2025
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, professor at the Wharton School and an author. Success is multi-layered. It involves challenges like overcoming nervousness, developing an appetite for risk-taking, and dealing with failures both privately and publicly—the list goes on. So how can we better navigate these hurdles to unlock our full potential? Expect to learn why so many people fail to reach their true potential, what most people don’t realise about where meaning and motivation come from, how to deal with uncertainty better, how to get better at taking more risks, the key to dealing with failure, why being vulnerable around showing your strengths and weakness is crucial, the best advice on how to deal with and overcome nervousness and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation. What does that mean?
Well, I did write that, and I think I believe it. So if you look at the history of great talent, we tend to see people at their peak, and we assume that they were just naturals. Steph Curry could always drain three-pointers.
um mozart was you know a natural musician and in some cases if you trace back these people were child prodigies and mozart i think was a great example but for every mozart it turns out that there are multiple bachs and beethovens who actually bloomed late and took a long time to improve
And I guess the study that really opened my eyes to this was Benjamin Bloom looked at world-class athletes, musicians, scientists, artists, and he went back to their childhoods and wanted to know, were they innately just brilliant at these skills from day one? And the consistent answer was no.
That very often their early teachers and coaches, even their own parents, had no idea how great they were going to become. And when they did stand out, it wasn't for natural ability. It was because they were unusually passionate. They love to learn. And they had early opportunities to get lots of practice in.
And I think what that suggests to me is that sometimes we overestimate the importance of raw talent and we underestimate the importance of creating opportunities that open doors for people and then giving them a chance to actually showcase their enthusiasm.
What about motivation? Where does that come from in this context?
I think in a lot of the cases, if you look at the Bloom study at least, the world-class performers tended to have an early teacher or coach who made learning fun. And I think that's not common for a lot of us, right? Like learning to do scales if you're a musician, doing drills if you're an athlete, it can be a slog.
And the idea that this boring task that might just lose your interest or might exhaust you could actually be exciting, it draws you in and it makes you wanna keep learning. And over time that becomes self-reinforcing because after all, it's hard to like something that you just suck at. As you gain skill and build up mastery, that's when your motivation begins to really soar.
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