Big Potential

This book is one huge value bomb. I spent 20 minutes just outlining the review, so reviewing it took some word count. Bear with me. It’s worth it. First of all, I experienced the power of the Big Potential firsthand. In 2013 I took part in a 3-month online Transformational Contest. In theory, we were there to compete for the few main prizes. The expectation of the contest was that each member had to login once a day and provide an update about his progress. The social element was added practically as an afterthought. There were very strict rules about this obligatory logging in and updating, but practically no rules about social interactions. In practice, we did that and plenty more: we cheered each other up, we supported each other, we exchanged advice and encouraged each other. And we succeeded like no other bunch of people I’ve ever seen in my life. Success of Average Folks Make no mistake, we weren’t superstars. Most of us were broken and had a difficult history. One of my friends struggled with brain damage after a car accident, another was practically bankrupt, yet another was coming out of an abusive relationship. I was at the beginning of my personal transformation and had virtually zero tangible accomplishments under my belt. Yet, we succeeded. The contest lasted 90 days, but the fruits are still visible even today. At least four of my TC friends wrote and published their books, including the one with damaged brain. A few pivoted into a different career; my friend who had just come out of an abusive relationship became a freelance writer. Some started new businesses. Many transformed their finances or health. I’ve never seen a group of people make such rapid progress in my life. I worked for several organizations, I have been with my church community for 14 years. I saw individuals make rapid progress. I saw the constant progress of my church community brothers and sisters, but it was at a glacier-like pace. The Transformational Contest was the only time I saw massive, rapid and lasting progress of many. We succeeded, because we tapped into the Big Potential. Wisdom “Big Potential” is groundbreaking despite the fact that ancient wisdom said exactly the same thing: do to others like you would like they do to you. The book of Proverbs is full of similar sayings. Listen more than you speak, be authentic, support others and you will be blessed. By the way, this is not the first time the current research firmly confirms what the Bible and ancient sages said thousands of years ago. This is fascinating. In the past centuries, people who wanted to lead a moral life had to refer to the code of conduct. It worked. The history is full of people who succeeded because they lived according to the timeless rules and didn’t succumb to complacency or easier ways. Nowadays, we have it even simpler. Data confirms what the code of conduct says. The element of faith is reduced. We are finally at the stage of development when we can actually measure that living a good, self-disciplined, service-oriented, decent life is advantageous for an individual. Small Potential About the first 25% of the book actually dwells on what Achor called the Small Potential – individual performance and how it is mistakenly highly valued in our society. Yes, it’s true that individual performance is required. It’s always better to tap into Big Potential when you already have Small Potential. But our craze of individual accomplishments is totally not grounded in reality. We fix on it and we miss the big picture, the Big Potential. Shawn Achor quotes research after research showing that the exaggerated focus on individual kills the true performance. We compete instead of cooperating. And our results stay at the low level. It is so much easier to develop an individual’s performance in the environment of the Big Potential. However, the fixation on an individual’s results holds us from creating such an environment in the first place. Infinite Versus Finite Reflecting on the book’s message for this review I came up with a similarity. Big Potential is like the eternity in Christianity. The Bible and tradition teach us that practically everything in this world is worthless compared to the happiness we will experience forever in the presence of God. It is worth it to leave everything behind, like the apostles did, to get into Heaven. Yet, very few Christians actually practice this. We are earth-bound like the book of Wisdom says “For a perishable body presses down the soul, and this tent of clay weighs down the mind with its many cares” (Wisdom 9: 15). And we dedicate 95% of our time and energy to earthly belongings, businesses, ventures, activities and issues, leaving only 5% to spiritual life. The same goes with the Small Potential. The idea of collaboration is not foreign or modern. We kind of know that it’s better to cooperate than to compete. Yet, we (companies, schools and even families) dedicate 95% of our energy to track and modify individual performance and the team is always an afterthought, if that. Here is the thing: some saints said that our time on Earth has infinite value because it can ‘buy us’ salvation and God, who is truly infinite. The same is true about our work here. Saints often encouraged us to consider our toil as a form of prayer. As long as our work makes us better and closes us to the gates of Heaven, its value is uncountable. The Small Potential, individual performance, is only as valuable as it contributes to the Big Potential. It IS good to be smart, nice, quick, sharp or skilled. It contributes to your team’s potential. If you are a valuable person, you will be a valuable addition to the team. However, modern fixation on individual performance makes us to use our good qualities like a club to beat everybody else around. This is not the Big Potential. If your super qualities make you arrogant to the point that it is hard to cooperate with you, you lose. You invested in Small Potential, not the big one. We Live in the Big World The harsh truth is that there are very, very few occupations in the modern world where Small Potential can make you a superstar. It’s hard to imagine a more lonely occupation than an author. It’s hard to find any other occupation where so much depends on your individual skills. If you don’t write well, no editor will help you to make your book great. An editor can polish a gem until it shines, but cannot make a gem out of a botch. The only ultra-successful modern author I know who may be described as a loner is Cormac McCarthy. This guy’s book sold millions of copies, but he gives interviews very sparsely (read: once in 13 years!). I can track how team effort was always behind successes of my books. I could never publish something alone. My proofreaders and editors were invaluable in straightening my English. Hynek Palatin made the first decent covers for me and suddenly my books started to sell better. Chris Bell helped me with marketing “Master Your Time” and it became my first bestseller. Jeannie Ingraham helped me to write “99 Perseverance Success Stories” and this book already sold over 3,200 copies. Steve Scott notified his email list about my new releases or promotions and every time it skyrocketed my sales. The Big Potential After finishing with the Small Potential, Achor tackles the big one. There are five fat chapters on it. I read in a so-so review a complaint that there were too many stories and research instanced in the book and too little actionable advice. Yes, there is plenty of that, but I deem it necessary. People follow a vision, and now we don’t have a vision of the Big Potential. We have no clue how great of a game-changer it is. We need to have it painted in front of our eyes. The stories and research instanced in the book do exactly this. Thanks to them you can realize how big is BIG potential, how it dwarves the Small Potential by many orders of magnitude. However, the vision part is only half of each chapter or less. Each chapter contains also a few to several strategies how you can implement the Big Potential. Here they come: Surround Yourself with Positive Influencers STRATEGY #1: Tap into the power of positive peer pressure. STRATEGY #2: Create balance through variety. STRATEGY #3: Create reciprocal bonds. Expand Your Power STRATEGY #1: Lead from the eleventh chair. STRATEGY #2: Develop your Elevated Pitch. STRATEGY #3: Use progress as fuel. STRATEGY #4: Lead from every lunch seat. Enhance Your Resources STRATEGY #1: Stop comparison praise. STRATEGY #2: Spotlight the right. STRATEGY #3: Praise the base. STRATEGY #4: Democratize praise. STRATEGY #5: Unlock the Hidden 31. STRATEGY #6: Don’t just praise the outcome; praise to an outcome. Defend Against Negative Influencers STRATEGY #1: Build a moat. STRATEGY #2: Build a mental stronghold. STRATEGY #3: Learn the art of Mental Aikido. STRATEGY #4: Take a vacation from your problems. STRATEGY #5: Pick your battles. Sustain the Gains STRATEGY #1: Generate more positive energy by creating Tours of Meaning. STRATEGY #2: Use Vivid Direction to generate a path for that energy to flow. STRATEGY #3: Accelerate the momentum you have created through the power of celebration. As you can see, some of them are hard to comprehend without context. What the heck is “Unlock the Hidden 31?” The background stories are necessary. The Masterpiece on Praising Other strategies may seem obvious, but they are not. I consider the chapter on praising a masterpiece well worth the price of the book. Praise as a tool for improvement has been known for eons. You probably think you know how important praise is. And how hard it may be? You probably think there is nothing new that can be said about praising. “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” – Ygritte Shawn Achor explains in detail how to instill a habit of praising in an organization. You don’t have to be head of an organization to implement it. Praising may start from any point of it. I tell you, “Big Potential” already influenced me. I’m considered (rightfully!) an outsider in my day job. A corporate environment makes my stomach twist in the wrong way. I’m of the opinion that everybody would do much better on their own. Anyway, a couple of days ago I praised my department and my supervisor indirectly. I just couldn’t help it. I noticed something in which we were consistently beating all other departments and articulated it out loud. A Significant Book Usually, I don’t come back to non-fiction books. Like never-ever. It’s not an empty promise: I will come back to “Big Potential” many times. Deep in my guts, I still feel I didn’t grasp the significance of the Big Potential. I had been bombarded by the cult of ego for decades. Be the best! Run the fastest! Be the strongest! It’s not easy to get rid of these thinking patterns. I need to refer to this book regularly. I may include it in my daily readings and read one paragraph at a time every single day. We struggle with the idea of potential. We were tricked into thinking that our individual performance is crucial to our individual wellbeing. On a small scale, it may be true. If you want to put a food on the table and keep a roof over your head, you’d better perform. But when you try to get into the realm of well-being and abundance, you’d better learn not only to cooperate, but consider your peers’ wellbeing more significant than yours. This is how the Big Potential begets. So, a small potential is a necessary seed, but it’s not a fully-grown tree. “In all truth I tell you, unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest.” John 12:24 I wonder how many other truths Jesus hid in His parables. This verse ideally applies to the Big Potential message. And this message is not a fable made by a crazy fanatic, but a result of meticulous research on huge data sets, so huge that they are available for humans for the first time in history. A Big Potential Story It is never about the one guy. It’s always about the team. One last story to illustrate how much the small potential relies on the Big Potential. In 17th century lived Saint Stanislaw Papczyński. He had some difficult times with his calling before he started his own religious order, a Marian congregation. It was the first Polish religious order for men. On the way to the realization of this goal, for a duration of 30 years, Papczyński had to overcome innumerable difficulties. When he died, the order wasn’t particularly big. It had only two monasteries, if I recall correctly. In 18th century it grew steadily, expanding to Portugal and Italy. One man started the order, but it took the whole order to grow and progress. Then Russia invaded Poland and a long struggle began. Czarist Russia repressed religious institutes in Poland. By 1908 only one living Marian remained. Here comes a story like from Star Wars. The remaining Marian, Vincent Sękowski [Yoda] was the Superior General of the order. A young Lithuanian priest [Luke Skywalker] secretly joined the ranks of the Marians. He had been brought up in a village where the Marian Fathers staffed the local parish and he had an utmost respect for the Order. The priest was George Matulewicz, who became later a bishop. Only five months after a pope approved the renewal of the Order, Vincent Sękowski died. Stanislaw, Vincent and George were remarkable individuals. At some time in the history, all of them were ‘the only ones.’ A lone man against the world. They were seeds. Now, the Marian Order is the tree with many branches. It consists of about 500 priests and brothers, it has convents in 19 countries on 6 continents. This is the Big Potential at work. An individual may be only the seed, not the tree.

Shawn Achor has done it again! As he did in The Happiness Advantage, in Big Potential, Shawn shines light on a commonly held myth that limits us: that our individual skills, attributes and knowledge are at the center of our success. This is what Shawn calls our small potential. Then he shows us a better way - by fully engaging others in our work and in our lives, we can tap into the Big Potential that comes from approaching all challenges as a team. And as he does in all his books, Shawn masterfully weaves top research, meaningful personal stories and powerful real-world examples into an engaging read. Big Potential offers powerful learnings that will change the way you think and provide you practical tools to make positive change at work and in life. From the time we take our first steps, through all our schooling and most of our work, we are shown that our individual skills, attributes and knowledge are at the center of our success. The story we tell is that the more we are seen to stand out and excel on our own, the more successful and productive we will be. But the research tells a very different story. It turns out success is not just about how creative, smart or driven we are but much more about how well we are able to connect, contribute to -- and benefit from -- the ecosystem of the people around us. Shawn shows that almost every attribute of our potential - from intelligence to creativity to leadership to engagement is interconnected with other people. "We need to stop trying to be faster alone and start working to be stronger together." I've spent the last decade coaching individuals and organizations on how to apply positive psychology research into actionable steps. Here are the two most powerful and actionable concepts (in my opinion) from Big Potential. 1) Change the way we praise. o Be generous and consistent with praise. It is a renewable and self-expanding resource. Use it constantly and consistently. Authentic praise, even about the smallest, most rudimentary strengths and actions helps everyone find more things that are going right and creates a virtuous cycle of positive emotions, motivation and engagement. o Stop comparison praise: for example, forced ranking or telling people they are doing a better job than their coworker, colleague or team member. Comparison saps motivation and sets up artificial expectations of perfection. Use praise and recognition to raise all boats rather than push one down to bring another up. Convert comparison praise into direct positive reinforcement of actions and/or noting progress. o Pursue the collective win. Praise the whole team, not just the superstar. No one shines alone. For every top performer there are less visible people who provided the resources, knowledge, skills and energy to make that success happen. Acknowledge, celebrate and reward all the people who contributed. And anytime you receive praise, ask yourself who helped you get to that place and pass some of that recognition along to them. 2) Surround yourself with a diverse set of positive influencers. "The conclusion of a decade of my work is clear. You can be a superstar; you just can't be one alone. What you need is a star system: a constellation of positive, authentic influencers who support each other, reinforce each other and make each other better." o The people around us matter - a lot. And while we don't get to pick our family or all the people we work with, we CAN strategically choose who we spend a lot of our time with. Make sure you bring into your circle 1) Pillars - those who have your back no matter what 2) Bridges - those people who have connections outside your world and provide new perspectives and 3) Extenders - those people who push you out of your comfort zone, make you take risks and try new experiences. o Give to get. It's tempting to only reach out to people in our networks when we need something. But to get the most out of our relationships we should make a habit of reaching out to offer something to them. The more reciprocal a relationship the more impact it has on our happiness, engagement and creativity. o Give in all directions yet selectively. Takers at work typically only give to more senior people who will provide obvious benefit towards raises or promotions. This is a path to small potential. The most successful people are those who give up and down the line, who not only look to get mentored but also provide mentoring and support. "The more you help others find their light, the more you both will shine." However trying to be all things for all people is a surefire path to burnout. So be somewhat selective - give to your circle of Pillars, Bridges and Extenders and to those people who make you a better person, those that make you feel good, strengthen you and leave you hoping for more. Find these people in your life and go all in. Of course, a 5-paragraph review is not enough to convey the depth of the research and the arguments that are so beautifully crafted in Big Potential. Go get a copy of the book, read it and start putting some of the practices into your work and into your life. Eric Karpinski The Happiness Coach

I read The Happiness Advantage and loved it. Big Potential also amazing. I found myself reading a few pages and then an idea for implementation would pop into my head. It inspires big picture thinking and I love that. Great read.

It's the beginning of a new year (2023) and I pulled Shawn Achor's book, Big Potential out of "saved for later" into my Amazon shopping cart. It arrived the next day on my doorstep and I completely devoured it. So much so, that I think I'll have to go back and re-read parts. :-) The main premise of the book is that working as individuals we can tap into some success - Achor calls this "small potential". When we tap into those around us, we can leverage those relationships into "Big Potential" and even greater success. Sounds reasonable enough, especially when he weaves in stories, examples and practical how-tos. Frankly, nothing in this book is earth-shattering BUT it does create a playbook by which to be a great and successful team player: 1) Surround yourself with positive influencers. This tenet reminds me of motivational speaker Jim Rohn who said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Achor then expounds on what that really looks like and how you can do it. 2) Expound your power - Four specific strategies to galvanize others: Recognize that you can create change wherever YOU are (even if you are not the designated leader), develop an elevated pitch, reward and reinforce people's efforts to create change, Help others see meaning in their lives. 3) Create a prism of praise and recognition - arguably the best part of this book as Achor would probably call me a "praise miser". "By denying the light of praise, we extinguish it. By bending the light toward others, we magnify it." He has six strategies for magnifying the power of praise: Stop comparison praise, spotlight the right, praise the base, democratize praise, unlock the Hidden 31 (those people who are positive but not expressive at work), and don't just praise the outcome - praise to an outcome. 4) Defend against negative influences - five strategies to defend, disarm, and overcome those forces that threaten our energy, creativity, passion, and potential: Build a moat, build a mental stronghold, learn the art of Mental Aikido, take a vacation from your problems, pick your battles. 5) Create collective momentum - three practical strategies for channeling positive, collective energy in the direction of your goals: Create Tours of Meaning" (move away from describing your daily duties and talk about the larger meaning in your work), Use vivid direction (because the more vividly we can picture something, the more attainable it feels) and celebrate the wins. All in all, a good read if you want to tap into even greater potential and success.

This book is a wonderful combination of research, personal anecdotes, and...well, positivity. It's refreshing to focus on the potential we all have, and how helping one another shine makes our entire constellation brighter. Don't let the fact that Shawn is a positivity scholar deter you from the tangible, tactical things in this book - I know it's easy to dismiss the recent positivity scholarship as being too "polly-anna-ish" for the real world. Shawn does a great job citing examples of how these approaches can be used in companies both big and small, and showing how a small shift in mindset has changed their culture and bottom-line for the better. Whether you sit in a position of influence or not, this book highlights ways we can all influence the trajectory of our organizations.

I love reading leadership books and books that “help me become a better version of myself”. This books is the best of both worlds. As a leader of people for over 15 years this book pushed my thinking about my approach to my individual success and the success of my team. My favorite thing about Shawn Achor is that in all his books he provides simple, tactical, easy to implement, changes you can make that yield big results. If you want some sting strategies on how to differentialy think about success for yourself and for the people around you this is the book for you.

Easy to read and packed full of exciting research pointing to the potential we have in teams. This book builds on his previous research but highlights the potential we have as we work together to be positive. I've listened to the audio version twice and plan to sit back down and read the book again soon. So much information to apply.

Decent book with an important message but could have been half as long with less self aggrandizing reference that comes across as name dropping. Overall a worthwhile read and a good reminder about the power of achievement with, through, and for others.