Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.
Why Perpetual recommends it
Shawn Achor’s Big Potential, a follow-up to his well-known The Happiness Advantage, challenges the deeply embedded myth of the lone high achiever, the idea that reaching your full potential means climbing alone and guarding your resources from everyone around you. Achor’s research makes the case that people actually reach higher, more sustainable potential by deliberately lifting the people around them, not by competing with them.
The book identifies five specific practices Achor calls the SEEDS of big potential: surrounding yourself with a genuine star system rather than trying to be the only star, expanding your definition of success to include others, enhancing others’ strengths rather than only managing their weaknesses, defending your team against negativity, and sustaining energy through genuine celebration.
Achor is particularly persuasive on the ceiling effect of solo achievement, individual willpower and talent alone eventually plateau, but the collective energy and support of a genuinely invested team can push performance well past where any one person could get alone, which he backs with data from workplaces, schools and sports teams alike.
This aligns closely with one of our own core values, look up, looking after each other and the wider community around us, and it’s a big part of why we recommend this book to leaders who are personally successful but quietly isolated at the top.
- Individual willpower and talent alone eventually plateau without a supporting team
- The SEEDS model, star system, expanding success, enhancing strengths, defending, sustaining, builds shared potential
- Defending your team against negativity is as important as generating positive energy
- Celebrating others’ success genuinely expands your own potential rather than diminishing it
A simple starting habit is naming, out loud, one person whose success you should be actively investing in this month, rather than focusing solely on your own performance.
We give this book four out of five stars.
