Falling Short? Time to Get Offended.
What is potential?
Well, according to ChatGPT, it is the following:
In the context of human abilities and achievements, “potential” refers to the latent qualities or abilities that may be developed and lead to future success or usefulness.
In simpler terms, it’s the “could be” or “might be” in you. It’s the book you haven’t written yet, the business you haven’t started, or the personal record you haven’t broken.
Potential is powerful and can create leaders in industry. But what if you don’t know you have potential or, worse, are not even looking for it?
Potential is easily ignored.
I recently watched some TikTok fitness videos (which follow me HERE), and a video struck me. The background has some pre-recorded voices, and gold is in the middle of the video. It said, “Are you taking it personally?”.
For such a common phrase, it struck me differently than it usually would under other circumstances. The idea behind the statement was simple. You have potential, and you are not hitting it. Why are you not taking that personally?
Potential tends to get lost in the shuffle of an incredibly long life. Potential is all about the “what ifs,” but most of us are just trying to keep our heads above water daily. We don’t have time to dream. And if we manage to do so, finding time to execute those dreams…there are not enough hours in a day.
Someone once told me an excellent analogy that fits nicely here. He said that when you drive to work, you might notice a specific billboard a few times. But after those few times, you never see that billboard again. It’s still there, but it’s now just part of the fabric of your daily routine. It doesn’t stand out, nor does it demand your attention.
Potential is the billboard of our lives. It’s there and has always been there. But, it’s often forgotten, replaced with the shiny baubles and dramatic cross hairs we live in daily.
Potential is often not understood, so it’s ignored.
Falling short of your potential is easily justified when you have yet to spend any time looking for it. Letting yourself off the hook is easy when you never really put yourself on it.
Understanding potential and searching for yours then puts you in a precarious situation. Now that you know you have it, you must decide what to do with the gap between you and it. You become solely responsible for its fruition when you realize what you can, or at least get a sense of it. With great power (knowledge) comes great responsibility.
So now what?
“The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward some great good.”
– Brian Tracy
Take Your Failures Personally.
1+1 equals 2. It always will.
When I look back at my life, there were many times that I wasn’t achieving anything. I was hoping someone would deliver to me what my potential was offering. I spent almost 20 years of my life waiting for that to happen.
But waiting is not an activity. It is not an action.
Looking back, what should I have done to improve my life? I am not sure what specific things I could have done. I am trying to remember particular job opportunities, connections, relationships, etc., that were presented I missed.
But there is one thing that I DO know I should have been doing that I refused.
Where I went wrong.
I should have been taking the distance between my current position at the time and my sense of potential.
I should have had a chip on my shoulder to excel because I knew I could.
I should have been thinking bigger than my circumstances because I knew it was big.
I should have lived beyond the minute I lived and thought about who I wanted to be because I knew it existed.
In other words, I should have taken it personally how much of a gap there was between myself and my potential self. So much so, to the point that sitting idle was not an option. Letting years of my life slip by would have been impossible. I should have been offended, but I wasn’t.
Looking back now, most of the things I have accomplished in my life, I did so after having enough failures built up that I would get disgusted with myself. Sometimes, it took too long, but I got there. It was a lesson I should have learned sooner, but I’m glad I still learned it when I did.
So my advice: Take it personally when you know you can do better, but don’t.
Be offended by inaction. Be disgusted by complacency. And use all of those to push you into betterment and closer to your realized potential.
