Potential is a Gift! What Would Happen If You Opened Yours?

I didn’t think about living up to my full potential until I was forty-five years old. What can I say? I’m a late bloomer.

When I finally did, I got frustrated and curious.

The frustration started when I took a college tour with my oldest daughter one crisp October day. I wasn’t expecting to feel anything but excitement for her in that moment, but a rogue wave of disappointment knocked me over midway through the visit.

My wife and I were standing next to each other, overlooking the quad at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, but we were having completely opposite experiences.

She was remembering our shared alma mater with fondness. Her wistful eyes were sweeping the campus, and she was having a hard time deciding which of the hundreds of memories was her favorite. “Wasn’t college just the best?” she asked me, squeezing my arm for emphasis.

“What? No. It was a mess,” I said, scanning the same exact acres she was but instead seeing my collegiate train wreck.

I had arrived in Alabama from my hometown of Hudson, Massachusetts, with a Good Will Hunting level of sarcasm that quickly got me rejected from every fraternity on campus. I was put on social suspension for a year after a disastrous Halloween prank, and I ended up working at the shaved ice stand outside our local Walmart. This wasn’t inside the Walmart—this was an unaffiliated street cart that a man named Kevin just rolled onto the sidewalk near the entrance. Is that what you did during your first semester of college? Unlocked “shaved ice guy” level at Walmart?

I’d like to say I turned things around after my freshman year, but then we’d have to overlook my foray into rave culture. Yes, I wore reflective clothing and danced in warehouses with glowsticks at 3:00 a.m. during my senior year. I guess I wanted to put a neon cap on my college career, an electronic bow on what might have been.

Standing there twenty-five years later, I was so frustrated that I had wasted all the potential of college. A university campus practically crackles with possibility. The opportunity to be something, do something, become something is everywhere you look. My oldest daughter was about to make the most of it. My wife had already made the most of it. But I hadn’t. How could I have missed it?

On the drive back home to Nashville and in the weeks ahead, that question weighed heavy on me. In the past, that sense of regret would’ve turned into bitterness and resignation. Have you ever felt that way after bumping into an opportunity you missed or a chance you blew? That’s my normal response, but this time was different.

I’d spent the previous two years researching and writing about the power of mindset for a book I published called Soundtracks. I knew that one of the best things you can do with a negative soundtrack (my phrase for a repetitive thought) is ask, “Is this helpful?” Bitterness never is, so instead I decided to see if I could flip my frustration into curiosity.

Maybe it was my age. Your forties hit different. They make you more introspective about where you’ve been and where you’re headed. My wife and I were also two years away from being empty nesters. There were significant changes on the horizon, and I started to ask the questions about my life that smarter people ask in their twenties and thirties.

I didn’t live up to my potential in college. That’s true and I can’t change it, but I started to wonder if I could change something even better—my future. Could I change this week? Could I change this month or even the whole year? College was only four years long. I still had decades of life ahead of me.

I was late to my thirties, so I wanted to be early to my fifties. I didn’t make the most of my twenties and ended up in my thirties without a real plan or foundation for my life. I wasn’t about to let that same thing happen again for my fifties, sixties, and beyond.

I didn’t know if living up to my full potential was possible, but I had a sneaking suspicion that I was capable of more, and I wanted to know what I could do about that.

Turns out I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Tapping Into Our Potential

When I got curious about tapping into my full potential, I did what I always do when I get curious: I commissioned a research study with Dr. Mike Peasley, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He and I asked more than three thousand people if they felt they were living up to their full potential.

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Only 4 percent of them said yes.

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That’s a surprisingly low statistic, but it’s not the one that stood out to me the most.

According to our study, 50 percent of people feel that 50 percent of their full potential is untapped. That means half of us are walking around with half-lives. No wonder Twitter is so grumpy.

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Imagine if every Christmas you only opened up half your gifts. You could see the rest—a whole pile of them in the corner of the room—but you never got to open them. The crazy thing is that no one was stopping you. There might even be friends and family members encouraging you to open them all, but for some reason they just felt out of reach.

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Would that make for a happy Christmas, a happy house, a happy job, a happy anything?

It wouldn’t, but what if it didn’t have to be that way?

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What if you could have a fulfilling career?

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What if you could enjoy a thriving marriage and strong friendships?

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What if you could be in the greatest shape of your life?

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What if you could write that book, start that business, declutter that garage, and pay to fly your immigrant parents first class back to the Netherlands so they could finally see the tulip festival?

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What if each day felt like a gift and each year progressively got better?

If you’re in your twenties, what if that could be your favorite decade, followed by your thirties, which was even more fun, and then your forties, which somehow managed to top those two?

That would be the best.

Let’s Keep This Simple

What if I could turn potential into a goal? What if all it takes is a goal? That would certainly simplify an otherwise confusing challenge.

You can’t take action on an idea you can’t even define, and potential is such a fuzzy word. It’s like trying to win a race without a finish line. You don’t know if you’re headed in the right direction, you can’t tell if you’re making any progress, and you tend to get frustrated by the whole process.

That’s what I sensed people were struggling with when I asked them to define potential. Their answers were all over the map:

A feeling of purpose.

Joy.

No regrets.

Freedom to do what I choose.

Maximum effectiveness.

Those seemed like aspects of potential, but they didn’t add a lot of actionable clarity to the conversation. Feelings are an important light to monitor on the dashboard of your life, but they can also be inconsistent and flighty.

What about joy? How do you measure that? Is there some sort of scale or color system? “I’m deep orange today, which is the amount of joy I can expect on a Tuesday. I hope I’m magenta by Friday.”

No regrets? Daniel Pink’s book The Power of Regret proved that while “No regrets” is a popular tattoo, it’s also an impossible thing to achieve. The average person makes up to 35,000 decisions a day.[i] Have you ever gone 35,000 for 35,000 on a Monday? Me neither. Even the most calculated, careful life ends up with some regrets.

Maximum effectiveness? That sounds like a robot. “I HAVE ACHIEVED MAXIMUM EFFECTIVENESS BUT REQUIRE SUSTENANCE.”

What if life was simpler than that though?

The more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to one critical question: What if all it takes is a goal?

Could I trigger a host of easy goals that would cascade into big accomplishments by turning this thing I suddenly cared about—my potential—into a goal?

Could I use that idea to become part of the 4 percent who say, “Yes! I am living up to my full potential!”

I only had the tiniest sliver of belief at first, but that was all I needed to start.

Equipped with that one idea, I began to seriously explore the concept of potential.

Everything was great for about fourteen seconds, until I ran into the same wall you’ve hit before.

… to be continued in Chapter 1 of All it Takes is a Goal. Pre-order a copy here. ?

(I wrote this for my free newsletter, the “Try This!” Sign up today to get ideas just like this, twice a month. www.Acuff.me/newsletter)

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