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First published: Jan. 2, 2010, 1:29 a.m. MST
Last edited: Jan. 9, 2010, 9:07 p.m. MST

Potential

I wrote this at the beginning of this month but didn't post it because I got all stressed out about resolving what I'm arguing for in this post with what I'm arguing for in this other one about contentment. I still think they can be resolved cleanly, but oh well. I'm a complicated person. It doesn't help that this post just falls apart near the end; I don't know how I'd diagram the structure of the second half.

I want to talk a little about potential; specifically, what yours is.

This has been something I've been thinking and talking about a lot lately. I've been observing a near-surprising amount of people who are aiming too low, either because they don't believe they can aim higher, or because they know of no other way. I even came up with a pithy quote:

"Failure from lack of vision is much more common than lack of ability. Take some time to dream today." - Me

So, I'd like to elaborate a little more fully on that idea, but first, I'm going to define a few terms in a sort of indirect relationship to each other.

The question many ask is how they might go about realizing their full potential, but what I see less than I think I should is people with full ambition. Full ambition, I'm going to argue, is a necessary stepping stone towards full potential. If you want to maximize your potential, you will need to be ambitious.

As a quick note: I want to point out very deliberately that complacency and contentment are not at all the same. Complacency, I'm here to argue, is bad. Contentment, on the other hand, is incredibly important in all aspects of life. Exploring this difference is probably worth another entry some other time.

Vision

There are two main issues people hit when choosing goals for themselves and their future.

Both of these problems fall under the umbrella issue of what I recently heard referred to as limiting expectations. These are expectations of yourself that prevent you from aiming higher with your goals. Either you expect you can't actually achieve higher or you expect that the height at which you're aiming is all there is.

Both are complete lies.

Put another way, it seems to me that the biggest detractor from the phenomenal success you are more than capable of achieving is not setting your sights high enough. It is so easy to look around you, decide that you are doing adequately, and become complacent.

How can you reach your full potential if you don't even have your full potential in mind? More often than not, it is incredibly unlikely you have any idea what your full potential even is. So, dream big! Think of the coolest thing anyone is doing, and really ask yourself why you can't be doing the same thing. The answer, of course, is that you can. You'll just need:

Determination

Obviously, a goal might as well be just a dream if you don't act on it. However, determination is far more than that. It is one thing to act upon your vision and give up at the first sign of possible failure, but it is determination to be persistent until you succeed.

Determination is being certain and sure of both yourself and the imminent success of your vision. Determination is being persistent until your vision pays off. Determination is not giving up when it is convenient or easy, or when things get rough. You can achieve your big dreams, but big dreams require real work. Real work that you are totally capable of.

Determination, in this regard, goes hand in hand with confidence, and I could go on for hours on the importance of confidence. But I won't. Needless to say, you won't get very far if you don't believe in what you're doing, or believe you can do it. Many times failure is self-fulfilling. If you don't believe you can do something, you won't! It's a (rather unfortunate) fact of human nature that confident people are perceived as more correct, more capable, more trustworthy, and more likely to succeed than people who are unsure of themselves and their goals. So be confident in your goals. Or at least act confident. In all likelihood you'll sell yourself on your own ability to achieve them.

Ambition

As I said earlier, ambition is the confluence of vision and determination. The reason why I listed vision first as the more vital aspect of ambition is because the determination part is usually pretty easy once you know what you're shooting for.

For instance, say you want to get into an ivy-league college? Easy (really!). All you must show is that you have vision and determination. Vision in a field you're interested, and determination to contribute in that field. In pretty much all fields, that is totally a piece of cake, and might not take all that much work. If you are determined to get into an ivy-league, then you'll probably talk to some college admissions people or professors to hear about what sorts of things they're most interested in seeing on an application. In all likelihood they will say the usual things like GPA, but I guarantee that most of them are looking for stand out displays of ambition, such as already having some research published (also easy, as there's lots of low hanging fruit if you know where to look) or something similar. If that sounds daunting, it's not, and it's within your reach. It just takes the motivating goal of actually doing it, and the persistence to get it done.

The college admission example is particularly apropros right now for me as my siblings are starting to become concerned with college preperations. Further, my sister just started public school for the first time this year. As far as I can tell from her transition from private school, private school is far better than public school, but not for the reasons I would have thought. The main reason I can tell that is different between private school and public school is that public school students have a endemic and contagious lack of ambition. There is little interest in doing better than "good enough," because that's what everyone else is doing. But every single one of them has the world at their fingertips, and so do you.

There is a lot of hand-wringing constantly going on over the debate between the importance of raw skills versus the importance of hard work. In a nutshell, do people succeed because they are naturally gifted, or do they succeed because they work hard? I think both sides are missing a fundamental point. Raw skills are worthless without determination, and hard work is worthless without vision. So is it hard work or natural talent? Neither. Success comes from ambition.

So, how do you realize your full potential? Be ambitious. Set lofty goals. Drive hard for them. Don't give up. Never surrender.

Goals

Dream big! Set big goals for yourself. For every goal, make sure you pick something you're inspired by, and you can measure success objectively. For example, if your goal is to make a difference in the world, decide what "a difference" is.

Make sure that all of your long term goals have a clear next step for attaining them. If your goal is "sail around the world," your next step can be "start researching how others have done this already." And then follow through.

If I have any advice on picking goals, I highly suggest goals that involve helping others and include others. The benefit of having others in your life and serving others is well documented, and I could go on for a whole other entry (and probably should, but won't) about why doing things by yourself and for yourself is detrimental.

Be persistent and don't give up. Decide to do the thing you want to do and stick with it, even when you don't feel like it. If your goal is to be suave, no one had a less suave start than Archie Leesh, better known as Cary Grant. As he once said, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and, finally, I became that person. Or he became me."

Get started. The amount of things to do is far greater than the time you have.