Living up to your potential is BS
The idea that we somehow have a certain amount of potential that we must live up to is a complete crock. People who say they are not living up to their potential do not understand what living means.
Life is very hard. We each probably have some fundamental goals, even if we don’t think of them consciously. First of all, getting up in the morning is very hard. It is fundamentally an act of optimism. Because surely you have already realized that most days are not full of happiness. They are full, but with something else. Yet we still get out of bed every day, thinking that the day is going to be good. That’s a big deal. A huge leap of faith. I spend a lot of time wondering why more of us don’t kill ourselves, and I never come up with a great answer.
The next big goals we have are the spiritual kind: Be good, be kind, treat people with respect. You probably don’t write these on your to do list, but now that you read them, surely you are thinking to yourself, “Oh yeah, I want to remember to do that.”
So already, life is very full. For example, I just took the red eye home from San Francisco. But if you live in a little town like Madison, Wisconsin, there is, really, no red eye. There is only half a red eye to Chicago, a traumatic awakening at 5am, and then an 8am flight to Wisconsin. By the time I get to my gate, treating people with respect takes pretty much everything that is left of my potential.
Living up to your potential is not crossing off everything on your to do list on time, under budget. Or canonizing your ideas in a book deal. Really, no one cares. You are not on this earth to do that. Trust me. No one is. You are on this earth to be kind. That is your only potential.
And then you have to earn a living.
It’s no coincidence that everyone who is walking around bitching that they are not living up to their potential is talking about how they should be more successful at work. Because “living up to potential” is really just code for “not being recognized as the talented genius that I am.”
How about this? How about saying, “I was so good at getting high marks in school. Why am I not catapulting up the corporate ladder?” The answer, of course, is that most of getting what you want at work is about having social skills, and school doesn’t measure that. So there you go—if you insist on talking about living up to your amorphous potential, the reason you’re not doing it, most likely, is that you are not being kind enough at your work.
If you want to live up to your potential, be as nice as you can be. Be as respectful as you can be. Be as honest with yourself as you can be. Because you can’t be honest with other people if you are not honest with yourself.
What can you do if you think you are living below your potential?
1. Recognize that it’s delusional. You are who you are, and you should just be you. Have realistic, meaningful goals for your life, like: Be kind. Be engaged. Be optimistic. Be connected. Most people who say they are not living up to their potential are not talking about this most-important stuff.
2. Recognize that the world isn’t a race. A race assumes that everyone has an inborn ability to reach a personal best. If you stop racing, you stop wondering what that inborn ability is. I mean, really, “living up to one’s potential” is always relative. You are really talking about your ability to kick everyone else’s butt at something. And it’s not a pleasant thing to say. When you stop looking at the world as a competition, then you can stop wondering why you’re not coming in first place.
3. Recognize that you sound like your mother. “Living up to your potential” is a phrase from a grade-school report card. It is elementary-school speak. It is your parents saying you need to do more homework. It is your mother saying “Joey, you’re a genius. Why don’t you get straight A’s? Look what you do to your mother!” In almost every case when someone says, “You are not living up to your potential,” the proper answer is, “So what?” Because it’s always someone trying to tell you that the thing you should contribute to this world is something other than kindness.
I really like this post. It is somewhat reasuring especially in todays world. I think that the word potential is something that is constantly redefined. Our potential today is different than what our potential will be tomorrow. Our potential constantly grows as we learn more and become more experienced. Therefore, someone can always try to reach their full potential without ever succeeding. That can really be frustrating.
I just read the following quote and it made me think of this post. I’ll add it here for posterity. It’s from William James (1842-1910)- father of American psychology.
Most people live,
whether physically, intellectually, or morally,
in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
They make use of a very small portion of their
possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources
in general, much like a man who out of his whole
bodily organism, should get in the habit of using and
moving only his little finger.
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
Hi! Many people are very pessimistic about challenges and saying that you are not living up to you potential without doing something about it is the definition of a looser.
I think people should try to be better each day that passes and not stay content with what life “gives them”.
What an inspirational post! It’s truthful and very funny at the same time. First, you need to be honest with yourself and THE rest will come.
Cheers!
P.S. It was really hard to get up this morning ;-)
Dear Penelope,
I have read few of your articles. I will be kind as much as I can but I need also to be honest. I do not like them, and I do not like the philosophy behind them.
What’s wrong in trying to improve yourself, day by day? How you can frame upfront what is right or wrong in what each of us calls “improvement” or “potential”? In using your brain, your heart, your knowledge in a context where you can create satisfaction for you and the other people around you? Why you complicate things so much? I do not wake up every day with the idea that life is hard. I thank God every day for the problems, the joys, the victories and defeats that I face. If someone feels the wish to take more responsibility and, with the power that comes from it, create better conditions (emotional, psycological, professional) for him/herself and for the people around, this is not wrong. A great man, called Ayrton Senna, who became a legend and is loved by a lot of people said: “you need to have dreams in your life and you need to work hard to make them happening. In your dream there always must be a piece of reality, but without dreams there is no life, no excitement”. Penelope, I am sure you will not mind if I tell you I will not follow your advices. I do not sense truth in them, you cannot be happy if you give up what you wish and long for, behaving like if your dream is a big missunderstanding.
Ciao,
Great post!
“Look what you do to your mother!” is probably the most harmful sentence I’ve heard. It just means “Do what I want you to do, regardless of your own happiness”.
Best Regards
Ahh, the good old days, when Penelope used to talk about nice things like forming relationships and maintaining a realistic self-image, and used to give people advice over things they actually could control, instead of living in a corporate fantasy-land and blaming society’s problems on individuals’ lack of marketing skills.
Seriously, I hope the old Penelope comes back.
I love you.
The mantra for my life could be “I’m not living up to my potential”; full of ideas, lacking in the implementation department; knowing I could do more but never fulfilling the promise. Your sanity check is much appreciated!
I’m with you on being kind. I was reading up on the fruits of the Holy Spirit last week – these are my real ambitions, and I remember dwelling on kindness for a while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_Holy_Spirit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_Holy_Spirit#Kindness_.28Latin:_benignitas.29
So what do you say to your mom who has said those exact words?
This is the best post ever.
Still one of my favourite posts after all these years!
Thank you sooooooo much, I was just thinking about this potential stuff and how no one can define what they mean by potential and won’t say to your face anything specific about what they do or do not want from you. I ended up quiting a job because they did not have the balls to fire me. Actually, they really didn’t have anyting specific to fire me for. Just this lack of living up to my potential crap. I found another job in which I was doing fine but the contract was pulled and moved to another company. New supervisor is on the same potential crap. Ending up looking like I need to move on from here too…very frustrating.
Yes you are right, school spends far to much time focusing on drumming into us how important it is to get good qualifications and they don’t put any emphasis on emotional and real life issues. We all have to get out of bed in the morning whether we like it or not so I believe it is important to work on having a good day because we have two options available, we can choose to feel good or we can choose to feel bad.
“The only tragedy in life is not to become a saint”. From God in My Everything.
I don’t want to be the only one here saying this but you’re completely misinterpreting the meaning of ‘living up to your potential’. In these 13 years and 7 months I’ve been on this planet, in these United States, I’ve seen many an overachiever, and many and underachiever. Perhaps you couldn’t think to try to come up with a different way to view this saying. . . or maybe you could, but it negate this article entirely and thus force you to write about something that has actually been well thought-out, though frankly, I don’t care.
Humans are capable of many, many great things, as evidenced by many famous mathematicians, civil rights activists, artists, and many, many more enriching professions, bbut what do we do? All we do is sit and whine that our potential is some superficial concept and that merely removing our white, American, paid asses from bed is such a goddamn struggle that we should just kill ourselves.
Oh. . . lets also reiterate how important it is to be ‘nice’ in the world. Because being nice and passing up all the job opportunities is such a grand way to life. Put yourself in my shoes, just for a moment. Humor me, if you will. I’m female and black, and live in a town where discrimination against race is prominent, as well as the obvious gender discrimination. Should I just be ‘kind’ to all those who don’t think I deserve the same pay as a white man. I also suppose my closest friend should have just been nice to her old teacher and not reported his sexually harassing him so that he could keep his job. Oh wait. . . women shouldn’t report sexual harassment at all. You already made that point very clear in that appalling article for CBS three years ago.
Humans could have accomplished so much if it weren’t for closed-minded individuals out there such as yourself keeping us on this path of inequality. Humankind has the potential to do so much more, and what do we do? We flip burgers at Burger Kings, work so hard to keep these money-making businesses thriving rather than putting funds towards, I don’t know, a cure for cancer. Ironically, we’re practically paying for cancer.
I have so much potential, the neighbors have so much potential. We all have the goddamn potential to become president, to make a change, to better this god forsaken world, and it’s because people who have a voice, have a position of power, don’t want it so. Its just better to let things go the way they are now, isn’t it? This society’s structure is a disease and all we’re doing is pushing drugs to cure the symptoms.
We’ve all got the potential to see, but we choose not to. We choose to pretend that we’re no more intelligent than an ape, acting on primordial instinct and that optimism is the only thing that gets us moving in the morning. Me? I just want to stick around until there’s a real change.
But I guess all you want to see is the elimination of a saying.
I love this article. You’ve hit it right on the head. I especially like #1. I felt liberated just reading that one. Focus on the important stuff – like our hearts and relationships. Thank you.
Just read this article after an older one “Stop worrying that your twentysomething is lost”. Myself being almost 27 and worrying my a** off about this kind of stuff..this is like a fresh breath of air. Your ideas are wonderful. Thank you.
Wow. This is definitely a new perspective on “potential”. As someone who came from an overachieving family, we always equated success and potential to high grades, high salaries, etc
It’s interesting to think about the “how” rather than the actual goal as the potential. And the great thing there is by focusing on the “how” you will most likely achieve your goal even quicker and easier
Haha. Most people don’t kill themselves because they are afraid of what is on the other side. Their pain of living isn’t so painful that it outweighs the pain of not knowing what the hell will happen. I have had more than one suicide attempt and looking back they were cries for help or partial acts of vengeance because of not being able to cope with certain things(not proud of that of it.) The point I am making is that if someone really wants to kill themselves then they will do it in a way that they can’t be rescued.
I agree that living up to your potential isn’t the wisest way of looking at things. You are an accumulation of your work/habits over a long period of time. That is just living, either you do it in a way that you want or you do it in a way that sucks and are too afraid to change or some other reason.
Be kind. I agree.
I couldn’t disagree more! I think that everyone has potential that they should live up to, and carry that drive with them each and everyday. Viktor Frankl believed that this was one of the make ups of our psyche, this search for meaning and reaching our full potential. I don’t believe that it is something that is imposed on us from society or any other outside force other than our own innate sense of accomplishment. I so understand your position and appreciate its originality, but I could not disagree more