When I was a kid, adults loved to talk about my potential. They told me I had it. They told me not to waste it. What they never told me was what it actually meant.

It felt like one of those party games where you have a note taped to your forehead that everyone can read but you.

As far as I could tell, my potential was some weirdly valuable commodity tucked into my life somewhere that I had to find and develop in order to not disappoint all these people counting on me to “make something” of myself.

I’m sure those people were trying to be be helpful, but I found it a lot more stressful than inspiring.

Today, I see lots of other people that are also confused about this. They misunderstand what human potential actually means.

They feel like potential is something unmistakable that you find early in life. And if you don’t find it that means you must not have much potential to work with.

In other words, they think of potential as a type of talent. But it’s not. Human potential is the capacity to grow, develop skills, and change over time.

It’s not a paved path of easy achievement but instead a collection of possible skills, abilities and wisdom, sitting dormant, waiting to be activated through effort and try-fail learning. The process that expands your capacity over time.

When you look at potential as if it were talent or ability, it interferes with your ability to grow. Talent itself is a problematic concept because it encourages all-or-nothing thinking: either you have it or you don’t.

It also distracts you from the necessity of discipline and putting in the work. According to popular culture, if you have talent, things should come easy and if things don’t come easy then you’re not talented and you should find something else to pursue.

Early success is seen as the hallmark of potential. Studying, applying yourself, and steady incremental progress is seen as the consolation prize for those who missed out on the talent lottery, instead of what it is: a proven path of growth.

This is only made worse when people compare themselves to high performers in their field. When we compare our first awkward steps to people already well underway we end up feeling like no amount of daily work and compounding growth could ever get us to that level.

So, the very idea of potential comes to be associated with the external pressure to achieve and the need to not disappoint others.

Rather than facing the possibility of failing to live up to some lofty potential, people often give into fear and lower the bar. They buy into stories of permanently assigned abilities that come from a fixed mindset taking the limits of their current abilities, not a description, but as a prescription: this is as far as you go.

With this protective filter in place, the prospects for improvement look pretty slim.

Over time, this way of thinking makes it feel like your path is already set—and that it’s already too late to change your life.

But potential is not pressure, it’s possibility. It’s your long-term capacity to grow, learn, and change over time.

When you build a house, you work from a blueprint and lay a foundation. No matter how fancy the house or how many stories you build, everything has to fit on top of that foundation. Nothing can hang off. The outline of the foundation determined the outer limits of the house. It cannot outgrow that foundation.

But most lives are not built from a fixed blueprint. They’re more like building a house one room at a time, laying the foundation as you go. There is less of an overarching plan, more exploration, and far fewer limits on how big or how long you can build. Every time you finish a room you look around, admire what you’ve built, and maybe invite a few friends over to celebrate it.

But after a while you ask yourself: Am I done now, or is there more I want to build?

Your potential is the combined footprint of every possible addition and expansion you can construct for the house. Every wing of rooms, every fancy courtyard, every new upgrade to the capacity and functionality of the house.

Over an entire lifetime of construction. 

But your potential doesn’t fulfill itself. It requires effort. It is realized (made real) through consistent effort and incremental improvement, often through try-fail cycles of attempt, failure-as-feedback, and adjustment.

This is the way your knowledge, skills, and abilities grow and compound over time. Your progress may feel slow on a day-to-day basis, but over months and years your abilities grow and expand, shaping you into more and more capable and accomplished versions of yourself.

These daily decisions to learn and grow result in sustained effort that works behind the scenes setting the direction of your life. What you choose to face and what you avoid determines the caliber of person you become.

By taking ownership of your story – realizing you are the protagonist of your life, you deliberately select the patterns of action that build who you become. Either someone capable and strong who converts their potential into their actual, or someone who stays small by running away from challenges.

The choice between the two doesn’t happen just once in some kind of permanent selection, where you forever choose your destiny. It happens every day, as you continually decide which patterns to support and which ones to let die.

Although your potential is almost always way bigger than you imagine, it is not without limits. Despite what you might hear from gurus and the permanently naïve, you can’t be “anything you put your mind to.”

Your age, state of health and other biological factors place constraints on what you can realistically become.

For example, professional basketball players are all relatively tall, athletic and young. If you are missing one or more of these factors, your chances of success in the NBA are slim.

There are also significant differences in the opportunities people get. You could be a tall, young athlete and still miss out on professional success if there are no school teams or sports leagues available to develop your skills and attract scouts.

There are also financial limitations that constrain some people more than others. Basketball doesn’t have a lot of built-in expenses, but if you have your heart set on competitive skiing, or scuba diving, or more exotic pursuits, you will need some significant financial resources to get very far.

You are also limited by opportunity costs. Real life involves trade-offs. The time, energy, and other resources you invest in one goal are not available for other goals.

This requires you to set priorities. To select what gets the first share of your time and attention what gets whatever is left over. Whatever you select consistently over time will determine the path of growth in your life.

This is why it is important to not get discouraged by a lack of quick success, the power of growth is not in early wins, but in compounding over time. 

In any satisfying story, wins need to be earned. Skills and abilities develop through determined effort, are tested by setbacks, and eventually incorporated into a new and more capable version of the character. In a movie this usually is accompanied by inspiring music. In real life it comes with a sense of satisfaction that’s rarely achieved in any other way.

Although there are limits to your potential it is almost always broader and deeper than you imagine. And frequently leads off in unexpected directions.

For instance, there was a time in my life when I was very serious about music. So serious that I quit my job, packed up my worldly goods, and transplanted my young family across the country so that I could attend music school.

And it was great. After years of working at boring, non-creative jobs I found a tribe of kindred spirits. People who were creative and passionate and not afraid to express themselves artistically.

They provided me with a lot of kind, yet critical feedback. The type you need if you really want to improve at something. And that feedback revealed an interesting pattern: although my music was never bad, it wasn’t great either.

Whenever I would perform a new song, I got lukewarm feedback on the music itself, but the story that I told to introduce it always captured people’s attention. The jokes, the ad-libs, the “me just being me” part of the performance usually ended up being more entertaining and impactful than my serious attempts at music.

So, I shifted. After completing music school, I started putting more focus on writing, public speaking, and even comedy. Intentionally developing these latent skills that had been highlighted to me.

The point here is not that I wasn’t amazing at music. That beginning stage is part of every growth journey. The point is that my friends called out a large chunk of potential that I wasn’t even aware of. And since it felt more natural and fulfilling to me, I chose to pursue it instead.

But even discovering these surprise skills didn’t create a fast-pass to success. I still had to work to develop that new potential through classes and books, and lots of try-fail learning. Putting in the consistent effort that builds long term success.

Like my path through music school, many careers and other long-term endeavors are often navigated through a similar method of exploration, experimentation, and feedback.

Even if you do discover unexpected talents, they don’t automatically carry you to effortless glory, you still have to develop them through consistent effort.  Instead of passively waiting to “discover your calling,” you observe what is working, invest in those skills, and strengthen them into reliable capabilities.

This is how growth works.

Having difficult conversations improves your communication. Facing challenges strengthens your confidence. Taking on harder tasks grows your ability.

Over time these small regular efforts compound into something impressive. The skills that once felt difficult gradually become more natural to you.

When you recognize this pattern, you stop looking for easy talent and settle into developing what is already working. Growth becomes less like “finding” your vocation and more like continually strengthening your useful skills. 

If you don’t recognize this pattern, you can easily get discouraged when your early efforts don’t pay off right away and stop doing the work that actually builds your ability.

This is the paradox of potential: no matter how huge our total potential is, the early efforts to develop it are almost always awkward and uncertain.  It might not always be clear what is working and improving until you get some reliable feedback.

It takes time and a good deal of exploration for the patterns of progress to emerge. But as they do, and you continue the consistent work of growth, these fledgling skills grow into powerful and reliable capabilities. Over time a realized potential takes shape that is far greater than you could have guessed from those first efforts.

The challenge is that we rarely recognize these early stages while we are in them. This poses some questions:

What areas of your life might be in the early stages of potential and how can you best invest and develop them into full capabilities?

The direction of your life is shaped by the capacities you continue to build. These do not develop quickly, but grow through repeated choices and sustained effort over time. Recognizing what your patterns of action are building is a central part of Narrative Ownership, because the patterns you repeat gradually shape the kind of person you become. And the kind of life your story ultimately produces.

This idea is one part of a broader pattern where pressure, challenge, and difficulty are what force growth and expand your capabilities over time.

This essay is based on ideas discussed in Episode 018 of the Full Mental Bracket podcast:
– What Is Human Potential (and How to Actually Unlock It).