How to Know If You’re Living Up to Your Potential
If you aren’t, you will spend a lot of time justifying what you’re doing
If you are not living up to your potential, you will know.
You will know even if you try to do everything in your power to avoid knowing. You will know because you will spend a lot of time trying to convince yourself that you’re doing your absolute best. You will know because you will find yourself rationalizing, listing facts and figures to prove you’ve made it.
I got this degree.
I graduated — that was once the biggest accomplishment I could have ever thought of.
I live in this place, and I didn’t imagine I would.
I’ve made this much, and I never thought I could.
I traveled here.
I paid this off.
… And anyone would say that’s enough.
On and on the accomplishments will go, until you’ve inflated yourself a bit.
In a fleeting moment of gratitude, you will appreciate what you’ve built. For a brief second, that lukewarm feeling of gratitude will dissipate your dissatisfaction, and you’ll forget your unhappiness for a while.
It will return.
There is a difference between doing well for yourself and living up to your potential.
When you are living up to your potential, your deep well of longing will close up.
Nobody can draw this line for you. Nobody can tell you what is or isn’t your fullest capacity. Nobody can define what success should or shouldn’t look like for you.
You’ll have to know it for yourself.
And what if you inherently know you’re unhappy? What if you know you’re constantly reaching for reasons why you should be happy instead of simply feeling it?
That means you’re not there yet.
When we’re growing up, we’re taught how to define “being okay” as stability.
In time, we realize that we don’t know what the hell we want out of life, so we attach ourselves to certain markers of success. We turn those markers into goals. We aim for them.
We build lives that soothe the fears of our childhood selves. As grown-ups, we find that we’re still hanging onto the training wheels.
Slowly, we realize we want to start that business. We want to influence our community. We want to travel. We want to heal. We want to be freed.
Deep down, we each have a vision for how great our life could be. When we say we “don’t know what we want,” we really mean we’re afraid to admit what we want, to face that vision head-on.
To pursue the thing you’re most afraid of pursuing would be to realize your fullest potential.
To reach the end of your life and know, deep down, that you lived as fully, deeply, and completely as you could — that would be to reach your fullest potential.
To live in a way that made you breathless with excitement and completely at peace all at once would be to reach your fullest potential.
To pursue what makes you come alive—no matter how silly, stupid, small, or unimportant someone else might think it is—would be to reach your fullest potential.
To do the thing that has been on your mind the entire time you’ve been reading this — that is what you must do to reach your fullest potential.
There is, unfortunately, no other way to be satisfied.
People will tell you there will always be more to hope for, more to want. Greed is stealthy like that. We get one thing and we want another, so on and so forth, until we hit a breaking point.
What most people fail to recognize is that we only want more when we aren’t pursuing what we actually need.
When you are living up to your potential, your deep well of longing will close up. You will feel full. You will go to bed at night excited to wake up the next day. You will live in a place that makes you feel like your best and truest self.
You will not wish for the world anymore, because you will have the only little piece of it you ever really wanted.
It’s not a question of whether you will live up to your potential, it’s a question of when.
