The Receding Horizon
“Am I realising my potential?" may be the wrong question entirely.
"I feel like I'm not realising my potential."
It's one of the most common things people say to me when they first make contact – and often they're people who, by any external measure, are doing well. Senior roles, real accomplishments, and the solid respect of the people around them. Underneath it all, a nagging sense of falling short.
I've grown interested in that sentence – less in whether it's true than in the standard that’s hiding inside it. Falling short of what, exactly? Against what is the shortfall being measured? Because the more closely you look at "my potential," the harder it gets to find the thing you're supposedly failing.
Potential is the capacity to do something not yet done – ability held in reserve, pending a future that hasn't arrived. That's what the word means. Which makes "realising your full potential" a strange thing to aim at when you really get down to it. Capacity for what, by when? The moment you grew in any direction, you'd have more of it, not less. Potential expands as you expand; there is always further capacity. It isn't a tank you could drain or a summit you could stand on and say, there, done. It's a horizon, and horizons recede as you walk toward them.
So the question "am I realising my full potential?" has no answer. Not because you're failing it, but because there's nothing there to pass or fail. You're being asked to measure yourself against a quantity with no ceiling and no edge.
And yet people suffer over it – their suffering is real even when the measure isn't. Why? I think because we've taken something open-ended and tried to manage it with a tool built for something fixed. A target. A score. A finish line. Those instruments work well for bounded problems: did I hit the number, did I finish the race. Brought to an unbounded thing, they produce a particular kind of torment – the sense of perpetually falling behind on a task that was never the sort of task you could complete. The exhaustion isn't a sign you're not trying hard enough. It's what happens when you meet something boundless with a measuring stick.
What makes it stick, though, is that the question doesn't feel at all odd. It feels like your own voice in your own head, asking something reasonable. But listen for where it actually comes from. "Living up to your potential" is a phrase the culture hands round constantly – school reports, appraisals, the whole language of ambition we breathe – until it lodges so deep it sounds like conscience. We end up tangled in a standard we never chose and never examined, one that doesn't, on inspection, hold together. A good deal of what people bring to me as personal failure turns out, when we slow down and look, to be less about their own potential than about someone else's idea of a life well spent.
There's a glib version of this that I don't mean. "You're already enough, so stop striving" just swaps one slogan for another, and to an ambitious person, it sounds like an instruction to give up, which is why they rightly ignore it.
I’m pointing at something different. The ambition and the self-punishment were never the same thing, though we've bolted them together. You can want to grow, stretch, build something you care about, reach for more – and still release yourself from the idea that there's a fixed bar you're failing to clear. The reaching is yours to keep. What you can put down is the stick.
So I've stopped finding "am I realising my potential?" a useful question. It has no base, no answer, and it tends to leave people smaller than it found them.
The question I'd rather that we sit with is plainer and harder: what's actually mine to do? What, knowing myself, do I want to give my one stretch of time and attention to – setting aside what would impress others, or measure well, or satisfy a standard borrowed from someone else?
That question has an answer. It changes as you change, as it should, because so do you. And it lets you reach for as much as you like, without measuring yourself against a finish line that was never there.
Sandra Cunningham - Outside in