The Tyranny Of Potential

I was twelve when a teacher told me I had potential. She said it kindly, meaning it as encouragement. I’ve been carrying it like a debt ever since.

Potential is a peculiar burden. It’s praise that hasn’t been earned yet, a promissory note you’re expected to make good on. Every choice becomes audited against this imagined future where you’ve finally actualised what everyone said you could be.

The word itself reveals the problem. Potential. From the Latin potentia: power that exists in possibility rather than actuality. You are constantly measured against a ghost of who you might become, never quite enough as who you are.

Aristotle distinguished between potentiality and actuality. An acorn has the potential to become an oak, but it is not yet an oak. The question he wrestled with: does an acorn fail if it never becomes a tree? Or is there dignity in simply being an acorn?

I’ve watched friends torture themselves over unfulfilled potential. The novelist who never wrote the novel. The entrepreneur whose business never launched. The artist who stopped making art. They carry their potential like original sin, proof of a promise broken to their younger selves.

But here’s what no one tells you about potential: it’s infinite and therefore meaningless. You have the potential to be anything because you are, as yet, nothing in particular. Potential is the luxury of not having chosen.

The moment you commit, potential collapses. You become actual. The quantum superposition of all possible futures resolves into one lived reality. And that reality, however good, will always fall short of the infinite.

There’s a relief in accepting this. In trading potential for actuality, even if what you become is smaller than what you might have been.

I think about this when I meet my twelve-year-old self in memory. That boy had such potential. He could have been anyone, done anything. The life I’m living would probably disappoint him. It’s too ordinary, too compromised, too far from the grand futures he imagined.

But unlike him, I’ve actually done things. I’ve made something actual out of all that shimmering possibility. I’ve failed at specific things rather than succeeded at nothing in particular.

The artist Lynda Barry once wrote that we are not troubled by the things we can’t do, only by the things we haven’t done. Potential is the permanent state of haven’t-done, of could-still-do, of might-one-day.

Perhaps the real courage isn’t living up to your potential. It’s choosing to let most of it die unrealised. To become someone specific rather than remaining everyone hypothetically.

I don’t have potential anymore. I’ve spent it, waste fully and necessarily, on becoming this one particular person. And while that person isn’t exceptional, isn’t the fulfilment of anyone’s grand predictions, he at least exists.

That teacher was wrong to tell me I had potential. What she should have said: you have permission to become someone smaller than your possibilities, and that’s enough.