The Saddest Part of Human Existence – Unfulfilled Potential
In my humble opinion, the saddest parts of human existence is potential that goes to waste. To have a passion, skill, ability, or talent that you never figure out how to use to your benefit is painful. Especially when you know there is nothing legally, physically, or mentally preventing you from tapping into that potential.
One of the reasons why potential goes to waste is that many people don’t understand how to tap into their potential. To tap into your potential, you first must meet three requirements:
- Have self-awareness of what makes a passion, skill, ability, or talent unique to your personality and strengths.
- Motivation to continually invest in a process that grows that passion, skill, ability, or talent until you become an expert.
- The ability to convert that expertise into an outcome valuable to society.
The vast majority of people do a reasonable job at requirement #1, once they make a commitment to self-awareness. However, the reverse is true for requirement #2 and #3. It’s these two requirements that cause the vast majority of people to struggle. The main reason why is that the mindset you need for requirements #2 and #3 conflict with each other.
Overcoming the Conflict Between the Process and Outcome Mindset
If your only motivation comes from trying to withdraw value from your passion, skill, ability, or talent it causes you to focus too much on the outcome. Moreover, focusing on the outcome when the outcome is unpredictable can cause motivation to decrease. On the other hand, if you ignore creating valuable outcomes because you focus too much on your process, then you miss opportunities to grow your expertise.
Indeed, it’s a catch 22 for sure. Furthermore, the way to overcome this catch 22 is to marry the process mindset to the outcome mindset using purpose. Purpose is when your motivation comes from doing something of value that does not only benefit your own self-interest, but it also benefits others. When you connect reaching your potential to a purpose bigger than just you, you get the best of both worlds when it comes to the process and outcome mindsets.
Correspondingly, your motivation to focus on the process increases as pursuing your purpose provides an outcome valuable to society. This is the secret to reaching your potential.