You Must Understand High-Potential if You Want High-Potential Outcomes
You may be high-potential, but if you aren’t doing high-potential work you aren’t high-potential. Moreover, you may be doing high-potential work, but no one will recognize you as high-potential if you aren’t in the right environment.
These are the two facts of potential that you must understand. Not because someone recognizing you as high-potential matters, but because of what it means to fulfill or not fulfill potential.
Potential is having or showing the capacity to become or develop into something in the future. You know in your gut if you are or are not doing the work to develop yourself. When you aren’t doing the work to develop yourself, you feel less than your best. You may even feel depressed. When you are doing the work, you feel better, but better is relative to the impact the work is producing.
High-potential is a designation of the latter. You are doing the work and the work is highly impactful. Ultimately, this is how you maximize your potential. However, this is not something that happens by accident. Going from potential to high-potential is an intentional act.
While I can’t give you the specific steps for your situation as every situation of fulfilling potential is different, I can leave you with one fundamental truth that you can’t go wrong with. As identified by the research of Shawn Achor in his book Big Potential:
Personality, creativity, energy, engagement, leadership, and even sales performance are all predicted by those you surround yourself with. In other words, connecting with high-potential people dramatically increases your likelihood of high-potential outcomes.
Simply stated, if you want high-potential outcomes, do high-potential work and do it around and with high-potential people.