Potential Doesn’t Last Forever
It’s great to have potential. Until it’s not. If you’re a beginner to be told you have potential is a complement. However, if you have experience, it’s basically an insult to be told you have potential.
Why? Because having potential means you haven’t lived up to all your capabilities yet. Nick Saban says it best:
We often times talk about what someone’s potential is. But I think to put it in better terms that is understandable, it’s the capability gap. The capability gap is what you are capable of, relative to what you are doing…
So, when you think about potential as a gap between what you’re capable of and what you are doing then having potential when you’ve been doing something for a long time indicates that you have a problem. Why aren’t you closing the gap?
While it’s great to be someone who has a lot of potential, it’s not great to be in that same position for too long. At some point, potential spoils. Simply stated, potential doesn’t last forever. You either seize it or waste it.