Reach Your Potential by Connecting the Process and Outcome Mindsets
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.
Most 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 create the struggle. The main reason why is that the mindset you need for requirements #2 and #3 conflict with each other.
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 connect 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.