Potentially The Best Blog About Potential There Is, Who Would Know If I Didn't Write It?

I may be a little bit narcissistic, delusional, or grandiose with the title of this blog, but I wouldn’t know unless I wrote it and published it.  Those who read it will have to be the judge of that and please feel free to comment.  If I thought it wasn’t going to be good and that stopped me from trying, you wouldn’t be reading it and you wouldn’t be able to judge it. The great potential inside us will never be realized to the truest extent by others unless you push to realize it yourself.  This is a constant struggle.  I know right now I can’t become a professional basketball player, but at one time when I was a teenager that may have been a possibility.  From outsiders looking in, it may not have seemed so then, but if I had thought I could do it back then and exhausted every possibility to help me to achieve that goal, who knows, what might have been.  Unfortunately, as a teenager I was unaware of my potential and how to cultivate it or maybe I just didn’t have the ambition or belief that I could cultivate that potential.   I think there are many people who don’t do themselves justice in exploring and finding what they like and push to become the best at it.   I am not sure which is worse, a teenager who doesn’t think they have an opportunity to pursue their dreams or one who has chosen not to allow their creativity and passion come out in a way that affords the possibilities that are available in the world. 

Young people do not yet know the power of their own mind, their thoughts, and actions, and often times they follow the lead of the adults around them, which may not be in their own best interests.  Distractions in this world are constant and may stand in the way of actualizing potential.  Distractions are not going away and you can’t live in a cave, what must be built to combat distractions to success are desire, discipline, and persistence.  These characteristics, traits, values or skills, whatever you want to call them are not necessarily taught in schools or by those around you when you are young.  They may be learned, but where do you learn them?  The people around you may have been teachers or models for these skills or traits and just like any teacher of any subject; they could be terrible or fantastic.  If you didn’t learn the skills well enough, don’t blame the teacher and make excuses, get a new teacher, study more; try new ways of doing things.  These characteristics and skills turn potential into actualization of dreams. 

When it comes to potential there is a nasty unspoken work that looms deep in a person’s psyche.  That word is failure or it could come in the form of a question like, what if I fail?  Those words keep more people from taking action than anything else and that is scary because they are just words, yet powerful words that trigger your mind into catastrophic ways of thinking.  When you ask yourself the question, what if I fail and that fear of failure keeps you from acting, then you are feeding a negative mindset, an illusion, thoughts that are not yet reality, but will soon become reality.  If you can ask yourself that question and you answer with a resounding “so what” I will try again. Then you know you are on the right track toward achieving your potential.  If you don’t move on and work through that fear you will be stuck in the trap of mediocrity.  Po Bronson in his book “What Should I Do With My Life, called these people the ‘Brilliant Masses.”  “The Brilliant Masses are composed of nothing less than the many great people of our generation, the bright, the talented, the intelligent, the resourceful, and the creative- far too many of whom are operating at quarter speed, unsure of their place in the world, contributing far too little to the productive engine of modern civilization, still feeling like observers, all feeling like they haven’t come close to living up to their potential.”   When I first read that I felt an array of intense emotions, from sadness to excitement.  The sadness from the realization that I had been operating on less than full speed myself and the excitement about the possibility of what life can be like if I went full speed ahead.   It’s difficult to operate at full speed ahead all the time, but unless you make that effort you will never reap the rewards of success and knowing what it feels like to live up to or surpass your potential. 

Live With a Sense of Urgency

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow what would you do today?  Would you have any regrets about how you lived your life?  How many people live today for today, with an urgency like there might not be a tomorrow.  Procrastination can be an epidemic, as it is easy to take for granted the fact that we may be gone and never get to what it was we were putting off for tomorrow.  I can’t imagine the feeling one might have lying on their death bed thinking about things they wish they had done. 

When I get to the point of my last breaths, I think I would prefer to focus on what I have accomplished and the times that I enjoyed, and I know that between now and hopefully that time period far down the road, I hope there will be a long list of things that I will look back at with pride, joy, and laughter.  I learned a valuable lesson from a man that I shared a ride with, when I was in my early twenties.  I can’t remember the name of this man whom I met while traveling on a golf trip with my grandfather and some of his friends.   We were traveling a couple of hours from where we lived near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to go play a course in some small town in the middle of Pennsylvania.  One of my grandfather’s friends asked if he could car pool.  I agreed, however at that time, I was hesitant because I had no idea how I was going to fill three hours of time conversing with someone nearly fifty years older than me.  I was a little worried, but to his credit, he was very skilled at starting and keeping a conversation going, probably all of those years of life experience.  We talked about life, mostly his, because I had not had much life to talk about up to that point.  Listening to him tell his story about how he worked through the business world and developed ideas that eventually led to his own successful business and financial success along with his stories about his family and raising kids, made me realize that he had a direction, and purpose and lived with an urgency, that I had never seen.   Hearing this man speak about how he lived each day with a purpose and how he was grateful for the opportunities, enlightened me, as I had never heard anyone share these views yet in my young life.   I was actually embarrassed because I realized that I had not lived with any type of purpose or urgency yet.

 At a loss for words and wanting to hear more from him, I asked if he had any regrets.  He promptly and firmly stated, no not one.  He talked about making mistakes, but always keeping the mindset of learning from those mistakes and not making them again.  This man spoke of the importance of gratitude and being thankful for what he had and how that made it easier to live through tough times.  This man was a World War II Veteran and experienced some tough times that many of my generation may never experience, but does that mean I can’t have the same type of gratitude and sense of urgency?  Maybe his experience brought this purpose, urgency and gratitude to the forefront of his life quicker. 

When I speak of urgency, it is not just an urgency to accomplish tasks and goals or make a lot of money.  It is an urgency to get the most out of the time you have.  It could be an urgency to stop and smell the roses, to hike to the top of a mountain and look at the grand view, or just feel the wind in your face while you walk your dog.  I don’t know what your urgency might be, but I believe that there is a purpose for all of us and we need to work to find that purpose.  I speak about this not as an expert in religion or philosophy, but as a person who is consciously trying to continue to evolve.  This takes effort, as it is difficult in this day and age to get distracted and forget that there may be a bigger purpose for us all and we need to consciously seek that out. 

“Life is borrowed time; we live on A loan day to day.” 

~Brian Souza

A Conversation with My Ideal Self

I was reading an excerpt the other day about how to use visualization to learn more about a character, when writing about a character you might be struggling to define or identify in the writing of a novel or story.  The point is to be able to get into that character’s head to experience how they think and feel and what possesses them to do what they do.  It is a melding of minds so to speak, so that you can become more in tune with the character, to be able to describe that character better in your writing. 

While reading the exercise portion of this article, of course I improvised to visualize a meeting with my own ideal self.  What I mean by that is that I visualized my current self meeting with my ideal self or the person that I want to be.  To be more clear, my ideal self is the person who has achieved most of my dreams and goals and continues to evolve with new and more fascinating goals and experiences.  At first, I thought it might be difficult to visualize this person and what he might be like.  Shortly after I closed my eyes and began to visualize him, he (or my ideal twin) began speaking to me, and he wasn’t very nice!  Either I didn’t focus enough on his personality or he felt he had the liberty to harass me because we are so close, haha!  Anyway he used sarcasm to light into me about a few things.  I guess because he had achieved what I have been working towards, he felt like he could arrogantly rip me about it.  What impressed upon me most was not so much the attitude with which he presented, but the emotion and urgency with which he spoke about how I should increase the intensity of my effort in going after what I want.  I guess it is easy for a fictional character to make things sound easy, but when thinking about it, it is just as easy to do something as it is not to do something. 

I first heard that statement in the audio book, People are Idiots and I can Prove It, by Larry Winget.  The first time I heard that I had to think about it for a while, because it didn’t seem to make sense.  However, if I apply that thought to an action like writing this blog post, I think about how easy it was to open the computer and to start writing in comparison to how easy it would have been to skip it and take a nap, watch tv, drink a beer, or goof off in so many other ways.  The reason that I or anyone else might think that a task is not easy, is because we may have developed preconceived notions about what is easy and what is not.  This can come from years of practicing those other things or just the mere fact that we have learned to enjoy certain tasks over others.  I think most people may have a bit of anxiety when starting a new a task and if it doesn’t go well, there is a greater chance of labeling that task as difficult instead of rationalizing that it was the first time and it will get easier.  I think a quote from Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, sums it up pretty well, “Is it hard?  Not if you have the right attitudes.  Its having the right attitudes that’s hard.”

Earlier today I was debating about skipping my workout.  I had to get into my rational mind and ask myself, what would I do instead?  I had no good answer and knew that I would feel better once I got there and started moving.  To me it was just as easy to go workout as it was to not workout.  In fact, it would have been harder not to because I would’ve had to find something to do with that time if I didn’t.  Of course, I did and I am glad I went.  I think that rational part of my mind is shared with that ideal me that I talked to in my visualization exercise, because he was in great shape!   

That’s enough talk about what is easy and what is not, now back to the visualization exercise.  Once, I was able to stop my ideal self from verbally berating me, I was able to follow through with the full exercise, which entailed getting into his head, thinking what he thought, and feeling what he felt.  I couldn’t help but notice there was more optimism, less limits, and more possibility.  This conversation with my ideal self was entertaining and encouraging to say the least.  It was an exercise that allowed me to challenge my thoughts and beliefs and look at myself and my dreams and goals from a different perspective.  I began to think to myself, I have flashes of these feelings and emotions and accomplishing what the vision of my ideal self accomplished, is possible.  The challenge is to be able to initiate those optimistic thoughts and feelings when times are tough and on a more consistent basis.  I believe that initiating this mindset of optimism and limitless possibilities is what makes people able to perform at higher levels.  Is this possible to do on a consistent basis?  It has to be, as evidenced by the successful people and the great minds that have graced this planet.  

                          

“In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...”
~Robert Pirsig