"Smart" kids are always praised for their high potential. They’re deemed inherently capable of so much, largely because of their natural talents. And not only that but their disposition at a young age suggests they’ll be able to harness those talents into something big. They can do anything they want, if they just try.
I was one of these kids. I had so much potential — to be a great surgeon, to be a great lawyer, to be a great musician, to be many great things. I got used to being someone who had the potential to really be someone. And it was a good feeling.
One that I soon learned didn’t hold as much value as it at first seemed.
II
One problem with having “high potential” is that it’s a false identity. You can’t be someone today on the basis of a fictional future you that hasn’t yet arrived. And when your present identity is too dependent on your future (more impressive) identity, you risk wanting to just merge them out of what I refer to as ego-convenience. The problem is, if you merge them, you risk shielding yourself from the pangs of longing for that future thing. And when taken to an extreme, you can lose some of the motivation to do the very things that would turn your “high potential” into the real thing.
The other problem is you don’t realize that having high potential is actually a back-handed compliment. It’s confusing because as back-handed compliments go, it first strikes you as a very good thing, and it’s usually said with that very ego-approving tone. But someone wise told me that when someone says you have high potential, it just means you haven’t achieved something great enough yet to talk about that thing instead. It was said more poetically, but you get the point.
Smart people can ride on the high of being someone with high potential for a while. But eventually you hit roadblocks. You have to pay back the ego debts.
I’ve seen this usually happen in one of three ways:
The first is when you get to that age when, rightly or wrongly, society expects that '“potential” to already have been fulfilled (or to be in the process of being fulfilled in some traditionally understood way on some traditionally understood simple algebraic trajectory). Depending on how non-linear your trajectory is, it’s likely to first hit in your mid-20s, once you’re done with reasonable kinds of schooling and are fully in the real world.
The second is when you notice that seemingly lower potential people start to pass you on that trajectory. (Sometimes it’s actually the truly high potential people who just weren’t identified as such at an early age). And in the absence of having had the cozy label of “high potential” themselves, these people acted fast on their base desire to advance themselves. They earned it.
And the third way? It’s the most straight-forward. Deep down you’re aware that you just haven’t achieved the thing yet. You haven’t figured out your own shit. Sometimes you confront yourself with this truth, and sometimes it confronts you, a little at a time or all at once. You feel this sharper pang when you start to see examples of real achievement around you, even harder when they’re the very achievements you covet.
When any one of these three things happens, that blessing of high potential finally reveals itself for a kind of handicap — not one that I suggest anyone should feel overwhelmingly sorry for, but one nonetheless. That handicap can be external, projected on to a person by family or and society, or internal, a self-image and expectation.
The “high potential” handicap is that being the high potential person actually puts you at risk of underachievement. The paradox is misunderstanding potential to be something other than what exists in the present. And it’s a very human paradox.
III
To put it in fable terms, people with high potential are at high risk of being the hare from the classic ‘tortoise and the hare’ story. The hare has the inherent speed, but the awareness of it is what causes the hare to rest easy, only for the tortoise to prevail in the end.
We don’t show a lot of sympathy for the hare in the fable of course. We characterize it as overconfident, haughty, arrogant — anthropomorphize it with many pejorative attributes. But suspend disbelief for a second — what if the hare itself was a victim of the high potential paradox?
There are real costs born by those who suffer the negative consequences of it. Foremost, a belief in high potential leads to high expectations. No surprise then that many struggle to meet their own expectations and those set by others. And as the saying goes — happiness is reality minus expectations. Success is robbed of its celebration when it still falls short of what should have been.
(But this is not say that confidence, even an amount of self-belief that others don’t see is bad. There is a subtle distinction in the mindset of someone who is tagged as “high potential” early versus someone who is self-delusionally confident despite others not labeling them as such. The latter don’t seem to bend as easily to a short-term failure or counted outcomes as the former often do. But this is a longer discussion for another essay.)
So what is the fable of this essay, this working theory? The simplest version would be to say that high potential people need to be careful not to rest on their laurels.
But even moreso, there’s very little value in projecting yourself into the future and reflecting it back onto how you think, behave, and identify in the present. The spiritually and pragmatically better strategy is to measure yourself by today and nothing more. Do things today that you will be proud of today, and let go of notions of tomorrow.
All of this of course is easier said than done, especially when narrative isn’t just set by one person. Effort must occur on multiple levels.
On a deep level, the understanding that potential is not reality is important. On a shallow level, high potential people are no different than everyone else, and they shouldn’t be treated any differently. Parents shouldn’t overemphasize potential, just like they shouldn’t overappreciate accomplishment.
Society in general should stop talking about people who “had such high potential” when they deem someone to have failed, as if it’s a consolation prize of some sort. And what about the high potentialites themselves? They should strive to be humble and appear humble too. You’re not good at anything until you demonstrate it.
When someone says “you have high potential” what you should hear is “you haven’t achieved anything yet.” It sounds harsh, something akin to what the movies suggest military school might teach you, but I think it’s right in spirit. With the correct mindset, it shouldn’t upset you, it should only motivate you to make something real out of it.
potential energy <> kinetic energy
This reads so much like the recent Nvidia's CEO talk.
Walking hard miles becomes very very tough for 'high-potential folks' - they are quick to bucket things/chores into what is beneath their doing and what is not.
Being choosy about things/tasks makes them prone to not doing enough things. In a more Indian case - people from supposedly better schools are more likely to be such. Not trying enough things - often categorising things into easy, medium and worth doing - which challenges their guts.
What often looks easy from the outside happens to be very tough! And thus goes the potential down the drain!
I sometimes feel so sorry.