Having Potential can be a trap

0:00 Why "Having Potential" Can Be a Dangerous Compliment One of the most dangerous compliments people can give you is if they say you have so much potential. It sounds like praise, but if you listen carefully, it is usually a warning because potential is one of the most deceptive things that you can possess. It makes you feel rich while you are actually broke. 0:16 There's always that one person in your school, top of the class teachers loved him. Everybody said this one is going to go far and then life happened years later. You check on where they are and it doesn't match the prophecies. Meanwhile, the average student, the one that nobody bet on, somehow build something real and it always confuses people. 0:34 How did that happen? It's simple. One lived on potential, the other lived on reality and action. Potential is dangerous because it gives you credit for work you have not done yet. It creates a false sense of progress. You start to confuse being capable with actually doing. 0:51 You start to confuse understanding with executing, dreaming with building. And the worst part is, people reward you for it. They say you're smart, you're gifted, you're special, so you get addicted not to winning, but to the idea that you could win. Potential, something that is supposed to represent how great you can become, becomes the reason that you don't become great. 1:12 Welcome to the trailer for podcast. And today, let's talk about the dangerous side of having potential. 1:37 But there's one thing that I potentially hope you have the potential to do, and that is to like subscribe, comment or share this video. This community can only grow if you do that. And if you like the kind of stuff that we're talking about, please like share, subscribe. Let's move on. Potential comes in multiple traps and we're going to explore them one by one. 1:54 The first trap is the trap of delay. When you have potential, you always feel like you have time. You feel like you can start later, that you can always figure it out, that you just need to find the right moment. But potential has a silent enemy, time. Time never negotiates with potential. 2:11 It expires whether you act on your potential or not. But because you have the potential, you lie to yourself that you have time to execute. The example of that is the child prodigy curse. It's something that psychologists have observed for years. Gifted children often struggle later in life simply because things came easy early. 2:31 So they never built the discipline, the consistency, the tolerance for failure. And then life starts introducing difficulty and they collapse, not because they were not capable, far from it, but because they never trained their capacity. 2:44 How Identity and Overthinking Paralyze Your Potential The second trap is identity. When potential becomes your identity, you stop being someone who does things. You become someone who can or could do things. You become a wannabe or a wanna do and now you have something to protect your image. 3:00 Because the moment you try and fail, you are no longer full of potential. You are just like everyone else. So what do you end up doing? You avoid action, you procrastinate, and you stay in planning mode. Because as long as you never fully try, your potential remains intact. It remains untested, unbroken, but also unreal. 3:18 This happens especially with footballers or young musicians or actors and actresses. They do one feature and everybody talks about how great they're going to become, how they are the next best thing. That actually paralyzes them because they are now too afraid to try and fail. 3:35 They end up not trying at all and ultimately failing. The third trap is the trap of overthinking. People with high potential often see too much. Too many parts, too many options, too many outcomes. So instead of moving, they freeze. Analysis becomes paralysis. 3:50 You start optimizing for a life that you have not even started yet. But in the real world parallel when you look at the difference between inventors and marketers. Nikola Tesla created world changing technology but he died broke. Thomas Edison built systems and companies and narratives and he became a symbol. 4:09 One of them had immense potential and was a brilliant genius. The other knew how to execute and to package and to push. History decided to remember the winner. And the winner was the guy that pushed his product despite not having the potential. 4:24 And that guy was Thomas Edison. But farther away from that unused potential has a very dark side. It doesn't stay neutral. It turns into other feelings, frustration, jealousy, bitterness, because deep down you know what you're capable of. 4:40 It's those people that you find looking down on other musicians or other talented people because they know they can do better. And it is true, they can. Every day they don't act, they build evidence against themselves. That is where they start saying I could have been this guy, but because of that thing, I could have been the next guy. 4:57 But because of that thing, the potential was there, but they never acted on it. And that led them to feelings of darkness and resentment. I could have been is one of the saddest sentences in the world. There is an internal conflict that happens with people that have potential. 5:16 There's a war inside of their heads. One voice says you are capable of greatness. The other voice says, well, if you are, then why haven't you done anything with it? And instead of resolving that tension, most people, they just escape it. They find distractions, they find comfort, they find endless consumption, anything to avoid confronting the gap between who they are and who they could be. 5:36 There are those guys that you knew had the capacity to be great, but now they're addicted to drugs or partying or any other slew of vices that they could pick up. 5:46 Six Steps to Convert Potential into Real-World Execution And many of them failed to sit down and ask themselves the question, which is, what do you do if you have potential? First of all, if you have potential, stop respecting your potential. It has done nothing for you and it will do nothing for you. But instead, learn to respect the execution. 6:03 Learn to respect the journey that it takes to achieve your dreams. Learn to respect the amount of work that is required to cross the finish line #2 learn to shrink your ambition into action. Do not chase the big vision, chase the next step. Potential dies in abstraction. 6:20 As long as it is not clear where the next step is, where the next milestone is, you actually can't move. Potential only survives in movement #3 learn to build proof and not promises. Your life should have evidence, not ideas, plans, wishes, hopes, intentions, evidence. 6:39 Small wins will always compound faster than big dreams. So instead of saying I'm going to be the best musician in the world, and then you say I have the potential to be the best musician in the world. You start off by going and playing at that nightclub, going and performing at that show, putting your music on streaming platforms, being OK with having 100 people watching your videos until such a point when you are the greatest. 7:02 If you start off by chasing the greatness and you don't build evidence around it, you almost will never get there and then #4 you must get addicted to finishing. Most people with potential are great at starting things, but they are terrible at finishing them. Strain yourself to close loops because finished work is what changes your life. 7:22 Not imagined or half done work #5 you must lower the cost of failure. If you are afraid to act because failure threatens your identity, you have to remove the pressure. Be OK to do things badly. Be OK to do things publicly. Do these things things anyway because the lower the cost of failure is to you, the higher the chances of you actually succeeding. 7:44 Number six, choose a lane and commit. You don't need the perfect path, you just need a path. You just need to start. Clarity comes from movement, not thinking. Potential is not real at all, execution is. 7:57 The Psychology of Potential, Regret, and Execution There are millions of people walking around with talent, intelligence, and ideas, but the world does not reward what you could be. It only responds to what you become. The real question is not do you have potential? The real question is how much longer are you going to let your potential sit there and used? 8:16 There's a strange phase in life where everything works in your favor without you necessarily doing too much. You are young, you are sharp, you understand things. Quickly people start noticing. They say you're different, you're going to be amazing, you're going to be something and without realizing it, something dangerous happens inside of you. 8:32 They start rewarding you before you've actually built anything. I'll give you a journey through multiple experiments that shed a light on the very, very many dangers of potential. The first illusion is early applause. There was an experiment where people were asked to evaluate others. 8:47 Some were described as high potential, others high achievers. At first, everyone preferred the ones with potential. It felt exciting. It felt like they are placing a bet on the future. But then time passed and those who stayed as potential, they started losing their shine. Because potential is attractive. 9:03 But when it becomes repetitive and the potential is all you are seeing, at some point people stop asking what you could be. They start asking what you have become. And then there is the identity psychology. Imagine growing up being told you are gifted. They don't tell you you're hard working or consistent. 9:21 They say you're gifted. You learn something subtle that things should and must come easy. And because they come easy, it means you must be special. If things become hard, it means something is wrong. So when life eventually challenges you, you don't lean in. 9:36 You step back. Because trying and failing threatens the very thing that you are praised for. You begin to protect your identity instead of building your life. And then the other one is the experiment of too many doors. Here's another twist. You're capable. 9:51 So you see many options. You could do this, you could do that, or you could do something else entirely. And suddenly what looks like an advantage becomes a weight. Because choosing one path always means ignoring others. But because you're capable of so many things, you hesitate. You research, you plan, you think. 10:07 And the more you think, the harder it becomes to move. Not because you're necessarily stuck, but because you can see too much. But when you look at all the great people, they started out with one thing and did it really well, and then they did the others afterwards. Pick a lane and 1st be great at it before you can do others. 10:27 This is something else most people never notice. Having a goal is easy. Saying I want to be successful, I want to build something, I want to change my life. Those things are easy, but they're not actions, they are wishes. The people who move forward, they do something different. They decide when, how and what exactly they will do. 10:44 Not someday, not eventually, but specifically. Because without structure, intention will always ways dissolve. There's a long standing belief that talent is everything, that some people are just born better. But when scientists actually studied high performers, they found something uncomfortable. 11:01 The best were not just talented, they were trained relentlessly. They practiced deliberately, repeatedly, with feedback, while others simply relied on their ability. They build systems. The difference between Cristiano Ronaldo and Adele Tarabt was simply because of the discipline. 11:18 Over time, the disciplined ones passed the gifted ones, not because they were better, but because they kept going. Now there is a slow death that you die if you don't realize this, because you don't wake up one day and you realize you wasted your potential. 11:36 It happens very quietly, very slowly. You get comfortable. You start saying things like I'll do it, I'll get to it. I know I can do it if I want to, I just need time. And slowly that becomes your normal. You adapt to almost doing something. You live in a space where nothing is terrible, but nothing is meaningful either. 11:54 Then years pass and something changes. You start thinking less about what you can become and more about what you didn't become. That's when it becomes regret, and that regret hits very differently because it's not about failure, it's about absence. The business you never started, the skill you never built, the version of you that never showed up. 12:13 And deep down you know it was not because you lacked ability, it was because you never used it. So even from all the scientific experiments, when you strip it of its big words, it says something simple. You were rewarded too early, so you protected your image. 12:30 You had too many options, so you avoided choosing. You feared failing, so you never fully tried. You relied on your talent and ignored discipline. And slowly, without noticing, you became somebody with potential instead of somebody with proof. 12:46 The difference between people that make it and people that don't is not divine capacity or divine greatness. The best use of your potential is having the potential to execute on your naturally given abilities. 13:02 Thank You for Listening: Train of Thought Credits My name is Hart Faizan, and I'm your conductor on the Train of Thought podcast. This episode is directed by Latifah and edited by Akura and Zaidan and produced by Wally Ogidon. With a great special thanks to the entire Train of Thought team, from all of us to you. 13:17 I'll see you in the next train.