What We Dare to Be
is all we'll ever be.
On Potential
“One must give up his potential in order to live up to his potential.”
This is the kind of quote you hear for the first time and aren’t entirely sure whether it’s true or not. On the surface you’re met with what feel like its obvious contradictions. And at the same time, you’re left also with this feeling that there’s something deeper to be appreciated, only eluding your gaze.
Well, as it goes, the deeper things are often to be found hiding underneath the surface. There’s nowhere else to hide.
“Living Up to One’s Potential”
This is the kind of phrase that comes to mean less and less the more we try to define it. We all know what it means. Mostly in contrast to what we spend our time doing.
But to give up one’s potential...this might be worth a moment of reflection. “Giving something up” doesn’t quite feel like something you do so much as something you stop doing. It tends to feel more like the end of an action, rather than an action in and of itself.
There’s this illusion that giving something up is purely a negative or subtractive act, rather than something creative or generative. But this is where I want to plant the shovel today and see what we can uncover.
On one hand, we can give something up like a hobby or an interest, or a bad habit. But one’s potential doesn’t quite feel like it exists in this same way. It’s not as though “potential” is something you’re up to lately but might soon abandon, provided something marginally more interesting were to catch your eye.
Giving up potential feels closer to the way one might give up an opportunity, or a chance, or a possibility. It’s not the loss of what is. It’s the loss of what could be. It’s the loss of what could have been, if only it were.
And at the surface, even talking about this kind of loss feels rather deflating. Or sort of like the antithesis to a project of self-actualization. Wouldn’t we want to expand the landscape of possibility available to us? Wouldn’t we want to be capable of more rather than less?
But perhaps more important than answering these questions is noticing the sleight of hand that’s happening when you ask them.
If we can agree that potential is valuable, we might ask why. At some level potential is entirely cash-in value, meaning the chips don’t do anything for you if you leave the casino with them in your pocket. Potential is valuable only under the supposition that one intends to actualize that potential, or cash-in, so to speak.
It’s only worth something now because it’s worth something later, and eventually you’re going to get that something by trading it in. We hold onto potential to make use of it later. But this isn’t usually where we stop.
Most of us hoard potential under the comforting make-believe that we might cash it in later.
It’s sort of like that uncle who has no plans to ever go skiing, but won’t sell his skis in the off chance that he’ll need them when he does. So, they clutter up the basement alongside dozens of other “just-in-cases” awaiting a day that will never come.
And the irony is that over time the basement ceases to be used for anything else but the storage of these tokens from lives unlived and plans unmade. Anything could happen. And nothing does.
A Billion Stars
We’re tempted to believe that the combination of infinite possibility and zero probability is somehow favorable to just limited possibility.
But notice how the whole enterprise of possibility hinges on this precious moment that infinite potential collapses into singular reality.
It’s the moment that something becomes anything and gives up everything that it might otherwise have been…when the first brushstroke falls upon the canvas, and a mountain begins to take shape. Not a teacup. Not an abstract rendition of what it feels like to be anxious. But a mountain. We mourn the loss of potential without realizing that everything we’ve ever had exists at the expense of everything it could have been.
The cradle of every great work of art rests in the graveyard of a million empty canvases, under the starlight of a billion other works it will never be, because it is.
Nothing is ever truly separate from anything else. And in this way, a thing is only the way it is in contrast to everything that it is not. To be at all, is to not be something else, and at some level everything else.
In other words, if you have the potential to be anything then you are nothing. And if you are unwilling to sacrifice any of that potential then that’s all you’ll ever be.
Some people spend their whole lives staring at a blank canvas, dreaming of the many perfect paintings their life could be. But all of those lives live on the other side of that first brushstroke they won’t dare to make. Because every brushstroke we make is the death of a thousand possibilities that now won’t ever be. But that’s what makes anything, anything at all.
The death of possibility is what makes anything possible.
Each new brushstroke is the birth of a new canvas from which to begin again, on which to paint something yet unimagined, and in which to see into a world that is yet to be.
One must give up his potential in order to live up to his potential.
Go and be something. Not a “could-be” something. Dare to be.
Because what you dare to be is all you’ll ever be.
— David Kennedy