Potential. It kinda sucks
Potential for its own sake is bad
Being filled with potential is exciting.
Some folks are scared of the blank white paper in front of them. But me, with a 0.7 gel ink pen in my hand, I savour it. I love it so much, I go out and buy more. A whole ream of five hundred pages, a weighty slab of paper.
Then I think how cool would it be if I had screens on my office wall, I could envelop myself within endless digital whiteboards, so I grab some sticky notes to emulate it. A projector would be even better… wouldn’t that that'd be so cool?
And before you know it, the white piece of paper in front of me... is still blank and I'm tired of thinking, tired of all this inspiring stuff.
Thinking and getting inspired is all good and well, that’s not the problem here.
The problem I’m facing happens when getting inspired becomes my only focus, when I’m more interested in buying the paper than filling it up. It’s the wrong focus, and its a habit I want to break.
Potential is the space you have, if you don’t fill it, then regret will.
Thinking back to the projects I'm particularly proud of, I noticed they exist because I pushed myself to start nothing new until they were done. I wasn’t allowed to be distracted. No more paper until the pages I have are filled. It worked for those, now I need to make it work again.
I think this is what will work for me. One project at a time, so that I’m not constantly trying to create more space, more potential only to ignore and languish through inaction.
What about you? What’s your take on potential, do you want more of it or are you happy to capitalise on what you have now?