Maybe You’re Not Supposed to Reach Your Full Potential. Here’s What You Should Ask Instead.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Potential isn’t a destination. It’s not about reaching some predefined “best version of yourself.” It just means the capacity to become. The minute you decide what your potential is supposed to look like, you’ve also put a ceiling on it. But there’s no way to know what the future version of you will be capable of. Just because you can become capable of something doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Because every expansion comes with a cost. More responsibility. More complexity. More decisions. Instead of asking “Am I living up to my potential?” ask “What am I becoming capable of?” and “Do I actually want the life that comes with it?” What in the world is potential anyway? We say this word all the time. You have so much potential. You’re not living up to your potential. Imagine if you actually reached your full potential. Hearing people say that to me used to give me anxiety. It comes loaded with expectations. Full potential. What does that even mean? Potential, by definition, is basically the capacity to become something in the future. Something. It doesn’t say successful, wealthy, CEO, bestselling author, eight-figure entrepreneur or one of those people who wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to meditate, journal, work out and apparently solve half the world’s problems before I’ve had coffee. It just means the capacity to become. What if we’ve got it all wrong? The more I think about this, the more I wonder if we’ve gotten the whole idea backward. We talk about potential like it’s a destination. Like there is this fully evolved, wildly successful version of us somewhere out there, and our job is to hurry up and become them or else. Or else what? We wasted our life, and now we should live in regret? Sounds fun. Especially if you’re an entrepreneur, because we are REALLY good at finding ways to measure ourselves. Revenue, growth, funding, clients, followers, team size, impact. Hit one number and another magically appears. Congratulations, you made it. Here’s your new goal. Oh wait, here’s another. I work with a lot of high achievers, and I see this all the time. At some point, potential stops being exciting and starts becoming another way to measure ourselves. Am I doing enough? Should my business be bigger by now? Should I be further along? Further along than what? Or who? Sometimes it’s our parents, peers or industry. Sometimes it’s that person on LinkedIn who apparently grew their company 600%, traveled the world, spent quality time with their family and gets eight hours of sleep every night. I assume they also drink a gallon of water a day. But a lot of the time nobody else is even doing it to us. We create the standard ourselves, alongside our good friend “should.” I should be making more by now. I should have figured this out. I should be able to handle more. You don’t know what future you can handle That’s where “living up to your potential” can actually become a problem. The minute we decide what our potential is supposed to look like, haven’t we also put a ceiling on it? And how in the world would we know what that ceiling is? Think about who you were when you first started your business. That person didn’t know what you know now. You hadn’t screwed up the things you’ve screwed up yet. You hadn’t met the people you’ve met or made the hard decisions you’ve made. You became more capable. There are probably things you handle today without thinking twice that would have completely overwhelmed you five or 10 years ago. So why do we assume this version of us somehow knows what the future version will be capable of? We’re trying to predict the capacity of someone who doesn’t exist yet. Our brains naturally use previous experience to predict what comes next. But entrepreneurship asks us to imagine and build things we may have very little evidence for yet. Our brains like precedent. Entrepreneurship requires possibility. “I haven’t done this” is not the same thing as “I can’t become someone who can.” And no, I’m not saying we’re literally limitless. We have limits. I’m 5’7″, 40 years old and haven’t played competitive basketball in decades. I feel pretty comfortable taking the WNBA off my vision board. But I think we’re pretty bad at knowing which of today’s limitations will still be limitations five or 10 years from now. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should And there’s another side of potential we don’t talk about nearly as much. Just because I can become capable of something doesn’t necessarily mean I should. There’s an ancient Chinese story about a farmer whose horse runs away. Everyone tells him what terrible luck this is. His response is basically, “Maybe.” The horse returns with more horses. Great luck. Maybe. His son gets injured riding one. Terrible luck. Maybe. Then soldiers come to take the young men away to war, but because his son is injured, he isn’t taken. Good luck? Bad luck? Maybe. We do the exact opposite in business. We label everything immediately. Funding is good. Losing a client is bad. Revenue doubled? Good. Deal fell apart? Bad. But maybe. We don’t know the whole story yet. I’ve seen this play out in my own life more times than I can count. Some of the things that felt like the worst or scariest seasons, things I absolutely would not have chosen, ended up creating a path toward more freedom or peace. I’ve watched it happen with clients too. One client was making more money than he ever had. On paper, he was doing incredibly well. Except he wasn’t sleeping. His health was taking a hit, and the environment had become toxic. Leaving felt almost impossible because of how much money he was making. At one point I finally asked him, “At what point will this have cost you enough?” He had already been through a devastating accident years earlier and worked incredibly hard to rebuild financially. He was 62. Starting over wasn’t inspiring. It was terrifying. Then he didn’t have to make the decision. The company made it for him. His boss, who he considered a friend, gave him two months’ severance and let him go. “I’m 62 years old, and I’m starting over.” He thought his world was crumbling. And honestly, it sucked. This wasn’t some cute “one door closes, another opens” moment. But I could also see what staying was costing him. I told him continuing in that job may eventually have cost him his life. What felt like this enormous loss might actually be his ticket to design the rest of it. That sounds nice now. It did not feel nice then. Eventually he started asking a different question. Not just, “How do I replace this job?” but “What do I actually want the next part of my life to look like?” About three months later, he landed a deal with people he genuinely respected, making essentially the same amount with the potential to make more. Good luck? Bad luck? Maybe. I’m careful with stories like this because I don’t believe every terrible thing is secretly wonderful. Sometimes loss is just loss. But I do think we often judge a chapter before we know the rest of the story. And we do the same thing with success. We assume more is better. If I can build the $50 million company, shouldn’t I? If I can make more, grow more, carry more, shouldn’t I? Maybe. Because every expansion comes with a cost. More responsibility. More complexity. More decisions. Sometimes more freedom. Sometimes a whole lot less of it. High achievers tend to assume that if we CAN carry something, we SHOULD carry it. And people will happily let us. Funny how that works. At some point, “Look how much I can handle” is not necessarily a flex. Sometimes becoming more capable means becoming capable of putting something down. Delegating. Saying no to money. Admitting you were wrong. Letting somebody else have the better idea. Building a company that doesn’t need you in the middle of every single thing. Maybe it’s realizing that just because you CAN build something bigger doesn’t mean you actually want to. That isn’t wasted potential. What to ask yourself instead So maybe there are two better questions than “Am I living up to my potential?” “What am I becoming capable of?” “Do I actually want the life that comes with it?” The first keeps us from deciding too early what our limits are. The second keeps us from turning “potential” into yet another exhausting high-achiever treadmill. I don’t know what I’ll be capable of 10 years from now. I haven’t lived those years yet. I haven’t met everyone I’m going to meet. I haven’t learned everything I’m going to learn. I hopefully haven’t had my best idea yet. I also haven’t made all my mistakes yet, which is unfortunate but almost certainly true. Maybe the goal isn’t to become capable of everything. Maybe it’s to keep expanding what’s possible without assuming we have to choose every possibility available to us. You can become capable of building a bigger company and choose not to. You can become capable of carrying more and decide to carry less. You can become capable of doing something extraordinary and decide the ordinary parts of your life matter more. None of that is wasted potential. Maybe potential was never something we were supposed to reach in the first place. Maybe it keeps changing because we keep changing. That’s one of the weird things about entrepreneurship. You start out thinking you’re building a business and somewhere along the way realize the business has been changing you too. Sometimes in great ways. Sometimes in ways that require a therapist. Occupational hazard. So I’m not all that interested anymore in whether I’m living up to my potential. I’m more interested in what I’m becoming capable of and whether the life that comes with it is actually a life I want. Where does that lead? I don’t know yet. Maybe.