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what do you need the concept of personal "potential" for? if you wanna invest in a person, you're not really interested in what the *maximum* is they could achieve under ideal conditions, you're interested in what the most probable level of achievement is and—for yourself? >>
do you need to know what *your* "potential" is? is it useful to know how much you could theoretically achieve? does your "potential" have any bearing on what you'll actually achieve? let alone—does your *knowledge* of the potential have any bearing on what you'll achieve? >>
everything that's not forbidden by the laws of physics is theoretically possible thus if you invent an idea of a "potential" for yourself, will it not be necessarily smaller than what you could theoretically achieve? will this idea not hobble you? is it not one-sided? >>
and how could you even estimate your "potential"? the future is a foreign country and your future self, ten years from now, an alien, with different values, different goals, different life—what could you know about what they can do? and twenty years from now? thirty? >>
and people look back and are like, "oh woe, i've wasted my potential" you haven't wasted anything, the potential was never real you're imagining a counterfactual in which you're a different person & measuring yourself against that you're exactly where you were going to be >>
looking into the future, it makes sense to estimate how projects will do: is it worth investing time into this? how likely is the outcome? but estimating how *you* will do? what for? there's no question if it's worth investing in yourself—it's the only thing you can do >>
"well if i don't have the potential to get this big thing, then i can save myself the trouble and do this small thing instead" you're going to fucking die! none of this matters! the score at the end of your life is 0, no matter what! what are you saving your efforts for? >>
just follow the dharma, man. develop a nose for it does it matter where it takes you? the dharma tells you to do this or that thing. is it the first step of some big ambitious outcome? who knows? might be life is wild >>
if you think in terms of some pre-determined "potential", you're always setting yourself up for disappointment, if it doesn't work out, or hobbling yourself, if you underestimate what's possible or probably both you just can't fucking know, man
@mechanical_monk And yet imagination is a necessary (through insufficient) condition for achieving something. If one cannot even *imagine* it (i.e. consider oneself to have a certain potential), then one certainly won't achieve it.