When You Feel Like You've Wasted Your Potential

When I was a child, I had a beautiful singing voice. It moved people. I could see it in their faces as I landed each note and articulated phrases beyond my years.

Grownups delivered praise that could make a kid drunk on possibility. And they imprinted their own dreams and desires on me in a way that made us all high on potential.

But our collective buzz did not last. As it turned out, my love for arias, jazz standards and even my folk favorites did not outweigh my disdain for the time commitment, discipline and practice it would take to improve. Halfway through my freshman year of college, I gave up all classes and academic connections to music in search of new answers.

This was not a popular decision with family and teachers. In the end they did support me, but for years after this moment, talk about my wasted potential crept into conversation. While I knew that was not my path, I didn’t have a clear sense of what my path would be—and so I internalized some of that fear.

What if that was my only gift and I squandered it?

What if it’s too late to get it back?

Years later, I’m confident that if I would have continued to pursue that dream, it would have been for someone else. It would have been for the recognition and not the love—which is a tough pill to swallow in a field where the hours are long, and the odds of success are low.

Beyond my personal journey, I’ve come to know that the idea of potential is an out-of-date construct. An old school bullshit that hinders the people who believe they have it as much as the people who believe they don’t.

Whether you think you’ve got it or not—know that the idea of wasted potential is simply one of thousands of thoughts you have a day.

It is not action.

It is not growth.

It is not momentum.

It’s stagnant, trapped in amber—fear—that there may not be more out there in this life for you. You get to choose whether to believe it or to move forward and do.