The Potential Pitfalls of Potential

When you have a thought which has the potential to become a fully fledged idea, you’re often full of energy and excitement at the possibilities that open up. In my experience there’s a kind of buzzingness, a dance of thought. A zapping tingle. You feel the horizons opening up. In those moments it’s like you are both the horizon and the person looking at it. Everything envelops like a mini universe is being created.

You feel the potential.

It’s an amazing place to be. Because we’re so innately connected to our intuition in these moments. It’s as if you and this idea are one and the same. And so you follow that feeling. And it unravels and becomes more and more and more. And soon a whole world exists. Soon plans are made. Soon, becomes a place you stay.

The allure

Potential is defined as: having the capacity to develop, achieve, or become something in the future.

Potential is a tricky knot. It is an incredibly useful state to realise ideas, but stay too long and its subtle skill at pulling you out of the present - where the real work gets done - takes over.

That is also why it is so tantalising. Potential is a bit like the Northern Lights. If you’re ever lucky enough to witness them, the Northern Lights dance and flicker in arrays of colours that do not belong in the sky; from emerald green to glowing red. Their otherworldliness can hold you there in a trance, in what seems like forever.

Until they disappear. And you’re left with the landscape around you, the same as it was before they appeared. That doesn’t invalidate the experience. Those lights are real. And the emotions and possibilities you feel are real too. But when that disappears, what happens to that idea you had?

Reality sucks

Bringing an idea into reality is irrationally archaic and slow. This is where the rubber meets the road. Potential on the other hand is illogical, it thrives on being kept alive in an abstract space. Reality is a bit like the gravity being turned on. Everything thuds to the floor and you have to figure out where things landed.

It’s a place full of problems that require navigation. By keeping things in the world of potential, you can edit and switch them as you like. A bit like when you arrive at a comeback to someone in the shower, days after the opportunity to say it has passed. In your mind, you won. But in reality, where the chat happened, nothing has actually changed.

Reality also cannot be controlled. Once your idea hits it, chaos often ensues. Part of learning to not stay in an abstract headspace for too long is accepting that chaos is actually part of the process.

Contacting reality

People can become stuck in potential for years, thinking progress is being made. Like two sides of the same coin, potential and action are both needed to realise an idea to its fullest. How we can think of that is twofold:

• In potential, an idea exists, free from burdens.
• In reality, we face the hurdles and issues that actually create the path for an idea to be realised.

But a coin needs two sides to be a coin. Without the energy of potential, ideas can be flat. We need to see that road, before the rubber hits, to invert the earlier saying. It’s necessary to dance with thoughts to bring them to life. But if we stay there, we end up driving a very appealing imaginary road. With nothing to show for it. Reality therefore is a tool to be used in shaping work and ideas.

Making something means accepting that something won’t work. That a sentence won’t make sense. That it might look like nothing else. Or a joke isn’t funny. Bringing an idea into reality can often be a let down.

In the abstract world of potential, the idea you have is commercially, artistically, financially successful. It has no compromise or real edges that form its own personality. It hasn’t yet had to survive contact with anything outside your own imagination.

The sooner you can close the gap between crystal clear idea in your head, and shaping it in reality, the sooner it can become something real that people can react to, use, enjoy, connect with. At the very least, be a ‘Version 1’ that exists.

Spending potential

Potential is a funny thing because really, what even is it? Your mind seeing round corners? A utopia of thought easy to get lost in? Or a necessary part of the experience of life, to see further than the four walls around us?

Potential, it could be said, is energy, and if we choose to expend it in the right way, by using it to close that gap between idea and contacting reality with it, that surge can be redirected into the scaffolding of something great. And scaffolding that looks half finished but is holding together in the real world beats sketches on paper of places that could have existed (though buildings that were never built are very cool and for another piece).

Placing something from inside your head to outside of it is to take a risk, a chance on your own work. Even if minuscule, we are often obscured from the meaning of just how important that is. Then reality can respond to it. And guess what? You can respond back.

Thank you for reading Operating Self.

I release articles once a day at the moment as I am doing the 100 articles in 100 days challenge.

My other current goal is to get one stranger from the internet (that is someone who does not know me IRL) to buy me a coffee. If you want that to be you (and you’d kind of be the first paying subscriber in a way, which is pretty cool) you can buy me a coffee here. More coffee means more caffeine means more ideas means more articles.

Thank you and I hope this piece, and what’s on this site, helps/inspires/creates something for you.