The Power Pit of Potential

When I walked onto campus, I had yet to acquire the inevitable freshman fifteen around my waist. Yet I was already too big for my britches. I arrived on a full tuition scholarship to play drums, and I was fairly certain my presence would change the course of college life forever.

I knew this because I brought with me something more powerful than talent, more promising than scholarships.  I had . . . potential.  I loved my potential, and I carried it everywhere.  I’d been carting it around since the 6^th grade, nurtured by well-intentioned teachers, preachers, and family members.

That all ended when I met Dr. Ed Jones. As the Director of the UNA Pride of Dixie Marching Band, Dr. Jones sported a handful of eccentricities. Among them was a take-no-prisoners pragmatism wrapped in a flaky crust of common-sense colloquialisms and served with a gravy-thick, south-Alabama accent.

He was like Glenn Miller meets Foghorn Leghorn.

On that first day, he told me something I will never forget, largely for its emasculating effect on me as an over-confident young upstart with delusions of grandeur.

“Listen up, you confound namby pambies,” he poured out in our first rehearsal.  “Don’t come in here thinking you’re something special.  Sure, you got potential.  But potential just means you ain’t done nothin’ yet.”

And THAT’s when I started working on that freshman fifteen.

Potential? Oh yeah, I got it. In fact, I’m buried in it.
So I’m at Barnes and Noble, and I see the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And it occurs to me that perhaps one of those seven habits should be actually READING the book once you buy it.  The problem is that I love owning books.  I love knowing they’re on my shelf. I love knowing I can just pick them up and read them anytime I want.  I fact, I plan to read many of them one day.  Furthermore, I plan to be very smart as a result of reading them one day.  They create for me potential beyond my wildest dreams.

And so I have amassed a small library that is actually more like a crypt, or rather a great big pit of potential.  This could be valuable one day, kind of like black crude from Jed Clampett’s back forty. But that day never comes.  Instead, I sit in my pit and ponder its potential.

And I’ve always been this way, a prince of potential – most likely to succeed at being most likely to succeed.

So, you come here often?
Oh, come on. It can’t just be me.  Surely some of you are also princes of potential.  Does any of this sound familiar?

1. You spent so much time dreaming about college that you totally missed high school.
2. You started six projects last year, and didn’t finish any of them.
3. Your current job is just until you can do what you REALLY want to do, if you just knew what that was.
4. You’d rather day dream about who you could be than look in the mirror at who you actually are.

That’s what it is to be a prince of potential.

The problem with potential is . . .
Potential makes you hopeful, prideful, and it gives you a false sense of already being ahead of the game, even superior to others.  Potential tells you that you don’t have to try.  Good things will come to you, because you have potential.

But potential breaks down when the guy next to you, who wasn’t supposed to even graduate, finds his place among the truly successful people of the world.  It breaks down when you start realizing that you’ll never be the absolute BEST at anything, because no one really ever is.  Then you start to wonder what your potential was ever worth.  Those well-intentioned affirmations on which you once hung your future are now folding up like that load of laundry when I forgot to add the fabric sheet.  That’s when you know for a fact that potential has passed you by.

Jane, get me off this crazy thing!
So how do we move past the false promises that potential can place in our way?  How do we climb out of the pit?  The answer is simpler than we might think.  We go back to square one, to the beginning.  We determine what it is we want to be.  For some of us, potential is (if nothing else) a great marker or indicator of where we might devote our time and our efforts. But the reality is that we have to start somewhere.  And while potential is a lousy barometer for success, it’s actually a fairly good indicator of one’s strengths and talents.

Tales of a fourth grade slugger slug
When I was a kid, I played softball.  I was slow, overweight, and lacked any degree of raw athletic ability.  But I could spit real well. And that came in handy.  My real problem was hitting.  I tried to kill everything.  No ball was too high, too outside, or too short to keep me from trying to de-thread it with my aluminum hammer.  Consequently, I struck out a lot.  Too many swings at too many balls, all of them ill-advised.

Then I had breakfast at “The Club.” Unfortunately, it was twenty-five years later and far too late to affect my softball game.  But it was helpful all the same.  I sat with my boss across from a Welsh gentleman who had invited us as his guests to one of Florida’s more exclusive golf resorts.  The man was the epitome of success. He even had the cool accent (not unlike Dr. Jones.)

What left an indelible impression on me that day was not the fine linens, the incredible scenery (I’m almost certain I saw Tiger Woods), or even the cool little breakfast quiches in the filo cups.  Instead, it was what the man said.  “Brandon, I tell every young man I meet this same thing.  So hear me, please.  Choose what it is that you do, and do it well.  One, maybe two things, but no more.  That is all. Focus on those things, and you will go far.”

Like my frustrated softball coach, this man was telling me that I can’t swing at every ball, and I can’t stand there letting every pitch whiz by either.  To climb out of the pit of potential and actually do something, I have to choose.  I have to find my pitch and take my swing.  If I hit, I hit. If I don’t, I wait for the next one to come my way. I only need one, maybe two, but no more. Focus.

The Climb

To move, we have to start putting one foot in front of the other.  The next step, therefore, is to simply act.  If like me you tend to buy books and stick them on the shelf, then by all means take one down and read it, cover to cover. Just because a cat has her kittens in the oven, that doesn’t make them biscuits.  Books on our shelves will not make us smarter until we READ them.  So let’s take down that book and read it, one page at a time. Let’s pick one thing we’ve been putting off and do it. It might just make us want to do more.  Wait, is that daylight I see ahead?

Um, dude? I’m still here in the pit.

To take a “next step,” there has to be a “first” step.  But a pit is dark.  We can’t see, so we don’t know.  And if we don’t know, we won’t go.  Put more succinctly, where there is a lack of knowledge, there is fear.  Where there is fear, there is inaction.

How many home improvement jobs have we let sit around for months or even years only because we weren’t really sure how to begin?  The job was too big, or so it seemed.  Our garages were cluttered with all kinds of potential just wasting away. But then, we started.  Just started.  We asked a guy.  We watched a video. Then we said (to ourselves of course – never to our wives), “Wow, if I had known THAT’s all it took, I would have done this thing months ago.”

So how do we turn on the light and start climbing out of the pit? We plug the holes in our brain.  We eliminate the lack of knowledge.  Knowledge leads to action which usually leads to more action.  And that’s when potential becomes reality. To find our way out of the pit of potential, we have to see where we’re going.  The first step, the one we usually miss, is to find the answers, to fill the gaps in our knowledge and our understanding.

Potential can be a great catalyst for success.  It moves us, gets us going. But it’s a thin veneer of motivation that soon wears and exposes the eternal truth so poignantly expressed by the great Dr. Ed Jones . . .

“All potential means is that you ain’t done nothin’ yet.”

Well, Dr. Jones, I just wrote this post.  I did something. And that’s a step in the right direction. So thanks for that.

With appreciation,

A Confound Namby Pamby