She has so much potential. He could be anything. It’s meant as praise. But I’ve been thinking about what it actually means, and what it costs.
In physics, potential energy is stored energy. A boulder perched on a hill has it. A stretched rubber band has it. It’s “potential” because it has the capacity to convert into kinetic energy, into motion, into becoming. But here’s the thing: the boulder needs a slope. Without the slope, it’s just a rock sitting on flat ground. The energy is there. It has nowhere to go.
I think about talent, and by extension, potential, in the same way.
So many people carry stored energy: aptitude, intelligence, creativity, drive, and never encounter the conditions that would release it. The slope never appears. They weren’t in the right place. They didn’t know the right people. They weren’t born where the schools had books. The potential was real. It just never converted.
That’s one kind of waste.
And it’s tragic, but there’s a cleanness to it. No one blames the boulder for not rolling when there’s no slope. The door was never opened. You mourn the loss, but you don’t assign fault.
The other kind haunts me more.
This is when you had the slope. You had the opportunity, the environment, and the quiet room to work. And you lost your way. Maybe you drifted or chased something fleeting: approval, comfort, a version of success that looked right from the outside but hollowed you out from within.
Maybe you just got scared and stopped pushing. Now there’s a ghost. A version of yourself that might have been. And you know it. And you carry that.
I don’t say this from a place of judgment. I’m someone who evaluates my life decisions almost the moment I’ve made them. And I suspect most people who think deeply about their own lives do the same. The alternate path that didn’t come to fruition. The door that was open and now isn’t. You don’t always get a clear reason why. You just live with the echo.
But there’s another layer to this.
Even when you have the slope, even when you do the work, nothing is guaranteed. You can push that boulder with everything you have and watch it stop halfway down. Through no fault of yours.
How many have trained for years, worked relentlessly, taken every opportunity they were given, and never reached the base of the hill? Was the slope not steep enough? Was the timing wrong? Was it just the indifferent physics of a world that doesn’t promise arrival?
And yet the expectation doesn’t adjust for that.
To whom much is given, much is expected. The verse doesn’t come with fine print. It doesn’t say unless the market is saturated or unless you get unlucky or unless the door closes despite your best efforts.
It just says much is expected. You carry the potential. You do the work. And if it doesn’t convert, the world still looks at you like you failed to deliver on a promise that was made for you before saying your first words.
This is the weight.
Potential is a gift, yes. Would I rather not have it? Absolutely not. Still, it’s not a given; you must will it into being.
I ask sometimes: am I measuring myself against what I know I’m capable of? Or against what society says I should have become by now? The two are not the same. And I think many of us are haunted just as much by our own unused potential as by the gap between our quiet satisfaction and the world’s louder demands.
But not every day is gloomy. Most days are actually great.
Look around and realise the work itself is good. The small and big wins. The process, the expected and the unexpected. The view on the slope, the breeze that comes with motion.
Look around and see that you’re not alone. Everyone is pushing their own weight, and when your paths cross, you build. Your work together with others makes the pushing feel less like a burden and more like a life.
The boulder doesn’t care if it rolls. But we do.
To know the weight is there. To know you’re pushing. To know the slope isn’t guaranteed, and the distance isn’t either. To push anyway.
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