Living Up To Your Potential

Smart, accomplished, ambitious people have a quiet problem. We place incredible high expectations on ourselves and we compare ourselves to the outliers, the world beaters. This leads to feelings of being unfulfilled, under-accomplishment, and depression.

If you aren’t careful, life can feel like a never ending struggle. You never feel like you accomplished much and that hunger never gets satisfied. People will argue whether eternal striving and ambition are good are not. That’s fine.

A person on Quora asked how he could turn around a disappointing, middle aged life where he felt he had not lived up to his potential. I answered because I often feel the same way. I try to have a health attitude, but no one feels great about themselves 100% of the time. Here’s the answer:

I am 34. Married with two kids. Combat veteran. MBA. Failed startups. Investment banking. Tech. E-Commerce. Traveled to 30 countries. I’ve also been where you are, floating with no way to engage my motor. It happens every couple years and lasts several months for me. Then I go through a period where I experiment and chase too many things. Then I find one thing to focus on and I usually nail it.

Experimentation
I have felt the same way several times. I eventually got out of it by doing many experiments, collecting a lot of ideas (reading, writing, talking, watching, interacting). These experiments had a particular structure though. First, they had to peek my interest. Second, I needed some path to improvement/mastery. Third, I committed to some minimum expenditure of time and effort to get to a point where I had enough experience/results/data to do decide whether to quite or proceed to the next decision node.

Example:
I want to get good at photography. Ok, I’ll go rent or borrow a nice camera. Then, I resolve to look at cool pictures for 1 hour. I’ll decide there are 5 shots I want to recreate and I’ll spend 5 hours trying to recreate them. After that total of 6 hours, I’ll have enough experience to decide if I want to stay with photography or quit it.

Passion
Passion comes from doing things that make you feel good about yourself. This may sound shallow, but it’s not. It’s just true.

Example:
You build a house for orphans because it helps them. The fact that it helps them makes you feel good about yourself and your effort. If it didn’t make you feel good about yourself- you wouldn’t do it (or do it again). You’d do something else.

So, to find your passion, look at what you are already passionate about. Distill out what it is about these activities or causes that really attracts your time and attention. That’s all passion is. Time and attention. Same definition for focus. Same for love or any relationship. Time and attention.

Starting from Scratch
Starting again from scratch is not a bad thing. You would ramp up quickly because you have a solid foundation. If you combined your MBA, your web dev experience, and found a problem to solve- you would get passionate about it. If you saw real potential in an idea you came up with- or someone else gave to you- you would lock on.

You get passionate about ideas as they become more concrete and as you see more potential in them. If you decided to make a new photo sharing app and it had 50 users, you might not be passionate about it. If users spiked and you had 10,000 people using it- all of a sudden- very, very passionate.
Caveat that you are motivated by certain things like business success or potential monetary gains/exit. You could adapt the previous example to building libraries or dog rescue shelters or gluten-free snacks.

Be Patient and Kind to Yourself
Early 30’s is 5–10 years away from true mastery of “life” (see “Mastery” by Robert Greene). It takes a while to have the confidence, experience, network, and capital to get meaningful stuff done. Don’t be blinded by all the 20–30 year old mega-successes. Pure survivorship bias and hype machine. The vast majority of success in a given field is done by 40 year olds who hit their stride. You have time. Mathematics doesn’t apply because the breakthroughs are about new ideas and so are purely theoretical, not experiential (Mathematicians, correct me if I’m wrong- no disrespect intended. Maths are good.)

Finding Inspiration, Take Risks, Fuck It
You can find additional inspiration by quitting your job and then freelancing. Elance, Odesk- do business consulting or web dev. This tells you what the market finds interesting. This tells you where the opportunities are. This allows you to get paid. This allows you to control your hours so you have plenty of time to go on long walks or to sit and think deeply and keep a journal and a white board or whatever.
Your job isn’t going to get you wherever you want to go, so take a risk.
You can always go back to a job you don’t like, rebuild your finances, then take another shot.
We’re all going to die. Not much of this activity and angst really matters. It didn’t matter for the people who died this year, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago.
It’s going to be ok. Keep plugging away.
Don’t use lack of passion as a crutch to be inactive.
Passion comes through activity, not thought. It comes through action.
Good luck. You’ll be fine. You’re introspective enough to realize there is a problem- so you’ll solve it.

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