What about your potential?

Most people tend to go through life doing what I call sandbagging, just doing the minimum that is needed in order to survive. But then, they tend to complain about their lot in life, about how it is so much less than it could be.

Each and every single one of us has greatness within us. It is not something that we have to learn or something that we need to cultivate. It is there inside just waiting to get out. If every person stopped letting fear run their lives and making them play small the world would be a much different place.

Psychologist William James, put it this way. “Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and behaves below his optimum".

Note here that he was talking about not a specific person, but people on the whole. All of us.

And such eloquent verbiage. Powers which we habitually fail to use. That makes it sound, and rightly so, that we have great talents and skills that we could easily use to make our daily lives so much better, if only we chose to.

If this is true, why don't we? Basically, the answer is fear. We know what life is like right now and even though it may not be pleasant, as long as we don't do anything new, it will likely stay relatively the same. We fear what we don't know, even if there is every likelihood and indication that the change would be for the better.

You would think that the fear would be of failure. But nine times out of ten what we fear is success. See, we already know about failure, it is an old friend, one that we have spent quite a bit of time with. But wildly fantastic success, now that would be a completely new adventure, into a scary unknown future.

Failure can be controlled even guaranteed. Success can too, but its hard to understand someone describing the light to you, if you have been blind your whole life. Just as a person who has lived their whole life with excruciating pain every single moment may want to wake up one day without being in pain, it is not something that they can truly understand much less imagine.

But who are the people that do manage to use these powers and abilities that lie dormant within all of us? Celebrities, artists, scientists, athletes, the rich and famous, successful people everywhere. They are the less than one percent of the population that conquer their fear of success, and fear of the unknown. The ones who pull back the curtain and let their full light shine out onto the rest of the world.

They are the people that choose to stop sandbagging and decide to start letting their awesomeness out. They are the people who start giving one hundred percent all the time and not holding back.
Join the one percent. Trust me.

You will be amazed by just how much more you can achieve than your ever thought or believed was possible. No one can say what your true potential really is. But for most of us, it is many hundreds maybe even thousands of times what have already achieved.