Becoming Who You Are: Why Don’t Most People Reach Their Potential?

Becoming Who You Are: Why Don’t Most People Reach Their Potential?

There are two states of being: surviving and thriving. For evolution to work, surviving isn't enough; we also have to thrive so we can provide and nurture offspring. We have an innate need to satisfy the requirements of survival, yes, but we also have a deeper desire to make something of ourselves beyond that so we can thrive in the world. And the latter is what makes us feel like we are living up to our potential, to our true self. As Abraham Maslow said, "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be."

Due to the sheer complexity of the average modern environment, one that is so different from what we initially evolved for, our lives have increasingly moved from managing ourselves in the physical realm of the body, moderating its survival, to the emotional realm of consciousness, moderating its sanity. Our media devices fill us with more information than we could hope to absorb and comprehend in multiple lifetimes; some of it purely false and even more of it simply useless.

In order to truly thrive and reach our potential, we must differentiate and integrate. Differentiation is the process of discovering individual values, while integration is the narrative or meaning that drives those values into day-to-day actions. There are many people who are integrated but not differentiated, and their problem is mostly that they haven't really done the work to expose themselves to the complexities surrounding them. Then, there are people who are differentiated but not integrated. These people have exposed themselves to the different corners of the world, picked out the values that represent their individuality, but they have a hard time making it all cohere.

The only person who can constantly look out for us is the person we see in the mirror. We must take the initiative to find the answers and have the courage to incorporate them into our lives. One of the great justices of the modern world, however, is the democratization of information. Through the internet, libraries, and other sources, abundance is a gift, but only if we learn to harness its potential. All of the answers are already out there and immediately available, waiting for someone to take the initiative to find them and then have the courage to incorporate them into their life.

Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past

If we abide by the common definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and if Montaigne was right — he was — that philosophy is the art of learning to die, then living wisely is the art of learning how you will wish to have lived. We will lose everything we love, including our lives — so we might as well love without fear, for to fear a certainty is wasted energy that syphons life of aliveness. In their fear of death, those living fear life itself, a life that is doomed to die. The mode in which life knows and perceives itself is worry. Thus, the object of fear comes to be fear itself. Even if we should assume that there is nothing to fear, that death is no evil, the fact of fear (that all living things shun death) remains. Fearlessness is what love seeks. Love as craving is determined by its goal, and this goal is freedom from fear. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future. Hence, the only valid tense is the present, the Now.

Viktor Frankl, known for his book "Man's Search for Meaning," believed that incorporating music and nature into our lives can bring us closer to our true potential. A century after Nietzsche proclaimed with his nihilistic grandiosity that "without music life would be a mistake" and a century after Walt Whitman observed with his life-affirming soulfulness that music is the profoundest expression of nature, we can understand the importance of these elements in our lives. It is not only through our actions that we can give life meaning — insofar as we can answer life's specific questions responsibly — we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings.

One of the saddest tendencies in our present culture is an indignant intolerance for the basic humanity of being human. People of the past are harshly judged by the standards of the present (which their own difficult lives helped establish), and people of the present are harshly judged by impossible (and hypocritical, in the full context of any judger's life) standards of uniform perfection across all regions of private and public existence. The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness, mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful. Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.

James Baldwin once said, "It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within." We must be clear-headed about human beings, for we are still each other's only hope. Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible because we save each other some of the time.

Rachel Carson, the acclaimed author of "Silent Spring," emphasizes the loneliness of creative work. Writing is a lonely occupation at best. A writer cuts themselves off from all others and confronts their subject alone. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening. But there are also rewards that are rich and peculiarly satisfying. Only the person who knows and is not afraid of loneliness should aspire to be a writer.

In most cases of people actually talking to one another, human communication cannot be reduced to information. The message not only involves, it is a relationship between speaker and hearer. The medium in which the message is embedded is immensely complex, infinitely more than a code: it is a language, a function of a society, a culture, in which the language, the speaker, and the hearer are all embedded. Creation is an act. Action takes energy. Sound is dynamic. Speech is dynamic — it is action. To act is to take power, to have power, to be powerful. Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners. This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things.

Bertrand Russell, the renowned philosopher and mathematician, believes that as our lives grow shorter, we should broaden our interests and merge our lives into the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

What we see is never raw reality, pure as spacetime — what we see is our interpretation of reality, filtered through the lens of our experience and our conditioned worldview. Always, the way we look at things shapes what we see; often, the lens we mistake for a magnifying glass turns out to be a warped mirror — we see others not as they are but as we are. It is a service to reality to see with greater charity of interpretation. It is a service to other human beings to look at them, confused and self-concerned as they may be, with the eyes of love and to resist for as long as possible letting the cataract of judgment occlude our view. To place the wish to understand above the wish to be right — and to see, with Thich Nhat Hanh, that "understanding is love's other name" — that is the greatest gift we can give one another.

In conclusion, to reach our true potential and live a life worth living, we must strive to thrive rather than just survive. We must differentiate and integrate, exposing ourselves to the complexities of the world and incorporating our individual values into our actions. We must embrace the loneliness of creative work, understanding that it is in the solitude that true creativity flourishes. We must have the courage to love without fear and to be clear-headed about human beings, realizing that we are each other's only hope. And as our lives grow shorter, we must broaden our interests and merge our lives into the universal life, finding meaning in the connections we make with the world around us.

Actionable Advice:

1. Take the initiative to find answers and incorporate them into your life. Embrace the abundance of information and harness its potential.

2. Embrace the loneliness of creative work. Realize that true creativity flourishes in solitude and don't be afraid to be alone with your