Potential

Tonight's post is something that I think we all consider at some point in our lives and something that I have considered in part before, but never to the extent that I considered it today. If you don't care about back story and just want to get to the philosophical stuff, you can skip to paragraph 4.

Let me start out by saying that I love my roommates. We have crazy, random debates/arguments all the time(always in jest; we never actually fight with each other). Usually these are pretty pointless and nonsensical. They revolve around things such as whether one of us could be simultaneously Spider-Man and Batman, who would win in a fight between Spider-Man and Flash or whether or not Spider-Man's web parachute would really work as it appears to (considering the fact that it is little more than a mesh net made of webbing but seems to have the air resistance of a fully fledged parachute). In other words, we're nerds. These debates often require a high level of suspension of disbelief (for those of you unfamiliar with this term, read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief. We throw out whatever amount of reality we feel is not required to validate our argument, and this tends to vary greatly for each one of us. For this reason, we rarely come to a conclusion as to who is "right" or "wrong" or who "won." But they are fun nevertheless and it usually ends up with either all of us laughing hysterically at how ridiculous we are or else one or more of us being somewhat frustrated with the others' inability to see the flaws in their argument and the merit in our own (this rarely lasts for more than 5 minutes). All in all, it's a good time.

Once in a while, though, we have actual discussions about meaningful topics that spur actual thought and give way for further contemplation and revelation. Such an instance occurred for me today. I was chatting with one of my roommates on Facebook and we were poking fun at each other. We were talking about a friend of ours that goes to BYU and how we wish he could/would attend Dixie so that we would see him more often. We joked about the fact that he was probably way smarter than us and I may have somewhat jokingly called my roommate dumb (what can I say? I'm kind of a jerk). He rebutted by asking me (if I considered myself so smart) why I wasn't "living up to my full potential" (by attending BYU). This led to me trying to weasel a response out of him about whether or not he felt like attending a more prestigious university was a requirement in helping one reach their full potential. I think he felt like he'd hit a nerve with me and he didn't want to spark a debate, so he avoided the question. I bore no ill will by his jab at me, but I was curious to know his thoughts about the matter. It is something I have considered a few times and it got me thinking more in depth about it.

And so these two longer-than-necessary(and probably not even entirely necessary at all) back stories lead me to the topic of my pondering today. How do we know if we are "living up to our full potential?" What is the ideal circumstance for this? Obviously certain situations or circumstances are going to help us more than others. BYU is undoubtedly a more prestigious and meritorious university than Dixie is. Does that mean that it is undeniably a better environment for growth? Although I always planned to attend BYU, personal experiences and revelation led me to attend Dixie instead. Does that mean that I wouldn't have grown as well at BYU as I have at Dixie? Would it have been too much for me to handle? Or could I have gone either way and grown equally as much but maybe in different areas? These are things that I have thought about often in the past 3 1/2 years. They are very difficult to answer because it requires a lot of unknowns and what-if scenarios. Ultimately, I don't regret my decision to go to Dixie in the least. I have loved the people I have met and the experiences that I've had and have seen a lot of personal growth over the past few years that I never could have anticipated.

(I'm still processing this part, so it may not come out the right way, but hopefully it makes some sense). This begs the question "How do we discover the perfect circumstance for our own growth at this time in our lives?" Life is constantly changing, and although something may be right for us now, it may not still be so 6 months from now. At what point can we decide that we've learned what we needed to and seek to move on to the next phase of life? We certainly don't want to stay in the same circumstance too long, when there is opportunity for growth elsewhere. But we also don't want to be so focused on the next opportunity that we let this one be wasted. We have to learn to take things as they come.

The other unfortunate thing that we do is not pacing ourselves in working towards developing that potential. Sometimes we hit a point where we are overly motivated (yes, I feel that this is possible) to do good and work to be the best we can. We get into a mode where we notice everything (or at least a lot of things) that we can and want to improve about ourselves and we try to do them all at once. This works for about a week and a half. Then we hit the wall, where we can't maintain all these new good things that we're not used to doing and we make the mistake of slowly but surely giving up on most or all of them. This leads us to the other extreme of not doing anything to improve and just keeping the status quo (or worse, letting ourselves drop even some of the things that we were already doing well at).

There is a fine balance of continuing on in what we are doing and adding that one or two things to the list that will help us to be a little better. This can be frustrating and disappointing as well. We feel like there is more that we could and should be doing, but we don't want to overextend ourselves, as we have likely done in the past. We also often find ourselves not keeping up with everything even when we are only focusing on one or two things. This can be discouraging to think that we can't even handle a little bit. But it is the consistently working at the one or two things, even though we will struggle, that will help us to improve. The hardest thing about reaching our potential is that it is such a slow process, marked with frequent stumbling and coming up short. It is hard to notice improvement right away, especially when the improvement we make can be so easily lost of we allow ourselves to become lackadaisical shortly thereafter.

So when it comes down to it, there are a few things to remember about potential:

• There is no single situation or circumstance that will provide the best environment for reaching your potential. What may work for someone else will not work for you and what may have worked for you 6 months ago may not be the best for you now. Learn to be open to changes in circumstance and look for the unique opportunities for growth in each opportunity and stage of your life.
• Do not let yourself be too complacent or too ambitious. Find the happy medium where you can work towards steady improvement without being overwhelmed. This will probably be slower than you may want, but it is better than doing too much and burning out.
• Learn to handle failure without accepting defeat. Reaching your potential will never come without failing and making mistakes, but working through those and moving forward are a large part of what will help you reach that potential. The sooner you can learn to work through failure, the more you will see yourself fulfilling that potential.

Anyway, this has been way longer than I intended it to be, but I guess that's the way it goes. If you actually bothered to read all of this, give yourself a pat on the back or some other such form of self reward. Heck, if I were reading a blog, I probably would have given up long before now. I certainly know I'm not going to proofread this for clarity. I barely even bothered to skim it for spelling errors. As I stated in my initial post, this is just a place for me to express my thoughts, so I doubt if it's even coherent. It made sense to me (at least I think it does upon my writing it at 2 am. It might be interesting to read this at a decent hour of the day and see if it still bears any semblance of coherency, but I digress). If you care to add anything to the discussion, you are welcome to post a comment. Or you can complain about how it made no sense or it was too dry and I need to get a sense of humor. Whatever tickles your fancy. After all, if you bothered to read this far, you certainly deserve to say whatever to dang well please about this massive wall of text. Peace out.