Two fears hold all of us back from the lives we want. These fears keep us from doing the things we want to do, the things we know we should do, the things that would bring us the most joy.
The first is the fear of not living up to our potential. We each have an internal sense of what we’re capable of achieving in this life, of the person we are capable of being, but somehow the thought of never realizing that potential gets in the way of those very achievements. They say true hell is the day that the person you are meets the person you could have been. Many versions of that quote exist, credited to many authors, but they all ring true for the same reason: those two versions of yourself meet every single day. And the bigger the gap between them, the more hell you suffer.
This fear becomes a barrier to us because we run from it. We don’t want to feel inadequate, lazy, or unfulfilled, so we fill our minds with nonsense. Distractions and lies, propaganda, designed to protect our egos from the daily suffering of knowing that we are not all that we could be. We distract ourselves with social media scrolling. We numb ourselves with alcohol and drugs. We tell ourselves lies like “I’m too busy”, “I’m not capable”, and “That life just isn’t for me” and we hide behind circumstances to avoid the brutal truth: we are each capable of becoming the person we aspire to be and we are each responsible for any suffering we experience when the distractions fade and we’re confronted with our unrealized potential.
The second fear that holds us back is the fear of what will happen when we actually do live up to our potential. We are afraid of success just as we are afraid of failure. Meeting our potential requires transformational change, not just in who we are, but in what we spend our time doing, who we associate with, and what we value. We fear rising to our potential because we fear the unknown. We don’t want to disrupt the comfort we have now for the inevitable discomfort that realizing our potential will bring. And so we choose numbness and distraction. We choose to stagnate. We choose the hell that we’ve created for ourselves. Because an object at rest tends to stay at rest.
It doesn’t seem fair that we should fear both unrealized and realized potential. But this paradox is a quintessentially human problem. It falls into the ‘duality of man’ category of problems, alongside infinity (a concept that we can grasp, but a state of being we cannot attain in this life). Fortunately, and unlike the problem of infinity, there is a clear path toward realizing our potential. It’s not an easy path, but it is simple to understand. To realize our potential we must not run from fear, instead, fear must be our guide.
Fear is a compass and it points us in the direction we should go. In the words of modern Stoic Ryan Holiday, “The obstacle is the way”. We must face our fears to conquer them and we must conquer our fears to alleviate our suffering.
We make a choice every day, whether consciously or not, we either live up to our potential, or we live down to our fears.
If we want to realize our potential, it’s time to face our fear.
MW 