People often talk about unlocking your full potential.
Or even the more elusive notion of using 100% of your brain capacity.
Most the time it’s seen as something mysterious.
When in fact it’s SUPER practical.
I’m NOT saying it’s easy to do.
Or how much is possible.
But there is a clear path to doing it.
It’s just, unfortunately, the path I’m sharing with you is one few people will ever want to choose.
Because it demands something that’s near impossible to do.
Set a near impossible goal
See, and this is going to sound obvious, BUT…
To unlock your full potential you need a reason why.
It’s like driving a Ferrari to the grocery store.
There’s little need or ability to really open up that powerful engine.
So most Ferrari owners never do.
They’re also not trained to drive to the limit so few even know what that car can do.
It’s the same with human potential.
If your goals only demand an average level of potential from you that’s all you’ll deliver.
Whereas, choose a massive goal that’s way out of reach…
And the only way you succeed is by unlocking more potential.
Olympic-sized goal
Being an Olympic athlete of course demands more than playing softball on the weekend!
Their sport is so COMPETITIVE…
And their goal so aspirational…
That it forces them to unlock every ounce of their potential.
In their sport, even unlocking all the potential they have may NOT be good enough.
But, certainly, without it, they’ll fail to be competitive.
It’s a simple choice in the end—
Do you deliver the potential you have and lose?
Or do you seek to unlock ALL of your potential and have a shot to win?
You unlock the potential you need
You know those stories you hear of say a mother picking up a car to free her child trapped underneath?
I don’t know if they’re true!
But you certainly know that type of WHY is going to unlock all of the strength inside you.
If you merely want to lift a lot of weight, how much less motivation might you have relative to if your child’s life depends on it?
In your goals, and you know this…
Your brain and nervous system are built for efficiency, so they’ll deliver whatever they need to.
Choose a puny goal that demands puny effort from you…
And you’re most likely to settle for delivering a puny amount of your potential.
Choose a massively hard goal, however, and this choice is made for you.
Do you fail or unlock more potential?
The choice in your brain and nervous system really becomes this simple.
Either you will fail.
Or you’ll do whatever it takes to unlock more potential to achieve.
Do you see how clear this makes it in your brain?
When faced with imminent failure your brain gets to choose—
Do you keep showing up the same old way and fail?
Or do you unlock more in you so that you can pull through to victory?
You don’t know your limits
The fact is, few of us will ever know our limits and full potential.
Writing this I’m thinking of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell who you might be familiar with from the movie Lone Survivor.
Pushed to the extreme, filled with shrapnel, his legs numb, unable to walk, he crawled 7 miles to survive.
Now, I’m using a deadly example here, but the point being—he didn’t know what he was capable of until he was pushed to the limit.
And even in his case, what was his limit?
Perhaps in our ancestral days us humans had many moments in our lives where we were tested to the limit.
And were forced to unlock every ounce of potential.
Yet in most of our modern lives, we’ve never been, or are rarely, forced to deliver all we’ve got.
So we never learn the limits of our potential.
What are the limits of your potential?
Now, here of course I’m not saying get yourself shot and see how far you can crawl :).
Nor get your child trapped in a car wreck to see if you can lift a car.
Or even, set a massive goal that is so hard to achieve that it forces the absolute best from you.
I’m merely saying—
Unless you are pushed to your limit, you won’t know what it is.
That unless you are forced to deliver your full potential, you won’t even know how much can be unlocked in you.
It’s like Winston Churchill said—
“Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.”
Do you agree?
Are your goals keeping you in your comfort zone?
Or are they forcing more potential to be unlocked in you?