Discovering Your True Potential: A Journey of Self-Exploration
Introduction
How do we come to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and more importantly, our potential? One of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't. You can learn to kind of watch yourself like you're watching a stranger. So, you have to understand that you don't know who you are, and that's not easy to understand because you think you know. But then, you know, you remember, you can't control yourself very well, you're not very disciplined, you're full of flaws. Maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think.
Exploring Your Identity
But it's hard to get low enough to understand how deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are. Now, there's an upside to that too, which also is that you're also ignorant about who you could be. And so, the discovery of that, you know, is some reward for the horror of determining who you actually are. Then you watch yourself, you watch yourself like you're watching a stranger. You watch what you say, and you listen, you think, "What sort of person would say that? And how am I reacting emotionally when I'm communicating in that manner?" You know, is that making me feel stronger, weaker? Is it filling me with shame? Is it helping my confidence? Am I laying out a lie? Am I deceiving myself and other people? Am I adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress and to amuse, and it comes across as nothing but self-centered narcissism?
What are my dark fantasies? What are my aggressive fantasies? What is it that I'm willing to do? What am I interested in so that I'll spontaneously pursue it? What do I procrastinate about, and why? What am I unwilling to do? What do I think is good? What do I congratulate myself for accomplishing, and what do I berate myself for failing to confront and to implement? Those are all incredibly complicated questions, and you don't know the answers to them. So, that's a start.
Uncovering Your Potential
In terms of potential, well, you'll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are, especially the darker parts of yourself. Because then, you discover your potential for mayhem. There's some real utility in that, you know, a discovery that you're dangerous. It's such a useful discovery. It's actually something that strengthens you because the first thing that a realization like that can, in fact, produce is the ambition to incorporate that danger into a higher order personality. And that can make you implacable. It can make you someone who can say no when you need to say no, you know? That can make you someone who won't avoid necessary conflict.
And so, that's unbelievably useful. And so, that's one of the potentials that you might discover. The other thing you do to discover your potential is to challenge yourself. You know, it's like take a bit of a look at yourself and think about what's not so good that you could improve, that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve. You know, and set yourself a little goal. You know, maybe you're not studying at all at your university, or maybe you're at work and you've got this stack of paper there and you haven't looked at that damn stack for like a month. And you know that you should be, and you're bothering yourself at night because you're avoiding that. It's like, maybe I think I've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month. I'm quite a coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper. How about tomorrow I just, like, put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk and I, like, I glance through it for 15 seconds? See if I can do that. It's like, well, you set yourself a goal of improvement. You know, it's a humble goal. There's things you could do to improve, and you know what they are. And there's small steps that you could take, that you might take, that would put you in that direction. And then the question is, are you big enough to take those small steps? You know, are you capable of grappling with the fact that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost child-like steps in order to manage them? And the answer to that is, yeah, you are. Most people have things they avoid, you know, and they're afraid of. So, I would say, to some degree, it's the lot of everyone. People vary in the degree to which they've conquered that.
And you do meet people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined, but most of the time, they've got disciplined in exactly this manner. It's through slow incremental improvement. And then you challenge yourself. It's like, well, could I do this that would be better? Then you find out. And then you think, well, is there something slightly larger and more challenging that I could do that would be better? And you try it, and you find out. And as you try it and you find out, generally you get better at it. And you can take on larger and larger challenges. You know, you take responsibility for yourself. That's part of standing up straight with your shoulders back. It's like take on the world, man. But only at the level that you can manage when you're ignorant and biased and deeply flawed and immature. It's where everyone starts. You don't want to bite off more than you can chew. But it doesn't mean that you can't wrestle with part of reality. You know, some part that's small enough so that you have a good shot at victory. And then you attain victory over some small part of the chaos. And then you're the person who's victorious over chaos. You're just a beginner, but that's who you are. And then maybe you can get unbelievably good at that. And you do that by challenging yourself humbly at the level that you're able to function.
It's easier to understand if you think about a child that you're trying to rear properly and you want to make that child help that child reveal their highest potential, whatever that is, whatever that means. And what you do is you don't set them a series of impossible tasks in the hope of undermining their self-confidence. You form a relationship with them that is predicated on your interest in their highest mode of being. And then you offer them challenges that are precisely optimized to their ability, right? So, they can do them, but they have to stretch the two elements of their ability, would be what they can do and how much they're capable of at transforming what they can do. And an optimal challenge is stretches you to the end of what you can do and then into the domain of how you can transform.
You have to be humble and wise enough to understand that you might have to aim pretty damn low, especially in those places where you're not functioning well. And it might be so embarrassing that you can't bring yourself to fathom that that's actually who you are. You need the loss of that arrogant ego because it's precisely what's interfering with your movement forward. You know, it's part of the adversarial process, mythologically speaking, that stops moral progress. You're too proud of who you think you are to notice what you're like so that you could change properly. You don't want to sacrifice that part of yourself. It's probably associated with some delusion that helps you maintain a positive, although very fragile, self-image. You know, in the absence of genuine effort, it's not to be recommended.
Conclusion
So, know yourself by watching and paying attention. It's not thinking, exactly. It's not imagination. It's just watching, like you're a snake. Because a snake watches, like, cold-bloodedly, with no emotional reaction, just to see what's there. It doesn't allow what is wanted or desired to interfere with what is observed. So, you watch yourself like that, as if you don't know who you are. Well, that's the beginning. And then you challenge yourself continually to see how far past yesterday you can push today and tomorrow. And to continually experiment with expanding the domains not only of your competence but of your ability to increase that competence. The upper limit to that is proportional to the moral effort that you put into it, the more that's guided by the highest of all possible visions, right? The alliance with the highest of all possible conceivable good. The more it's accompanied by truth in speech and action, the more you will develop your potential.
I believe that potential to be as unlimited in the upward direction, more unlimited in the upward direction, than it is unlimited in the direction that brings people to the political and social health that so often characterizes the world that we inhabit. And so, you also, I suppose, have to be willing to undertake that as an adventure, because it's a hell of a thing to bear that kind of responsibility. It takes a person out of the ordinary. It takes them out of themselves. But there's deep meaning to be had in it. And there isn't anything better that you can do.
