I told myself for a long time that I don’t have a type . if we vibe, we vibe. but somewhere along the way I started noticing a pattern in the people I actually love, the ones I keep, the ones I’d go out of my cave for. and when I finally held that pattern up to the light, the word that came back was potential.
This is the first time I’m forming that into a sentence.
What potential actually is
The most precise definition I know: potential is the gap between what something is doing right now and what it could do under the right conditions. it is stored capacity for change. the reason a boulder at the top of a hill is more dangerous than one sitting at the bottom, even when both are completely still, is potential energy. in this case the threat isn’t in the present state, it’s in the distance between the current state and what physics would allow.
That’s the physics definition. but there’s a philosophical one I find more beautiful. Aristotle called it dunamis — potentiality — as opposed to energeia, which is actuality. potential is unrealized actuality. it is what something could become if the conditions were right and the motion began. it is a real latent property of the thing itself. the acorn isn’t pretending to be an oak. the capacity is already there, waiting.
Everything I want to say about people lives inside that distinction.
It’s almost impossible to hide
People misread each other constantly. someone appears sharp but they’re soft. someone appears weak but they cause damage . someone appears stupid but they’re paying closer attention than anyone in the room first impressions are noise, and we mistake them for signal all the time. but potential is different. potential has a quality that resists camouflage. you can act dumb, you can play small, you can shrink yourself to fit a room, and people will still sense it. something leaks through.
I know this because I lived it. I was afraid of my own potential for years, uncomfortable when people named it, quick to deflect or dismiss the compliment before it could land. I was in denial about it, genuinely. but the people around me weren’t. they saw it before I acknowledged it to myself. and looking back, they were right, consistently right, in a way that I can only explain by accepting that potential isn’t something you can fully conceal just because you’re not ready to claim it.
I can walk into a room now and feel it almost immediately. who has it, what form it takes, whether it’s broad or concentrated into something very specific and strange. everyone is capable of something. some people have the potential to master a niche that nobody else is even paying attention to. others have the kind of potential that, if it ever fully activates, would be very hard to ignore. both are real. both register differently.
Not knowing it exists
Not knowing your own potential is a real form of suffering. it accumulates as a vague dissatisfaction, a sense of moving through life at three quarter speed without being able to name why. you can’t develop what you won’t admit exists. you can’t build toward something you’ve refused to locate. and the cruelest part is that most people with genuine potential are exactly the ones most likely to discount it, because the standard they hold themselves to keeps moving ahead of them.
Other people saying it to you can help. it doesn’t always land, I know that firsthand, but it plants something. the acknowledgment has to come from inside eventually, but sometimes someone else has to say the word first before you’re willing to hear it.
People are almost always on the wrong side of their own potential
It is genuinely rare to meet someone who is living at or near the ceiling of what they’re capable of. and I try to be careful here, because it’s easy to look at someone who isn’t producing and call it waste, without knowing what they’re carrying. suffering has its own timeline. recovery has its own timeline. what looks like stagnation from outside can be something else entirely from inside, and I don’t love making that call without knowing someone well.
But there are also people who are just not using it. no obvious reason, no obvious obstacle. just a kind of default drift that, if it continues long enough, will eventually produce regret. I’ve watched it happen. the regret is specific and heavy in a way that ordinary disappointment isn’t, because it’s not about what the world failed to give you. it’s about what you already had and didn’t move toward.
How it changed how I recruit
When I’m recommending someone for something, or building a team, potential is almost always the hidden variable in my reasoning. I’ve learned to distinguish between someone who is currently good but is already near their ceiling, and someone who isn’t quite there yet but has visible room ahead of them. the second person, in most contexts, is the more interesting bet. not always, context matters, but often.
There is also something about incompleteness that I find genuinely attractive, in tools, in ideas, in people. perfectionism has always felt sterile to me for this reason. something finished and optimized has no room left for you to contribute to it. but something that isn’t quite there yet, that has obvious potential and obvious gaps, pulls me in. the act of contributing to the unlocking of something, being part of the process by which a latent thing becomes actual, is its own form of beauty. it connects back to Aristotle’s dunamis in a way that feels less academic when you’re living it.