Behold the Stars

Earlier this evening, I stopped at Barnes & Noble for a cup of coffee. As I was browsing the magazine racks, my eye caught one of the “wealth and success working from home by joining an MLM” magazines that are popping up everywhere. At the top of the cover was a teaser headline that read, “How to Reach Your Full Potential, ” and I thought to myself, “Do I really want to reach my full potential?”Imagine for a second that I could reach my full potential and that the process could be fully explained in a 750-word magazine article. That would mean that a) reaching my full potential is much easier than I thought, and b) I must not be too far away from it. To believe that these two propositions are true is to believe that I am dangerously close to my full potential, or level of incompetence — a walking, talking example of the Peter Principle.

My full potential is infinite — as I learn more, I can learn more, and as I do more, I can do more. Humans are capable of achieving pretty amazing things, and I like to think that I’m no different from the best of them. I couldn’t imagine reaching the point at which I no longer believe that I could, if I wanted to, become an astrophysicist, or a concert pianist, or a financial wizard — and I hope I never do.

Here’s to never reaching my full potential.