You would think that the more capable you are, the more you should be able to accomplish. And that seems perfectly reasonable. Someone who can recognize more opportunities, anticipate more problems, and imagine more possibilities should have an enormous advantage over someone who can't, right?

Well, evolution is going to disagree with you. And I'll get to that in a second. But the strange thing is that the more capable you are, the harder it can become to live up to your damn potential.

And if that sounds like I'm describing the most painful part of your existence, I've got good news and bad news.

The bad news is that there's a mathematical explanation for why this might be happening. The good news is that this mathematical equation tells you what to do about it.

Because I suspect there's a problem you rarely account for. Your ability to recognize what you could accomplish can expand much faster than your ability to actually accomplish it.

And that raises the question I’ll spend the next few minutes answering:

If intelligence is such an extraordinary advantage, why hasn't evolution made us all considerably more intelligent, on average?

Consider IQ. The average is around 100, not 160 or 200. Now, I know the scale is standardized around that average, so the number itself is irrelevant. What interests me is why the cognitive abilities we associate with exceptionally intelligent people aren't simply the norm.

If greater intelligence helps us anticipate danger, solve problems, and make better decisions, why hasn't evolution pushed us all toward the highest possible level of intelligence?

Well, evolution doesn't reward a trait simply because having more of it sounds advantageous. It favors traits that improve our chances of surviving and reproducing, given the costs and constraints involved.

Imagine one of our ancestors walking through the wilderness and spotting a lion. His brain recognizes the danger, anticipates what might happen next, and produces a solution: run.

The same principle applies today. You notice that your expenses are exceeding your income, so you decide to reduce your spending. You anticipate a problem, identify a solution, and act on it.

In both cases, something rather important is happening.

First, there's the prediction of a problem. Second, there's the implementation of a solution.

And in these simplified examples, there's a rather convenient one-to-one relationship between the two. One problem anticipated, one solution implemented.

The prediction serves a purpose because it leads to something you can actually do.

Now, imagine what happens when we increase someone's ability to anticipate problems. Instead of recognizing one potential danger, they can recognize ten. Instead of ten, a hundred.

They can anticipate consequences, imagine alternative scenarios, identify everything that could go wrong, and even predict the problems that might arise from the solutions to their original problems.

You would think this would make them extraordinarily effective. After all, they're seeing things other people can't.

Except we've only increased one side of the equation.

Their ability to anticipate problems has expanded enormously, but their ability to implement solutions hasn't necessarily increased with it. They still have twenty-four hours in a day. One body, limited resources, limited attention, and a finite amount of energy. And no matter how intelligent they become, they cannot act on a hundred different possibilities simultaneously.

So imagine someone capable of anticipating a hundred problems but only able to do something about ten of them. That's ninety potential problems their mind can recognize but their life cannot possibly accommodate.

This creates a gap.

The distance between what you're capable of anticipating and what you're capable of acting upon.

But those ninety problems don't simply disappear once you've recognized them. With the same intelligence that allowed you to anticipate them, you can now predict the consequences of leaving them unresolved. And then the consequences of those consequences.

What started as a hundred potential problems can quickly become a thousand possible scenarios, while your capacity to act remains exactly the same.

Eventually, every decision introduces so many additional questions that you no longer know where to begin. You can see what might go wrong, what you might regret, and what could happen if you make the wrong choice. So you keep thinking, hoping to find a solution that accounts for everything.

Until you freeze. And do nothing.

Meanwhile, the ten problems you could have done something about are still waiting for you.

You can spend an entire day thinking and planning, and feeling as though you've been working incredibly hard. And I mean..you have. Except by the end of the day, you've accomplished almost nothing.

Your intelligence has become so occupied with anticipating reality that it's preventing you from participating in it.

And here's where I suspect something interesting happens. At first, increasing your ability to anticipate problems makes you more effective. You recognize dangers earlier, prepare for complications, and make better decisions. But if your ability to anticipate keeps increasing while your ability to act remains relatively fixed, those additional predictions may eventually stop improving your results.

And beyond a certain point, they might actually make them worse.

In other words, there may be a point of diminishing returns to predictive intelligence, and where that point lies could depend on how effectively you're able to turn predictions into action.

Which brings us back to evolution.

Perhaps there's a reason exceptional intelligence hasn't become the norm. If the evolutionary advantage of intelligence comes from anticipating problems and responding to them, then maximizing anticipation without a corresponding increase in execution could eventually become a disadvantage.

A mind that can recognize one danger and respond effectively may have a better chance of surviving than one that can anticipate a hundred dangers but becomes paralyzed by the possibilities.

In other words, evolution may have favored a balance between our capacity to predict and our capacity to act.

And this would explain why the very intelligence that makes you capable of accomplishing extraordinary things can also become the reason you accomplish so little.

-

So we have a problem. Our ability to imagine what could happen can expand much faster than our ability to do anything about it.

And I think there are two ways to approach this. The first is to test our predictions against reality. Because acting can eliminate problems that thinking alone would have kept alive. The second is recognizing that just because you're capable of something doesn't mean you're obligated to do it.

One is an informational correction. The other is a philosophical correction.

And both accomplish the same thing. They reduce the gap between what your mind can imagine and what your life can actually accommodate.

There's another problem with spending so much time trying to solve those ninety possibilities. You're assuming the problems you've anticipated will still exist by the time you get around to solving them.

But predictions are only as good as the information they're based on. And reality doesn't stand still while you're thinking about it.

The moment you act, you interact with circumstances that may have already changed. You discover things you couldn't have known beforehand. That new information changes your predictions, which changes what you decide to do next.

And the process repeats.

There's a principle in engineering that illustrates this cleanly. Elon Musk describes a five-step algorithm: question the requirements, delete unnecessary parts or processes, simplify and optimize what's left, accelerate, and only then automate.

At Tesla, engineers spent a long time trying to automate the installation of fiberglass mats in battery packs. Eventually they discovered the mats weren't necessary. They had become exceptionally good at solving a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

Most of us have done a quieter version of the same thing. We anticipate a problem, then the problems that might arise from solving it, then the problems those solutions might create. Before long we're engineering elaborate responses to complications we haven't even confirmed are real.

Now return to the hundred problems.

You can anticipate a hundred but only act on ten. We've been treating the remaining ninety as fixed obligations. But what happens if you act on just two of the ten?

Those two actions can reveal that several assumptions were wrong, that certain complications were never going to arise, and that other problems depended on circumstances that no longer exist. For the sake of the example, let's say seventy of the original hundred predictions no longer apply.

You've taken two actions. Instead of ninety-eight problems left, you now have thirty.

You didn't become more intelligent. You didn't acquire extra hours in the day. Your capacity to anticipate problems hasn't changed. What changed is how many of those anticipated problems still deserve your attention.

You simply obtained information that wasn't available when you made the original predictions, and that information eliminated seventy problems without requiring you to solve them.

This doesn't mean thinking is useless. If the next decision involves irreversible consequences or large downside, more analysis can be the rational move. The question is whether the thinking is producing new information or simply rearranging what you already know.

Decision theory has a useful concept for this: the expected value of information. Additional information is worth obtaining when the improvement it can bring to your decision exceeds the cost of getting it.

So before spending another afternoon analyzing something, ask what you actually expect to learn. Is there an assumption you can test? A fact you can verify? A calculation that could change the decision? Or are you mostly revisiting the same possibilities, hoping one of them will eventually arrive with a guarantee?

Sometimes another hour of research is the right call. Sometimes you need to ask someone who knows more than you do. And sometimes the highest-value move is the smallest reasonable action available, taken imperfectly.

Because you cannot observe the reality that only exists after you've acted.

We've been talking about anticipated problems. But I suspect we've been making the same mistake with something considerably more important.

Our entire lives.

Think about what people mean when they tell you that you're not living up to your potential. They're suggesting that there's a version of your life you could be living, and that the one you're currently living falls short of it.

Which is a rather strange way to measure a life, considering that the version you're being compared against doesn't actually exist.

You could have started that business, moved to another country, pursued a different career, married someone else, or made a thousand different decisions that would have produced a thousand different versions of your life.

And the more capable you are of imagining those alternatives, the more versions of yourself you have available for comparison.

Unfortunately, you can only live one of them.

OK Let's put some numbers to this. Imagine measuring your potential by taking everything you've actually accomplished and comparing it to everything you believe you could have accomplished.

Imagine two people. The first can identify ten meaningful possibilities for their life and manages to realize five. That's fifty percent.

The second can identify a thousand possibilities and manages to realize fifty. That's five percent.

The second person has accomplished ten times more, yet has realized a fraction of what they believe they could have accomplished.

Now imagine that person doubles their accomplishments, from fifty to a hundred. An extraordinary achievement by almost any reasonable standard. But if their imagination has expanded from a thousand possibilities to ten thousand in the meantime, they've gone from realizing five percent of their potential to one percent.

They've accomplished twice as much and somehow managed to feel five times further behind.

And there's no end to it. No matter how much you accomplish, your mind can always come up with more.

Which means you could spend your entire life accomplishing extraordinary things and still feel that you've barely scratched the surface of what you could have been.

And the mathematics will agree with you.

So if you've built businesses, made money, achieved things other people dream about, and still go to bed wondering why you haven't done more, congratulations. You've become exceptionally good at making your own accomplishments feel insignificant.

Of course, that's what happens when you measure a finite life against an endlessly expanding collection of imaginary ones.

If you want the equation to produce a different result, you have two options. Accomplish more, or stop demanding that you accomplish everything you're capable of.

We've spent most of our lives trying the first. Maybe it's time we examined the second.

Most of the things you're capable of becoming are things you will never become.

And that's perfectly fine. Remember the equation?

We've spent most of our lives trying to improve it by accomplishing more. Building another business, pursuing another opportunity, learning another skill, becoming another version of ourselves.

But there's another way to change the equation. We can stop counting every possibility we can imagine as something we're supposed to accomplish. Because just because you're capable of something doesn't mean you're obligated to do it.

You could build ten businesses. That doesn't mean you should. You could live in twenty different countries. That doesn't mean your life is incomplete if you only live in three.

Every choice requires giving up other choices. Because you cannot spend the same Tuesday building a company in Miami, learning to surf in Bali, and raising a family in the French countryside. Although, if I dig deep enough into my Google Drive, I'm pretty sure I could find a spreadsheet where I've attempted exactly that.

The point is, your actual life involves bills, mistakes, difficult decisions, wasted afternoons, and people who occasionally refuse to behave the way you'd prefer. Your imaginary lives, on the other hand, are under your complete editorial control.

You can imagine what would have happened if you'd started that business five years earlier. You'd probably be considerably wealthier by now. Or if you'd moved to another country, taken that opportunity, or stayed in that relationship. Who knows how wonderful things could have been?

Of course, you could also have gone bankrupt, hated the country, or spent the next five years arguing about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher. But those details tend to receive considerably less attention when we're imagining the lives we should have lived.

Meanwhile, the only life you have any actual evidence about is the one you're living.

And yet we keep using imaginary alternatives to judge it.

That's a rather extraordinary arrangement. We invent a version of ourselves who's more successful, happier, wealthier, and somehow never makes a bad decision. Then we look at our actual lives and feel disappointed that we haven't managed to become that person.

We created the competition. We invented the opponent. And then we declared ourselves the loser.

I suspect a considerable amount of suffering comes from doing precisely this.

But the mathematics gives us a way out.

You don't have to stop imagining possibilities. You don't have to lower your ambitions. You can still recognize a thousand different things you could do with your life.

You simply stop treating all thousand as obligations.

And when you choose one possibility, you don't owe the other nine hundred and ninety-nine an apology.

In our earlier example, acting on two problems gave us information that eliminated seventy others. We didn't have to solve them. We discovered they no longer deserved our attention.

The same principle applies here, although the correction is philosophical rather than informational. You can recognize a thousand possible lives without treating the nine hundred and ninety-nine you're not living as evidence of failure.

Every possibility you choose to pursue creates a reality that didn't exist before. And every possibility you choose to abandon gives you back the attention you would otherwise spend imagining a life you're not actually living.

If I had to summarize what I've been sharing with you this whole time, it would sound something like this: I find it rather extraordinary that we can spend so much of our lives worrying about things that haven't happened, regretting lives we haven't lived, and feeling inadequate because we haven't become people who don't actually exist.

All while having a perfectly real life available to us.

And I suspect the greatest mistake is believing that every possibility we give up represents something we've lost. Because the time we spend mourning those imaginary lives is time we're taking away from the only one we can actually experience.

You can remain ambitious. You can keep imagining extraordinary things. You can even maintain a Google Drive folder full of plans for your next seventeen lives. I still have one, and I checked it twice this week.

Just remember that none of those plans are evidence that your current life is insufficient.

And the next time you find yourself spending three hours anticipating everything that could go wrong, perhaps try doing something that might tell you whether any of it was worth worrying about in the first place.

I enjoyed applying mathematics to investigate something that evolution might help explain. Especially because once you understand the mechanism, you can actually do something about it. Which is why I spend all this time thinking and writing, by the way.

I have no interest in making life more complicated than it already is. Quite the opposite. I want to understand it well enough to make it easier, so I can spend more time actually living it.

And that's what I'll be investigating next.

This time, I want to see what biology can teach us about the questions we spend our lives trying to answer, and whether some of them even need solving in the first place.

I'll share that investigation here soon.

For now, I'll leave you with this.

Infinite potential is worth nothing. Finite reality is worth everything.

Stay curious,
Benoit