The more capable you are, the easier it becomes to feel like you're wasting your life. We tend to assume that having more potential is a good thing. More intelligence, more opportunities, more things you could become. Who wouldn't want that?

But your ability to imagine what you could do can grow much faster than your ability to actually do it. And at some point, the distance between what you imagine and what you accomplish starts to look like failure.

Consider two people.

One can imagine ten different futures for themselves. They pursue one, build something meaningful, and feel pretty good about it.

The other can imagine a thousand. They see the businesses they could build, the books they could write, the places they could live, the skills they could master, the people they could become. They pursue one of those futures, accomplish something extraordinary, and still wonder whether they chose the wrong one.

Same life. Very different relationship with it.

The second person isn't less successful. They're simply more aware of everything they haven't done.

And that's where potential becomes a burden.

I know this feeling well. I've spent the better part of my existence measuring myself against things I could have done instead.

I have built businesses, made money, walked away from things that were working, started over, and spent years pursuing questions that have absolutely no guarantee of leading anywhere profitable. At almost every stage, someone could have made a convincing argument that I was wasting my potential.

And they might have been right. But the same hours couldn't have been spent writing, studying, traveling, or becoming the person I am today.

Every decision closes doors. That's what makes it a decision. And yet we have this strange habit of treating the doors we didn't open as evidence that something is missing from our lives.

There's another side to this. Sometimes we become so attached to keeping our possibilities alive that imagining change becomes a substitute for actually changing:

Imagine judging a wonderful marriage by all the people you could have married instead. Or a beautiful afternoon by the thousand other things you could have done with it. You would eventually become incapable of enjoying anything.

Just because you're capable of doing something doesn't mean you have an obligation to do it. In other words, you don't owe your abilities a career.

You might have the intelligence to become a surgeon and prefer making furniture. You might have the talent to build a hundred-million-dollar company and prefer running a small business that leaves you time to raise your children. You might be exceptionally good at something you simply don't enjoy.

None of those choices requires an apology.

We humans tend to confuse what we're capable of doing with what we should be doing.

But capability tells you what's possible. It doesn't tell you what's worth pursuing. And nobody else can make that distinction for you.

There's also a mathematical problem with potential. The more possibilities you can imagine, the more opportunities you inevitably leave unexplored. If you measure your life against everything you could have done, your accomplishments will always look insufficient.

You could spend eighty years doing remarkable things and still leave thousands of possibilities untouched. At some point, you have to decide which possibilities are worth turning into reality. And that requires something far more difficult than recognizing what you're capable of.

Deciding what you actually want.

You have one life.

And unused potential doesn't carry over when you die. Neither does the obligation to use all of it.

Stay curious,

Benoît