The Lie of Endless Potential
I opened the email and didn’t even have to read the full sentence before I felt like someone had sucker-punched me in the gut.
“Hi Aaron, I wish it weren’t so but there are still issues with the report. Many of them are ones that you said were resolved.”
There it was. Again.
They’re a good client, and the project is challenging. It’s a sales commission tool that I’ve labored over for months (many, many unpaid hours). The commission structure is so tangled it feels like it was written by a poet who hated numbers and logic. I’d built overrides for overrides. Tied logic to exceptions that seem to contradict each other. Rewritten the same function fourteen times in pursuit of something cleaner, clearer, and more reliable.
Each round of feedback, I’d gone back in. Fixed. Validated. Double-checked.
And still, it wasn’t enough.
I tried. Hard. But sometimes, no matter how much effort you bring to the table, the result falls short. There’s always a new edge case. A new condition. A new way to disappoint.
What hit hardest wasn’t the correction itself. It was the painful realization that I had no more margin left. No hidden gear to shift into. No brilliant refactor waiting in the wings. I’d already given this everything and then some.
And for most of my life, that sentence — I gave it everything — has been where my worth lived.
I was the guy who could stay up until 2 a.m. rebuilding ETL pipelines from scratch because the old one wasn’t reliable enough. The one who would foolishly rewrite all 2,359 lines of code than spend one more minute trying to find the bug.
Potential was my currency. If I wasn’t there yet, at least I could be.
For a while, that story served me. It pushed me past limitations, real or imagined. It gave me a narrative to cling to when results were slow or ambiguous. I told myself I was playing the long game. That this was the cost of success, and that discomfort was just the tax on extraordinary.
But lately, I’ve started to wonder if “extraordinary” is even something I want anymore.
Ordinary, in my mind, equaled failure. It was like the whole point of life was to become the most optimized version of myself I could be, always one iteration away from finally being impressive enough, calm enough, and useful enough to be worthy.
I don’t think I believe that anymore.
And maybe that’s why that email didn’t cause a temper tantrum. It didn’t trigger the old scramble. I didn’t stay up all night rewriting things from scratch. I didn’t replay the comment on loop, trying to make it mean something about who I am.
I still felt the sting, but this time I didn’t confuse the feeling with my own moral failing. Instead, I walked away from my computer, and crawled into bed with my wife to play some Wordscapes before going to sleep.
And that’s the shift. It’s small, almost unnoticeable most of the time, but it’s still very real.
For years, I bought into the myth of limitless potential. Every challenge became a test of character. Every unmet expectation, a reflection of personal lack. And I’d answer that perceived lack with more effort, more control, more internal pressure to rise.
There’s a quiet cruelty in how we measure our lives. Steadiness isn’t enough. Contentment isn’t enough. Even being deeply rooted isn’t enough. As Will Leitch put it, “We live in the real planet, in America, in a place where there is an implicit understanding that you must be constantly and ravenously growing or you are somehow not living at all.”
That expectation sounds noble… until you’ve lived inside it. Until you’ve run out of breath trying to keep pace. The moment you stop sprinting, you feel like you’re falling behind. The moment you pause to breathe, someone else’s momentum becomes the measure of your worth.
The lie of endless potential is that it demands more (always more) because stillness feels like failure and because you “want” to grow.
Yes, there’s beauty in stretching yourself. But there’s also a cost in believing that the only version of you worth loving is the one just out of reach.
It’s strange how that lie rarely sounds cruel. It often masquerades as encouragement. As ambition. As someone saying, “You’re capable of more.” And sometimes, you are. But capable doesn’t mean required.
You can do more but you don’t always have to.
Lately, I’ve been practicing that in small ways. Letting the answer be “good enough” instead of perfect. Letting the project be done, even if it didn’t land the way I hoped. Letting someone else follow up, even if I believe I could say it better.
And with each small release, I feel a bit more grounded in who I am. Not who I could be if I worked harder, got faster, and stayed sharper.
Just who I already am.
There’s still a part of me that flinches when I don’t live up to my imagined potential. That voice doesn’t vanish overnight. But it’s quieter now. Less certain. Less central.
And in its place, something better is growing. A way of being that isn’t built on proving. A version of strength that includes rest, softness, limits.
I still want to build good things. I still want to solve hard problems. But I don’t want to lose myself chasing a finish line that keeps moving.
Maybe I don’t need to become something extraordinary.
Maybe I just need to stay close to who I am.
I’m still learning to believe that.
And that is enough.
If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.
It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of my reflections on identity, meaning, and building a life I don’t want to run away from.
You can purchase a copy here:
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