I have spent a lot of my life living in the future.
I was always told I had potential. I was a smart kid. I was capable. I could be anything I wanted to be. I internalised that idea pretty deeply.
And I think, over time, potential became my safe place.
There is something incredibly pleasurable about potential. In potential, everything is still possible. The business could become huge. The next idea could be the one. I could become exceptionally successful. I could build the body I want. I could meet the right person. I could create the life I’ve imagined.
Nothing has been decided yet, so nothing has failed.
You can live in that space for a surprisingly long time.
I’ve spent years coming up with ideas, thinking about businesses, working on various different projects geared around the future of money, imagining different careers and different versions of my life. I’ve always been interested in what could happen next.
And this isn’t to say that I’ve achieved nothing. I have. I’ve had interesting careers, built things, made money, travelled, taken risks and created a life that is in many ways very different from where I started.
But I’ve increasingly wondered whether I have sometimes been more attracted to potential than reality.
Because reality requires something that potential doesn’t.
A decision.
Once you choose something, other possibilities disappear. Once you launch the business, you find out whether the idea actually works. Once you ask the woman out, you might get rejected or left with a broken heart. Once you commit to a direction, you have to live with the consequences of that decision.
Potential doesn’t ask that much of you.
It gives you the dopamine of possibility without requiring you to find out what is actually possible.
I’ve been thinking about this through the lens of Tony Robbins’ work.
I’ve spent a lot of time with his material over the years. The Six Human Needs helped me understand some of the forces driving my behaviour. RPM helped me connect my goals to the reasons they mattered, which gave me energy to actually pursue them. Breaking my life into different categories helped me create balance and made me less of a workaholic. Gratitude helped me move through fear. Structured decision-making gave me a way of dealing with complicated situations.
But there was always one part of the framework that I never quite understood: pain and pleasure.
The idea that, ultimately, we are motivated to move away from pain and towards pleasure.
I understood the concept intellectually. I just didn’t always understand how it applied to me.
I’m finally starting to now.
Looking back, I think a lot of my earlier self-development journey was, at least partly, about trying to move away from pain.
I grew up with a lot of instability. Absent father. Emotionally unavailable mother. Addiction.
It could have been worse. But it wasn’t a particularly healthy environment for a child, and there is no doubt that there was trauma in it.
I think I learned to block a lot of that out.
Perhaps that was necessary at the time.
And perhaps some of those strategies followed me into adulthood.
Working with a coach this summer and doing shadow work has helped me bring some of that previously unconscious pain into consciousness. The process isn’t particularly complicated. Sometimes it is simply sitting still and allowing your mind to go where it doesn’t naturally want to go. To feel the discomfort rather than immediately moving away from it.
And I think this is where the idea of potential becomes interesting.
Because perhaps one way of moving away from pain is to keep moving towards the future.
Keep thinking.
Keep planning.
Keep building.
Keep imagining.
Keep looking for the next thing.
Interestingly, I don’t think I’ve been living this way quite as much over the last few years.
Since arriving in Biarritz three years ago, something has changed.
For perhaps the first time in my adult life, I have felt genuinely safe at home.
I have somewhere that feels like mine. I have a sense of stability. I can walk down to the beach. I can surf. I can sit in a café. I can come home and just be.
And that has been a bigger deal than I probably realised.
I don’t feel the same compulsion to constantly be somewhere else, become someone else or create the next thing.
For the first time, I have experienced something closer to simply being present in my own life.
Maybe I needed that.
Maybe after spending so much of my life moving, searching and striving, I needed somewhere to stop.
But I don’t think that means the old patterns have disappeared.
If anything, the stability has given me enough safety to start seeing them.
I can now notice the difference between genuinely wanting something and enjoying the idea of what something could become.
And that distinction matters.
Because there are things in my life that I know I need to do.
Financial administration. Business projects. Decisions that I’ve already made intellectually but haven’t yet acted on.
And when I look closely at my resistance, I often find something interesting underneath it.
There is some pleasure in keeping things unresolved.
As long as the business remains an idea, it can still become anything.
As long as I don’t make the decision, all the possibilities remain open.
As long as I don’t act, I don’t have to experience the discomfort that comes with reality.
Potential is safe.
Reality isn’t.
I think this is also why some of the painful periods of my life have been so catalytic.
There have been moments when the pain of staying where I was finally became greater than the pain of changing.
When an ex-girlfriend looked at my payslip and told me I needed to get another job, I knew she was right. The discomfort forced me to stop overthinking and apply for an absurd number of jobs. Eventually I landed an amazing corporate role.
Later, after leaving that job and moving to Copenhagen to work for a startup, I went through a period of drinking, drugs and generally behaving irresponsibly. Eventually the consequences of that life became painful enough that I had to change direction again.
Pain moved me.
But I don’t think the lesson is that I need more pain in my life.
Quite the opposite.
Perhaps the lesson is that I need to become better at using the pain that already exists.
The pain of knowing I’m not doing what I said I would do.
The pain of watching time pass.
The pain of knowing I’m capable of more.
The pain of leaving something unresolved.
The pain of remaining in a life that is slightly smaller than the one I know I want.
Rather than immediately escaping those feelings by moving into another possibility, perhaps I need to sit with them.
Let them become conscious.
Let them inform me.
And then act.
I’m approaching forty now, and this has made the idea of potential feel different.
For most of my life, being told I had potential felt like a compliment.
Now I’m starting to see its shadow.
Potential is infinite.
Life isn’t.
At some point, the future stops being an abstract place where everything could happen and becomes the life you’re actually living.
I don’t want to spend the next forty years endlessly becoming the person I could be.
I want to become the person I actually am capable of becoming.
That means choosing.
It means committing.
It means allowing some possibilities to die.
It means being willing to find out that some of my ideas won’t work.
It means risking rejection.
It means doing the boring administrative thing instead of thinking about the exciting possibility.
It means building something rather than imagining what it might become.
And perhaps most importantly, it means learning to tolerate the discomfort that comes with making things real.
I don’t think I need pain to motivate me.
I think I need to stop making potential so pleasurable.
And I need to become more willing to feel the pain of not acting.
Because maybe growing up isn’t about discovering that you have potential.
Maybe it’s about accepting that potential is only valuable when you are willing to turn it into reality.