She asked people whose opinions she respected what they could imagine her doing next.
Some offered thoughtful reflections.
But many could only point to more of what she had already done.
That hurt.
I don’t think that they were being unkind or wrong. It hurt maybe because she was not really asking for a job title. She was hoping someone could see more than the version of her they already knew.
This was from an article by Nilofer Merchant that I came across years ago, and I never quite forgot some of her points.
It is painful when your own sense of possibility is not yet visible to others, especially when you are already questioning yourself.
I also hear different versions of it in conversations with others who feel they are not fully using their potential.
- What if I am only good at what I have already done?
- What if I am not underused – just tired?
- What if I try something new and discover I am not as capable as I hoped?
- What if I do have more potential, but I don’t know where it belongs?
- What if I can sense something in myself that no one else can validate yet?
And on and on.
She wrote about how aspirations are, by nature, unproven. That means other people may not be able to validate them in advance.
Perhaps potential is not something we prove before we begin. Perhaps it is something we come to understand by paying attention, experimenting carefully, and noticing where our energy, strengths, and values begin to meet real opportunities.
This does not mean every aspiration is a direction to follow. But it does mean we may need better ways to explore possibility than asking only for evidence from the past.
While the title of her article speaks about changing the world, I find myself drawn to a more personal question: how do we explore potential in a way that helps us see what else could be possible? Not every aspiration needs to be world-changing to be worth exploring.
This is one reason I value the Firework Career Coaching Framework. It creates a way to look at potential from several angles – not only through what you have done before, but through your values, strengths, motivations, and real-world experiments.
If our aspirations cannot always be validated in advance, what might help us explore potential from more than one angle?
Link to Nilofer Merchant’s article.
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