Why should you care about Potential? Because it confronts you every day.  The future is a mass of unformed, or unactualized potential.  The future can be anything because it hasn’t happened yet.  Understanding the nature of future potential is the essential element that will make your life successful or not.

You reap what you sow. If you want something different in the future you have to sow something different today.  All the great thinkers dance around this topic.  Here’s one of my favorites:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

The Future Is a Constant Stream Potential

Every moment in your life depends on your changing unactualized potential, in the form of future time, into what you want. For example, did you get into a deadly accident driving to work?  A wrong turn of the steering wheel could mean certain death at 70 MPH.  But, getting to work on time every day might lead to a promotion and a bigger paycheck.

As humans, we’re confronted with a constant stream of problems and challenges.  All too often these challenges turn into suffering. In fact, the first noble truth of Buddhism says:

The First Truth is that suffering, pain, and misery exist in life.

Successfully confronting unknown future time potential and avoiding suffering is a core aspect of humanity.  Chaos and its ability to turn into suffering is a core natural law of the universe.  But, clever thinking can change chaos into bliss.

Embracing the adventure to boldly challenge and overcome unknowable future potential makes a life well lived.  Failure to successfully actualize future potential results in suffering.  Unfortunately, sometimes suffering is unavoidable.  But failure provides a powerful case study on what doesn’t work. Suffering provides a strong motivation to do better next time.

The cycle of failure, learn, try again, and finally succeed is the human experience.  It starts with our first stumble when learning to walk and ends on our deathbed considering our deepest regrets. – Todd Stoddard

Every minute is an opportunity for you to make the next minute better than the last.  And, time is inevitable and unavoidable.  So, suck it up, Buttercup, and embrace the adventure to actualize your potential.

Life is a journey, not a destination. – Todd Stoddard

Natural Laws

Happiness and satisfaction in life depend on understanding and alignment with correct principles or Natural Laws.  The Founding Fathers based the American Republic based on Natural Laws. They learned them through in-depth study of philosophers.  Thomas Jefferson started out the US Declaration of Independence noting several powerful Natural Laws saying:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Jefferson didn’t just make that up.  It was all the rage for Enlightenment Intellectuals to read long into the night about Natural Laws and the Rights of Men by philosophers like John Locke.  One of the most potent natural laws is Aristotle’s ideas about True Potential and Actuality.

True Potential and Actuality

Aristotle used this framework extensively throughout his philosophy and applied it in multiple areas like causality, motion, ethics, physiology, metaphysics, etc.  This theory’s power stems from its broad applicability.  Any human endeavor rests on this Natural Law.

Let’s start with an example of some applications then get into the philosophy.

Imagine a sculptor creating a statue.  Now, two things must occur for the creation of this statue.  First, the sculptor must find a rock with the true potential to become a statue.  Is the stone a nice color?  Is it strong enough to hold its own weight when parts of it are removed?  Second, the sculptor must apply energy and skill carving the rock to create or actualize the statue.  We wouldn’t have much of a statue if the sculptor sucks.

In order to do anything, you need the raw material and the skill/technology to accomplish your goal.

Believe in Yourself

The true potential of any human is almost limitless.  But you’ll need lots of skill and deliberate energy to transform potentiality into actuality.  That means hard choices and long hours.

To actualize your full, true potential to assess your own skills. What motivates you and gives you energy? What are your circumstances?  For example, if you want your life to revolve around famous paintings and hobnobbing with the rich and famous, you’ll be limited if you live in Topeka, Kansas.  That’s because small towns in the Mid-West don’t have that kind of potential no matter how much effort and skill you put into it.

Think Deeply and Honestly

You need to be honest with yourself about your limitations.  For example, I’ll never be a good guitarist.  I can’t hear the differences between the notes.  But, I do have several other talents.

Most people get stuck in lifelong patterns and don’t have the courage or imagination to do anything different.  But, if you’re reading this, you do.  So, don’t accept that you can’t be, have, or do anything you want in life.  But, at the same time, you have to accept that you’re only human.  That means you’re not perfect.

Deliberately thinking about what you want from life will get you a lot further than you think.  In fact, just thinking with a little energy can make you wealthy.  Check out my blog post on the Ultimate Hack for an Early Retirement … here.

Potentiality and Actualization take on particular importance in business.  Businesses are just systems of capabilities … sets of Potential with various abilities to Actualize specific outcomes.  One company has the capability of building houses another of creating websites.

Suppose your boss says, “we need some reports on our cash flow.”  You’d probably go to your bank’s website and download the latest bank statement.  But what if you are the bank and must generate a bank statement for every customer every month?  That’s an entirely different capability … Potentials with the ability to Actualize specific outcomes.

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Let the Philosophical Fun Begin! Defining Terms:

Are you excited about all our Philosophical Potential?  I know I am!

So, what does True Potential and Actuality mean?  It gets a little complicated.  Philosophers have written countless books explaining this concept.    Heck, modern philosophers wrote hundreds of books talking about what they think Aristotle meant by these terms.  I’ll do my best to explain.

The dichotomy of Potential and Actuality refers to any possibility that a thing can be said to have.  For example, hydrogen atoms have the potential to become rocks when subjected to the energy and pressures inside a star.  Those rocks have more potential to become beautiful statues when subjected to the skill and deliberate intention of a sculptor.

Are you picking up on the infinite scope of possibilities here?  Good.

True Potential

There are two main types of potential, which we’ll call Persistent Potential and Worked-out Potential.

Stable or Persistent Potential usually occurs in nature.  A star formed hydrogen atoms into a rock.  That rock has existed in its current form for a million years.  So, it will persist as a rock forever, without other Actualizations like water erosion or wide-eyed sculptors.

Worked-out potentials typically won’t occur without deliberate intention (setting aside the argument that it was God’s intention that actualized the hydrogen atoms into a rock by creating stars).  The stone will never become a beautiful statue without the sculptor.  How would a rock, by itself, even know what’s beautiful?  Thus, Worked-out Actualities usually don’t persist without deliberate intention.  Even if a rock happens to become a statue, it will, sooner or later, devolve from that state into a pile of rubble or dust over eons since science doesn’t Actualize that form.

Actuality

Actuality refers to something being in its particular type of action or at work, as all things are when they are real in the fullest sense, and not just potentially real.  Easiest to understand Actuality as a constant state of becoming.  It includes an aspect of deliberate energy that provides the fuel to transform Potential along with the knowledge of how to accomplish that transformation.

When our sculptor finds the rock, it is, at that time, actually rock with statue potential.  While he’s shaping the stone his knowledge and energy actualize a rough statue with the potential to become a beautiful statue while maintaining its rock-like identity.  The sculptor transforms the rock into an impressive figure, but it keeps some rockiness.  Even when it’s transformation into a beautiful statue is complete its Actualization is continuously ongoing because it has the Potential to become dust.  Every day a few molecules of its perfect statue-hood blow off in the wind thus Actualizing its Potential as dust.

Everything is changing all the time.  Its either changing for you or against you.  If you don’t like what’s happening in your life, you need to get to work making things better.  And you can because the Natural Laws of True Potential and Actuality are always at work.  Use your energy to learn new skills and employ them in ways to actualize the potential all around you.

Relevant Characteristics

That’s the essence of Potential and Actuality.  But, I would wrong my reader and Aristotle if I didn’t mention a few other aspects that have caused Thinkers and Philosophers over thousands and thousands of years to learn from and to debate this topic.

• • True Potential and Actuality continuously occur everywhere around us in things like rocks, sand, gravity, light waves, and even in our thoughts and actions.  Everything’s in a constant state of becoming.  Even our brain has the potential to become something more.  Education is one type of actualization of the mind.  But, it’s never complete.  Even after completing the highest level of education Ph.D.s continue research to expand the frontier of human knowledge.
  • The dynamism or energy that ‘hammers away’ at the rock of potentiality implies some agency.  Someone has to care enough about something to do something about it and must know what to do.  The application of know-how and a deliberate effort is required to actualize the current state into something different.
  • This implied agency demands a pre-conception of Natural Laws underlying the universe that defines Potentiality.  Actuality and Potentiality form an essential part in Aristotle’s logical proof of the existence of God.  I’ll write another blog post on this later.
  •  Don’t assume actualization is better.  Outcomes rely on the nature of the inputs (unless you’re a Skeptic, LOL) and intentions, skills, or beliefs, as inputs, matter.  For example, Socialists in places like the USSR believed Actualizing Communism would make things better yet resulted in the execution of 21,000,000 to 70,000,000 people … more here. In other words, it’s not just what gets accomplished that matters but also how it was accomplished.  The end does not justify the means. I don’t want to get too distracted here.  Suffice to say; this rabbit hole goes very deep.

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What do you think?

Thanks for reading to the end! This blog is my project in the pursuit of truth. I spend dozens of hours researching each blog post, so I hope you found something useful.

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