9 Ideas to Help You Reach Your Potential

What is your potential? That’s what you have to ask yourself. You have to get down and dirty and honest with yourself. A honest healthy assessment of yourself will help you attack your weaknesses faster than any magic pill will ever do. So I’ll stop right here and give you a second to ask yourself "What is MY potential?"

Now that you've thought for a second-know this. Sadly, most people never reach their potential. In fact, the richest place in the world is the grave yards. More treasure has been collected by the graveyards than any other place. Cemeteries are filled with unwritten books, dreams never realized, and potential never pursued.

So here are 9 ideas to help you reach your potential before it reaches the graveyard:

1. Be yourself and be all that YOU can be:  Its important to learn from others and study what made them successful, but be careful trying to be to much like them. You’ll never reach YOUR potential trying to be someone else. They’ll always be better at being them then you’ll ever be. Studying others is easy, but you HAVE to take action and apply it to YOU.

2. Keep Growing: A man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, will never regain its original dimensions. The only way for something to grow is to feed it. For your mind to grow then you must keep feeding it knowledge.  For you to keep growing you must keep feeding yourself experience.   The opposite of growing is shrinking. You can only do one or the other. Grow or shrink.

3. Accept the pressure: If your going to grow and reach your potential then you eventually have to go somewhere you’ve never been before. Or take on new and more responsibilities. With that comes pressure. You have to accept the pressure and then press forward if you’re going to go forward.

4. Don’t expect the experts to always be right: An expert is someone who know’s tomorrow why things he predicted today didn’t happen. Just kidding.  But don’t get me wrong, the experts are experts for a reason, and they deserve your attention and respect. You better be learning from them. What I’m trying to say though is that what the experts say isn’t law or biblical commandment.

 Take these historical figures for example:
- Beethoven was told by his "expert" music teacher that he was hopeless
- Thomas Edison was told by his teacher that he couldn’t learn anything
- F.W. Woolworth was told by his employer he couldn’t wait on customers
-Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor cause he said he wasn’t creative enough

Now do you see what I’m trying to say. Just because the name badge says "Expert" doesn’t mean they give expert advice or know how to spot potential.

5. Don’t take shortcuts: If you take shortcuts then you have to ask yourself what’s being cut short?

6. Be DISCIPLINED: It takes discipline to do something over and over when you don’t feel like doing it. You have to be disciplined enough to sow the field if you want to reap the reward.

7. Choose your friends wisely: You know the old saying "Birds of a feather flock together". You will ALWAYS become like those you hang around. Don’t try to tell yourself you’ll change them, THEY’LL CHANGE YOU. Proverbs 27:17 says "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend". So ask yourself who are you hanging out with that’s better then you in an area you want to grow in?

Draw inspiration from others who have walked higher than you. Another Proverb says "He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed"

8. Have a mission that motivates you: We go where our dreams take us. If you don’t have a dream or mission then you’re not going anywhere. Don’t expect others to carry you either. They will eventually get tired of carrying you and drop you.

9. Change, Keep up with the change, anticipate more change, and EMBRACE it:  A Harvard Business Professor once said, "The future belongs to people who see possibilities before they become obvious". Readers Digests says, "you must change with the times unless you’re big enough to change the times."

I hope these ideas help you in some way or another along your journey to success!