have you squandered your potential?

Hockey: I was really good but I stopped growing in height at like BANTAM so I kinda gave up on that. I play pick-up nowadays but I feel like shit.

Skiing: Was semi-pro for freestyle shit but I burned out/went to uni. right when all the kids I used to beat in comps all the time got into the new wave X-games shit and kept going and now they're famous and on the X-Games and I still smoke cigs on the chairlift but I'm still usually the best skiier there if I hit up a local mtn instead of Whislter/Blackcomb. I ain't shit up against the SuperPark kids there, which is kinda depressing.

Romantic: follow my name for a picture of me. I'm not great looking, nor am I the easiest person to get on with in some ways, and I'm pretty demanding. I was married to an extraordinary and beautiful woman for 23 years, and after all that monogamy, well, my sexual life since then has already been talked about too much here, but it's been beyond all but my wildest dreams. I'd say I've exceeded my potential by a long way here.

Artistic: I don't think I have much artistic talent at all. I long ago decided that a perhaps secondary role was all I was good for there. I was at one time arguably Britain's leading comic critic (ha, talk about a biggish minnow in a tiny puddle), and I worked with several of the greatest British talents in comics in recent years (Moore, Morrison, Gaiman, Millar, Campbell...). I now write alongside some people who I think are genuine world class writers, for Freaky Trigger. I think I've done as much as my meagre talents would allow in this area, probably rather more than I would have expected.

Sport: I was a small and pretty puny kid with exceptionally bad asthma, but I loved sport, and made the school football team, and was table tennis and tennis champion. I seemed to be the best at the last named in the first year at Cambridge, and I think I'd have probably got my blue (US: award for playing in the equivalent of Harvard-Yale or some such) had I stayed there long enough. With my very poor health I can't imagine I could have taken any of that to a much higher level, so not squandered, but I have let most of what fitness and ability I did have go. I did bowl a 160 today, which isn't bad for I think my eighth ever frame or whatever you call them.

I've no idea what that amounts to. I guess with my intelligence I could have maybe become a genuine expert in something, or turned it into a lot more money, but that would have required a different personality, and I'm happy enough with where I am. The rest I think I score pretty well on.

A prof + PhD student said that I was destined for grad school because I read Ulysses three times, and in a way I took that to heart (more like, I didn't try very hard finding a job so I went with what I knew: school). I saw myself as a professor. But now I'm 80-90% sure that I want to no more to do with academics and try to find some editing/journalism/writing gig, which is still hard for me to reconcile with the fact that I still think that the peak of intellectual thought and discourse is accomplished in a doctoral program.

squandered potential

210!!! Is that metric or hogsheads or some other british unit??? yoo r a supergenius!!! i will have to pay more attention to yer posts from now on.

And yet, I am strangely happy and contented right now. I can only presume this is preceding some gigantic crisis at the age of 30.

But yes, other than specifically in that respect I have squandered all of my OTHER potential. Probably so.

I do feel that in an artistic and professional sense I am kind of selling myself short, but part of this is not really knowing what it is I ought to be doing. In the meantime I earn a reasonable income and live a pleasant lifestyle.

Usual units. I take it as evidence of the very severe limitations of IQ as a measure. It is a test that suits my abilities very well, but provides no evidence of anything that a reasonable person could call genius.

My 8-ball and 9-ball skills have declined dramatically since college ended.

Also, I don't understand my college honor's thesis anymore. I'm not sure if I was full of crap or just got dumber. Probably both.

I don't feel potential as something wonderful or pleasant, I feel it like some crushing onerous weight which makes me unable to even stand up sometimes.

The idea that someone with stacks of qualifications *should* be sombody important earning shitloads is nonsense. What if they don't WANT to.

I should have had a book out by now but the lady who was dealing with me at the publishers has left and no one else there knows who or why I am. After the terrible critical roasting that the Belle de Jour blog book got no one's going to touch blog books with a bargepole. The freelance reviewing has ground to a complete halt. So I'm just continuing to systematically cut myself off from the few people out there still remotely sympathetic to me. Bite and snarl at anyone who dares to come near me. And I'm probably enjoying it deep down; why else would I do it? No one else to blame; I asked for this time and time again; dozens of chances have come my way and I rebuffed every one of them. I suppose one ends up with the squandered life that one deserves, and perhaps even craves. Takes the pressure of "potential" off.

Academic : Seen in terms of raw qualifications, I would be seen as an over-acheiver by most people. Yet look beneath the surface and the grades are always the minimum needed to get to the next stage. Not that it matters now, since I always did get to the next stage, but I do regret not making more of an effort just to see how good I was, rather breezing through on autopilot. So i'd say : squandered.

Romantic : Oh god. Not squandered, despite my idiotic approach over the years. The lovely Mr.s Dr. C is more than I could have ever hoped for.

Artistic : I've wasted years farting around with hopeless bands before finally getting in a decent one. : Squandered.

Sport : I have been pretty good at virtually every sport I have tried. I could probably have gone further with a couple of them (rugby, cricket) but stayed in my comfort zone instead. Given that I'm still playing and will play until I drop, I'd say : Not Squandered.

Professional : I earn pretty good money doing something I don't have the remotest interest in. If I was so inclined I could easily climb up to the higher levels of corporate life. I know what you have to do, I know what you have to say, etc etc. But I'd rather have all four limbs removed, not through any real sense of pride at NOT doing it, but because it would take up too much time. Time best spent having fun!

"Time best spent having fun!" though - that's my trouble, you see; I can't stop working. Even when I'm doing the blog it feels like "work" ("yes and it's hard bloody work reading it and all!" - readers' chorus).

this is what the internet was invented for.......

I wouldn't be too hard on yourself about this Marcello, I don't know a single freelancer (however talented) who isn't struggling right now.

I agree with Martin (despite the fact that he is clearly very smart). I can barely understand the instructions to many IQ tests, never mind the tests themselves, yet I'm a pretty smart person.

I spend all my time thinking up these great ideas and then can't be arsed to put any of them into practice. My main goal in life is to work as few hours as possible and yet somehow maintain an almost middle-class lifestyle. But I know that whenever I apply myself to a job, I always get promoted and handed extra responsibilities and am great.

The only area of my life where I think I'm doing exactly as well as I possibly can is in my writing. I'm a middling (and still unpublished) writer with middling ideas, and I reckon that sounds about right.

That said, I do spend time reflecting on the fact that every job I've ever held began with me being heralded as the new messiah and ended with an involuntary "exit interview."

i'm getting better and better in 99% of my endeavors

guessing posting is in the 1%?

I *intellectually* know that there isn't such a thing as a finite amount of "potential" that one can run out of, but emotionally I have a hard time escaping the notion that I am a failure because I could have achieved more had I done things differently in the past; if I had been less cowardly/complacent, or if I'd simply worked harder. When I was in school my teachers' favorite comment to put on report cards was "zchyrs is capable of working at a higher level." And I'd beat myself up about that, the way I still beat myself up about it.

The irony of course is that dwelling on this notion only paralyzes; it actually keeps me from reaching my potential. I have to remember that all there really is are the things I want to do and the work I have to do to get there, and all the thoughts I have about success and failure are only thoughts, and I should just pursue what interests me, and let that interest be the thing that pulls me forward. At the end of the day, nobody might care about what I've done, but that's irrelevant anyhow.

"potential" itself is one of the traps your betters construct for you as a kid

you have the potential to fail continuously up until the moment of your miserable death

https://www.cardcow.com/images/set444/card00927_fr.jpg

this thread really bringing the negative self-talk

look, it doesn't matter. all human striving is useless. since its inception humanity has done nothing but repeat its past mistakes on failures on grander and grander scales. even if you by some miracle manage to overcome your environment and your upbringing you will never change that. not only that, with humanity having failed up to the point of developing the theoretical capacity for self-annihilation, it is only a matter of time before we bring it about. the history of humanity is the horror of conscious existence slowly eating away at our instinctive drive for survival.

bloody amateurs.

rusho otm

although tbrr there are a ton of “negative self-talk” threads on ILX, personally I’d prefer it stay on 77 in that one with the very clear title explaining itself, but ehh

IMO, if the balance of your life has trended more towards decency than shittiness, you've lived up to and possibly exceeded your potential.

In general, when it comes to laments about the squandering of potential I tend to think of Thich Nhat Tran's idea that "hope is what kills you". In ruminating over abstract concepts like "what could've been" you're just making your brain and your outlook worse

But

I do think I've drunk too much, and smoked too much, and I shouldn't have dated this person or that, and I wish I had my anxiety in check so I didn't lose years of my life to "pacing around the apartment talking to myself", and this job and that job were the wrong jobs-- but I don't think of it as "squandered potential" so much as "li'l whoopsies"

And

I do think that the abstract concept of "potential" is a real thing when digesting the half-life of other people's careers, body of work, romantic life, and so on-- I've always said that it's "potential energy" that makes work made by first-timers and/or young people that creates fascination, the thrill of the audience "imagining what might come next"-- but if I might look at this band or that director and think "wow, look at all that squandered potential" when they finally release their second album/film and it's a disappointment, I don't tend to hold myself or people close to me to the same standards-- I try and parse everybody's arcs in a more pragmatic way

The one aspect of "squandered potential" that I do feel, actually, on a daily basis, pertains to my physical fitness. I can't tell if "the good years of my life" were good, and thus I was at the gym daily, or if I was at the gym daily and thus the years were good, but yeah that's the one thing I ruminate on

nothing squandered nothing gained

I think that's the hidden caveat of artistic "potential" -- you can get objectively better at composing, playing an instrument, painting, but the fact you're trying to make something that's judged subjectively means it might not have an audience, or your existing audience doesn't want something you can give.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

surprisingly, I don't regret my earlier posts on this thread

weirdly, neither do i! i still agree with myself. there's no squandering unless you are dead and in that case RIP. if you're still alive you should keep trying.

The only real squandering I could see is if you are an expert in a medical/scientific/niche field and you decide to give it all to play videgames and watch pornhub all day. Then maybe. Everything else is people feeling entitled to shit without wanting to do the work.

glad to know I feel entitled to shit, sure is heartening to hear

I actually didn't quite understand your posts above. I thought it could go either way. But what I meant is that a lot of people from underprivileged or non-traditional backgrounds weren't necessarily told all the time that they were gifted or they could do anything in life because it obviously is not the case for everyone. They never felt let down later in life because they never assumed it was a given.

Don't worry, it's easy, you just gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

xp

this is a judgment-free zone, unless it's a little introspection

Isn't there a meme about feeling a crush sense of anxiety if you aren't automatically good at something you try to do and then you just give up. I mean a lot of stuff was extremely easy to do as a child/teenager and adults pushed that narrative of being gifted or in the whatever percentile, when in reality you were just not a mouthbreather.

there's a lot of writing on that, especially regarding "gifted" children and how some of the ways they're presented with ideas actually makes them less likely to try new things

I am probably being tainted by that article written by Ijeoma Oluo about why white men engage in mass shootings, killing their partners and we excuse it away as being lovesick, challenged, etc. The highlighted line was "Somebody needs to stop telling these white boys that they can be anything they put their mind to."

xp this is pretty much why I sucked at math, because I didn't immediately grasp some things and doing the homework made me anxious. so I never did the homework

in all seriousness, I don't think this is "negative self-talk" so much as an unaddressed cultural dissonance in American society. the financial and social structure of society is set up to require a steady, upward and unbroken trajectory to A) live, in the sense of "making a living" (no more plateauing at the same company for 50 years then retiring; these days it's a race to see whether you can get promoted/take a job at the next level before your near-guaranteed layoff), and B) be content with your life. however, the lifespan of the average human is far longer than many people can keep that up. so if you fail at any point, you're fucked, and there are so many decades to get through knowing you're fucked.

The trouble with being a gifted kid is you most likely end up as a fairly ordinary adult, leaving you with a fevered imagination but not much perseverance.

Agree with both above. I think in the US at least there is a huge shift taking place about what that financial and social structure should be or what is acceptable. My parents thought I was a drug dealer for years because I didn't care about getting married or having children or getting promoted or talking about my job. Talking about work is tiresome small talk. No one cares. They think I wasted my education even though they have no clue what I do.

Adults should be arrested for telling kids that they're gifted. IMO.

I can see where it was all the rage with parenting and testing. It's kind of a lazy way to motivate.

I listen patiently about all my nieces and nephews constant accomplishments and I say "wow, great." but in the back of my mind I am still thinking they are still really average and kind of douchey.

there are other factors:

- the expectation that everything be done in public, as part of one's aforementioned personal brand, means that one cannot fail quietly. once you do, it is on your permanent record, and it is there forever. (this existed to some extent with resume gaps, etc., but now those resume gaps are public.)
- the hyper-ageism of it. your trajectory begins before you're born, as the continuation of your parents' trajectory, and has major milestones that occur before you're even aware that they're milestones. like, if you don't pass (say) your algebra end-of-grade test, then that affects the classes you take from then on, which affects your access to honors/AP classes, which affects college admissions in a million ways (both obvious and not; at my school honors and AP classes were weighted at 5.0 and 6.0 respectively, so even if you're a perfect 4.0 student you're still going to be outpaced by people who basically just showed up), which affects the trajectory of your life. meanwhile, the internship trajectory starts around high school, and if you're not getting the big New York internship around sophomore year, that also affects the trajectory of your life. then, if you're successfully out in the workforce, you better hope you get promoted in a year, otherwise you're pretty much fucked. it is entirely possible, and common, to be washed up one year after entering your career, which for many people happens around age 23. suppose you live to age 73; that's 50 years of what the fuck exactly?

basically, there are so many points along the line to fail. some people are scrappy or charismatic or rich or lucky enough to overcome those failures, but you need to deviate quite far from baseline on any of those for it to happen.

(although "suppose you live to age 73" may be a bit optimistic, because that requires medical care of the sort that you can only afford if you have a job)

you can reject some of those things though -- ageism hyper or otherwise can fuck off, expectations of everything being public don't need to be adhered to -- you don't need to do what other people think you should do.
everywhere there are people being quietly awesome at what they do and no one notices. who cares if you try and fail? the only way it hurts you is if it makes you stop trying.

i have tried to start at least 3 different bands and none of them have really gotten anywhere. who cares?! i will keep trying. if people want to laugh at me or judge me for failing they are not people i care about tbh.

I read this article recently that had a very good premise for writers. Instead of trying to get published as a goal, make your goal to get a certain number of written rejections a year.

I think society's weird ideas about failure come from our weird ideas about intentionality. The idea that ppl have lucid, non-contradictory motivations which they then succeed or fail to actualise is insidious; ppl are constantly warring against parts of themselves & trying to understand themselves and judgements are v partial and contextual.

LL otm. Without sinking into resentfully anti-social behaviour, there is so much solitary work of value out there that doesn't get noticed at all. We are seven billion now yet the stage is hardly any more capacious than it was when we were four billion. For good or ill, invisibility is the norm, but this needn't lead us to nihilism. If anything, we need to turn this anonymity and fragmentation into a chance.

- the hyper-ageism of it. your trajectory begins before you're born, as the continuation of your parents' trajectory, and has major milestones that occur before you're even aware that they're milestones. like, if you don't pass (say) your algebra end-of-grade test, then that affects the classes you take from then on, which affects your access to honors/AP classes, which affects college admissions in a million ways (both obvious and not; at my school honors and AP classes were weighted at 5.0 and 6.0 respectively, so even if you're a perfect 4.0 student you're still going to be outpaced by people who basically just showed up), which affects the trajectory of your life. meanwhile, the internship trajectory starts around high school, and if you're not getting the big New York internship around sophomore year, that also affects the trajectory of your life. then, if you're successfully out in the workforce, you better hope you get promoted in a year, otherwise you're pretty much fucked. it is entirely possible, and common, to be washed up one year after entering your career, which for many people happens around age 23. suppose you live to age 73; that's 50 years of what the fuck exactly?

i think this is a trajectory of a very specific type of career path that most people do not follow.

"big new york internship" there are many career paths that do not require this

"get a certain number of written rejections" is awful advice, sorry; it just makes editors dread and/or automatically delete your emails from their inbox. they do remember these things.

i think this is a trajectory of a very specific type of career path that most people do not follow.

but rapidly becoming the only one that is financially tenable in American society

fwiw i just had coffee the other day w/ a person who landed a fucking sweet plum job at a world-renowned art museum and she told me her career path and it was nothing like what you would expect from a person w/ a plum job at a world-renowned art museum, i do meet people like this all the time

i've also served on a ton of search committees at various institutions and honestly we don't give a shit what schools they went to, like it never factors in that someone when to a community college and another went to harvard

right, but that's self-selecting -- something caused you to meet this particular person, you didn't just seed a RNG up to 8 billion and decide to meet the person corresponding to what you got

Oh, I found that aim for rejections article. https://lithub.com/why-you-should-aim-for-100-rejections-a-year/

I know lots of ppl my age who are doing well financially and the only one that I know interned did not benefit from it

I don't know many (any?) people who have had that type of trajectory that's outlined above. People seem more flexible in life. But it could be a regional, class, specific sector thing.

I mean, one example: in my case, I would really like to have children, but have resigned myself -- extremely unhappily -- to the fact that I probably will never be able to, because the only way to be in a financial situation where that would not completely ruin the kid's life is to somehow turn around my complete failure of a career, which does not seem likely, or marry rich, which is not generally possible unless you yourself are rich, incredibly successful, or incredibly attractive, none of which apply, and also generally not possible for women above age 25 or so, which I've long since lapped

(there are other reasons; I know a lot of people who want to have children but have resigned themselves to not having children because they do not think it is moral to bring a child into a world that will probably be wrecked by climate change in their lifetime. which is a fairly strong moral reason. but if you are a person who really wants to have children, then you have to live with that regret for decades.)

I read this article recently that had a very good premise for writers. Instead of trying to get published as a goal, make your goal to get a certain number of written rejections a year.

― Yerac, Thursday, 29 March 2018 14:46 (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm hoping i can translate this into my field and consider myself a tremendously successful academic

xpos I've never wanted to have children so I can't relate but I understand. The US in general is not kind to single people and especially single women (all women really).

Fwiw Katherine your writing makes the world a better and more interesting place