Living at full capacity

What percentage of your resources and effort are you currently operating from? Right now, with only your current knowledge, abilities and beliefs, how close are your actions compared to your absolute best?

For most people this percentage would range somewhere between five and thirty-five percent. A few remarkable individuals have periods of up to fifty or sixty percent. I doubt many people here could say they regularly operate at a level of eighty or ninety percent, never mind one hundred percent.

Clearly there is enormous capacity for us even in this moment. Keep in mind I'm not talking about the entire span of human potential. I personally believe that the true expanse of human potential is infinite, so asking what percentage you currently are of that amount is sort of a null question. Instead I focus on the velocity.

I'm specifically referring to how much of the resources you currently have available are you using to maximize your own growth and improvement. The sad truth is that most people only move at a tiny fraction of their capacity at any given moment.

This isn't a new discussion. If you've read even a single self-help book, you've probably heard this fact blared at you, as if you weren't painfully aware of this aspect of your own life.

I'm not here to repeat a message you've had pounded into you from an early age. Instead I'd like to explore exactly why we fail to act in a fraction of our capacity and how we can utilize more of that power.

I personally believe that there are three major aspects that we all need to work on in order to unleash more of that dormant force sleeping within us. These three aspects are courage, drive and purpose.

Fear debilitates us to using our full potential more than anything else. Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of such books as Blink and The Tipping Point, pointed this out so clearly in an interview with a sportswriter.

Gladwell stated that many athletes did not give one hundred percent simply because if they failed, they could use their lack of investment as an excuse. When you invest all of yourself in something and it fails, you have nowhere to turn.

That feeling that if you put every part of yourself into something and you don't come through scares the daylights out of most people.

Most of us feel far more comfortable living at a much smaller fraction of our abilities so we can still hold onto the daydream that we would have succeeded had we truly invested ourselves in it.

Overcoming this fear of failure so we can unleash the full force of our resources involves abandoning those daydreams of the future and thrusting ourselves into reality.

Most of us live halfway in the real world and halfway in their imagination of the world. While the ability to imagine is one of the most powerful gifts of mankind, it can also be a curse.

Because we are afraid failure might arise we devote less than our potential so we can preserve our daydream. Unfortunately, the daydream doesn't exist.

Courage is a decision to live in the real world. Courage is a decision not to focus on the could's or should's of our daydreams and focus on reality.

Source: www.scotthyoung.com