Do I have hidden potential?

Listening to another Oprah podcast — this conversation with Adam Grant around his newest book, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things — and it struck me that it’s the question I’ve been asking myself. Essentially, are there things still hidden within me to discover?

The short, immediate answer is, “I hope so!” But I can also regularly feel fear get in the way, changing that enthusiastic answer to a dimmer, “Maybe?” 

One of the books I’ve read recently, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by Jungian psychologist James Hollis, suggests that we have two psychological halves to our lives. In the first, we are concerned predominantly with building a life constructed on what society or our family wants for or from us. And in the second half, we are called by our soul to follow its voice from within. (Fittingly, the Greek psyche means soul and is the root of psychology — or “study of the soul.”)

Even if you don’t have any religious or spiritual leanings, this need to follow your own inner guidance is the predominant one in your life’s psychological second half, according to Hollis.

In the past few years I have found myself in my life’s psychological second half for sure, and Hollis’ work has been comforting, helping me realize that I’m not losing my mind. I’m learning to listen to my own inner voice and shed the need I’ve previously had to turn up the volume of others’ voices while also minimizing my own. There’s safety in staying with already carved-out spaces and lanes, but I'm feeling the need to go off trail now.

And this brings me back to wondering, do I have hidden potential? If I am learning to listen to my own inner voice and yearnings, I’m also hoping that I will reveal — something? anything? — within myself that I wasn’t previously aware of. Could I be, as Adam Grant says in the book, a long shot or a late bloomer? 

It’s exciting to think that there might still be things I don’t know about myself, skills I haven’t tapped into yet, or avenues I haven’t fully explored in my creativity. It’s also daunting to stand on a precipice between what has been and what might be and look out into a very foggy unknown.

We think of children or younger people as having potential and get excited for them, for their lives to unspool and discover what pulls their attention, makes them happy, lights up their time and hearts. But for those of us who are older, who have experience (and exhaustion lol) but also a desire to keep exploring the bounds of our individual lives, could all of us have hidden potential?