Powers And Pitfalls Of Potential

Picture a stark white canvas hanging on a wall, absent of color and waiting to be painted. Now picture the wall it’s on, covered in a messy drop cloth with endless paint marks of colorful incongruity.

A new painting is there to be made where many more have been created before it. If you’re an artist, this is an image you’ve no doubt seen countless times without a second thought. For me, seeing it is always an emotional experience. I can’t help but think of potential when I see a clean canvas on a paint-smeared wall; the piece could become my best work to date or it could land among a pile of incompletes destined to be painted over. Most likely it will exist somewhere in between. I’ve learned to find comfort in the range of outcomes that potential presents. 

What makes this emotional for me is knowing that I wasn’t always comfortable with achieving anything less than my full potential. In fact, the idea of not reaching the artistic goals I felt capable of nearly kept me from pursuing painting at all.

I didn’t paint for a year and a half after college, mostly because I was scared that the end result would be disappointing. I let the shiny, bright light of potential (in my case, a career that would live up to the four years of effort I put into an art degree) cause me to sit in fear when it was finally time to realize that potential. 

I knew I could make good art, so the thought of producing subpar art when I was rusty and working outside of the college art community I had thrived in was too much to handle. 

On the handful of times I did pull out my paints and begin to make marks on a canvas, almost instantly I became anxious because it was inevitably falling short of the potential I had in my head. It became a self-fulfilling loop– I didn’t want to paint because I wasn’t immediately hitting my potential and I wasn’t going to reach my potential because I didn’t want to paint.

It was only in January 2016, when I told myself to prioritize making “something”– to put anything down on paper– that I realized that the attempt was more valuable to me than the perfect potential I had in my head. I started small with doodles and sketches which basically no one saw, and they weren’t even really that good. But it was something, and from that starting point the potential to reach another rung on the ladder seemed obtainable.

We are a culture obsessed with potential. The idea of the shiny new thing (invention, politician, idea, painting etc.) that will come in and save the day. This way of thinking can make it particularly hard for artists because the truth is, potential, when it’s in our head, is absolutely perfect. 

It’s a dream career where everything falls into place and where all of our paintings synthesize exactly what’s in our heart and help us fulfill all of our wildest dreams. This can be great– we want to optimistically believe that everyone has potential– but it can be harmful just the same.

My experience showed me that the scariest thing isn’t trying and falling short of that dream, it’s not trying at all. So I made myself a de facto New Year’s resolution that I was going to destroy my idealized version of potential and allow myself to mess up and move on.

The frustration I felt from not making anything for 18 months forced me to recalibrate what I thought potential looked like and become a lot more willing to embrace a messier, slower, less-worthy version of success. 

The success in that first year was simply showing up and making the art. As that became possible, the goal posts moved a bit. The goal then became making some art that I was actually proud of. Then those goal posts moved again and the mission was to make a part-time living off my work… and so on and so on. Seven years later and I’m still slowly tinkering with my goals to keep moving my career forward a step at a time.

With each progressive year, my idea of what I could achieve kept growing. Sure, my skills improved with all I was making, but it was my steady mindset of patience and forgiveness that made that possible. 

Before I knew it, all of a sudden the thing I was envisioning for myself actually exceeded the potential that had haunted me during the year and a half when I wasn’t making art. It was a little bit bigger and brighter and encompassed different things than I had originally planned for myself.

I’ve always loved my ability to look up and dream big. I think that is what got me through a particularly rough childhood. Dreaming of a life of stability and love in a home that was violent and insecure may have kept me going in a way that I don’t know that I could have without that optimism.

It was that same ability– to dream big and see clearly what success might look like for me– that kept me, initially, from going after a painting future for myself. I’m writing this to encourage anyone who may feel overwhelmed by their potential to find peace with falling short, to embrace a different timeline and find gratitude for showing up and persisting anyway. 

It’s (nearly) January 1 and with that day comes a lot of promises and resolutions. Sometimes these work out and sometimes they don’t. But if I can ask of you one thing this year, it’s to put aside some of the energy you would dedicate into potential and instead give it to yourself in the form of compassion.

Put another way, if the weight of potential is bogging you down, don’t focus so much on the blank canvas that represents your end product. Focus instead on the sweat of your brow, the clink of cleaning your brushes, and the mess you will make. Picture if you can all the stray marks that go around your canvas. 

Stay tuned for an announcement coming January 1 related to this blog post!