Do you know who Marcus Aurelius is? He is one of the Stoics, a Roman emperor, and one of his greatest fears was not to live to his fullest potential. In his words, a human being has a duty to do so and unfulfillment is a crime and the worst sin a human can do. At the same time later prominent Stoics like Epictetus extend his thoughts that everything beyond your potential should not stress or concern you and you should only worry about the things you can actually change. Thus some of the greatest ideas of Stoicism are to let go of everything that is beyond your potential to affect in any way and work as hard as you can for everything which is within your potential.

I like pondering about these questions too and I somehow feel something is missing in his thoughts. If a potential is an estimated boundary between what we should work so hard to fulfill and what we should completely drop from our concerns then how do we set this boundary? Where do we draw the line and how do we estimate our own potential? A little bit too high and we will needlessly suffer for external giant problems we cannot fix, a little bit too low and we commit the crime of not trying hard enough. What we know for sure is that no matter how capable or talented everyone is, there is always a boundary somewhere out there. But again, this is too vague to consider knowledge which is solid enough to guide our actions. Thus, Stoicism seems to work only if one has a very realistic perception of themselves.

This is the crisis of action due to lack of knowledge (a crisis of power due to lack of wisdom) where an action has to be taken with or without that knowledge. A naive way to try and solve it is by simply trying any fulfillment possible. Granted, there will be numerous failures to follow but we should not be afraid of failing and rising again. And most importantly, nature will always make sure to correct overly ambitious arrogance or generally greedy overestimation when some direction was not supposed to be tried and some potential overdone. However, most of the gained experience will remain superficial and most of the effort will go to waste. There could instead be knowledge from a greater depth in applying and developing the same potential, all the way down to a rather unreachable singularity of stillness. However yet again, there might be bigger potential in there that may never be discovered and expressed, resulting in a zero sum game of two mutual extremes. Either of these extremes can do away without the missing information on its own but the only way forward is in their balance where all vagueness takes hold.

Let's take a step back.

What is even a potential to fulfill? Is your potential a form of talent that you would have to estimate before developing or perhaps a measure of the opportunities you are given? Both can be missed and indefinitely many of both are unknown.

1. The more human-centric interpretation is one of talent as potential whose actuation would more greatly benefit the human kind, a duty to discover and devote to. Perhaps a talent can even be a potential to benefit just oneself considering nature's propensity to multiply organisms successful in overtaking. Either way it doesn't seem to be within our control to choose it, only to discover it.
2. The less human-centric interpretation is that potential is naturality of actuation where some reality could manifest more naturally than another one: some things happen more easily than others, some humans perform some actions more easily than others, and so on. Not crossing natural bridges is a waste of opportunity for your betterment. But you could be excused for not getting better opportunities or opportunities to notice better opportunities. One could even argue that the way of the world might waste but ultimately and inevitably will fulfill potential. Either argument seems escapist from responsibility and you simply lose your role in fulfilling any potential.

Therefore the potential sought here should be something you are able to fulfill and inevitably have a duty to do so. It is natural to you and within your control but not necessarily knowledge. Discovering it then would involve exploring every limitation in every direction in a balance of the diversity of possible paths and the length you are willing to push through each of them.

With diversity of potentials going beyond the scope of sizing actuation, is suboptimality of effort something to be feared? Even as we find peace with being finite in our capabilities and resources, we still want to be close to our own limits - a constrained optimization of sorts. To explore them, we have to face discomfort in the form of challenges. However, we can best explore them if the challenges are not too hard or too easy - they have to once again be close to the boundary of what we can actually do. To size them according to our potential would be to size them according to our effort which remains within our control. A maximum duty then demands that we try as hard as we can in order to finally bump into the wall we so much wanted to find on the first place.

The question that remains is whether we would realize the impossibility or at least difficulty of that which is no longer up to us once we reach it or start wasting our own effort instead. Perhaps we can see it better by ourselves but unlikely given that we are blind to our own blind spots. Perhaps we can see it in the eyes of others surrounding us with as many such reflections as possible but also unlikely given how much more of our internal world we never share. Humility can be of aid in any mix of these but there is no clear cut solution. A limitation in knowledge is just as important as a limitation in control so we also have to be Stoics about what we know.

Ultimately to rephrase these ideas from Stoicism in my own flavor: doubt and care about what you are aware of and can actually know, put all your vigor in what you actually do and can have conscious effect on, and with both of these constantly shifting either way use the hunch that if you are struggling you are likely in the right place in your own life. This is where the boundary of your own "conscious" potential separates you from everything else. Finally, acknowledge the vagueness of your potential's limitations as an additional limitation on its own and potentially deal with it in the same way as with all the rest - by carefully sizing your effort between duty to not waste potential and humility to not waste effort.

So are you fulfilling your potential?