Unrealized Potential Quotes

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..

come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one’s death anxiety.

Comfort...was the key ingredient to making the prisoner crave the prison.

Man is a continent, but his conscious mind is no larger than a back garden…man consists almost entirely of unrealized potentials.

The notebook smelled the way old books do, like dust and unrealized potential.

I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one’s death anxiety. My

The greatest story every(any)one can tell is the story of their life. Just don't let the climax of your story be unrealized dreams.

His best talent had yet to be determined, unless you counted unrealized potential.

You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which man has probed continuously and successfully, it is that of military technology. No potential weapon would remain unrealized for ten thousand years.

It almost bereaves me to think of unrealized potentials dying inside, the small miscarriages of self. I

i will always be in love with the man that you’ll never become • unrealized potential

A brick could be used to suppress the price of gold. But not for very long, because once the people realize the unrealized potential in undercutting the central bankers, gold will rise and fiat currency will sink.


Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it is necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral; it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare to define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing. All literature is an attempt to make life real. All of us know, even when we act on what we don’t know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying’, which is what an adult, i.e., an idiot, would say but rather, ’ I feel like tears.’ And this phrase -so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! The small child aptly defined his spiral. To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming- like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

Jacob wore a tetchy air of mild resentment that Paul couldn't begin to understand. He was forty and his father was bankrolling him; what could he possibly feel aggrieved about? He pushed unrealized potential before him like a baby carriage.

If [things] seem to have a relative unreality ... it is because they are potential and not actual; they are unfulfilled ... They have it in them to be more real than they are.

life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized. I had planned to do so much, and I had come so close. I was physically debilitated, my imagined future and my personal identity collapsed, and I faced the same existential quandaries my patients faced. The lung cancer diagnosis was confirmed. My carefully planned and hard-won future no longer existed. Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit. Here we were, finally face-to-face, and yet nothing about it seemed recognizable. Standing at the crossroads where I should have been able to see and follow the footprints of the countless patients I had treated over the years, I saw instead only a blank, a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert, as if a sandstorm had erased all trace of familiarity.

Who is the learner and what is his or her relationship to knowledge and learning? Is he or she basically good or evil (or both)? Passive or active in learning? Capable of choice, or has life already been determined somehow? Motivated internally or externally? An unmarked slate or having unrealized potential? These questions are answered every day in every classroom, daycare center, or basketball court—answered by the way children are viewed and treated by adults.

To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour.

Andrew Young, a former U.S. Congressman and U.N. ambassador turned Wal-Mart spokesman, seemed to offer an explanation: “Poverty in America,” he said, “is market potential unrealized.” It seems that the poor benefit the discounting industry far more than the discounting industry benefits the poor.

Each of these people has had to deal with illness, death, loneliness, broken marriages, and unrealized dreams. For the most part, they have accepted physical aging gracefully, and each has some way of keeping fit. What they have not accepted is the myth that learning and growing become less possible as one ages.

We can do things that are greater than ourselves. If you believe nothing exists beyond a certain boundary, then you will never test the veracity of that belief and you will never discover new possibilities....Maybe there are truly extraordinary people out there, but I'm not one of them. The most extraordinary acts are accomplished by ordinary people doing something a little extra and stepping ouiside their personal comfort zone....I often wonder how much human potential lies unrealized and untapped, how much we are limited by our own fears as well as by social, cultural, religious, and self-imposed limitations. If we can break through those, how far might we go as individuals, as a species?

The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealized, unutilized potential in yourself. The whole point of this journey is the reintroduction of this potential into the world…It goes without saying, this is very difficult. Bringing the boon back can be even more difficult than going down into your own depths in the first place.

It’s so cute, isn’t it?” Arianna said dreamily. “Are we seeing the same creature? It’s like a demented goat with a bone growth.” “You’re going to hurt its feelings! Now shut up and sit on the ground.” I did as I was told, sticking my ankle out. “How is it going to heal me?” I asked, suddenly nervous. I pictured it licking my ankle and gagged. I could only imagine the diseases unicorn saliva had or what it carried around in its filthy, matted beard and hair. Bleating reproachfully, it stared at me with its doleful, square-pupiled brown eyes. “Oh, fine. Great, glorious unicorn, beloved of oblivious girls everywhere, please heal me. Now, if you don’t mind.” With one last bat of its gunk-crusted eyelashes, it lowered its head and put its stubby horn against my ankle. I cringed, waiting for pain, but felt instead tingling warmth spread out, almost like having butterflies in my stomach. Only in my ankle. Butterflies . . . with rainbows. The feeling of wholeness and well-being spread up my leg and into my entire body, and I couldn’t stop grinning. The forest was beautiful! The tree branches, naked against the brightening sky, held unimaginable wonders. The hard-packed dirt beneath me was a treasure trove of unrealized potential, lovely for what it could eventually give life to. I could sit out here forever and just enjoy nature. I was so happy! And rainbows! Why did I keep thinking of rainbows? Who cared! Rainbows were totally awesome! And the unicorn! I beamed at it, reaching out my hand to stroke it. There was never a creature more beautiful, more majestic. I’d spend the rest of my life out here, and we’d prance around the forest, worship the sunlight, bathe in the moonlight, and . . . I shook my head, scattering the idiotic warm fuzzies that had invaded. “Whoa,” I said, shoving the unicorn’s head away. “That’s enough of that.” I looked down at my ankle, which was now completely healed, not even a scar left. I fixed a stern look on the unicorn. “I am not going to frolic in an eternal meadow of sunshine and moonlight with you, you rotten little fink. But thanks.” I smiled, just enough to be nice without being too encouraging, and patted it quickly on the head. I was going to soak that hand in bleach. “Okay, let’s get out of here.” I stood, testing my ankle and relieved with the utter lack of pain. I still had an irrational desire to do an interpretive dance about rainbows, but it was a small price to pay for being healed.

The Boy’s head was spinning. Raul was real, and quite possibly not kindly disposed to him, as Marama’s potential heir and jail-breaker. The sailors worshiped Marama, who controlled the tides and commanded them through dreams? The Geolwe collected clouds and lived in the sky? And did the captain just say there were mountains in the sea? Did he mean under the water? Downing the drink in front of him, he began to laugh. It was all just so hopelessly un-real. Anselt and the captain stared for a moment, then found his mirth infectious. Before long they were laughing too, and the sound of their merriment sailed through the night and out to greet the rolling waves, wrapping itself around the ship like a cloud.

There is also a second great area of unrealized common cause between Native Americans and geneticists—the potential to use ancient DNA to measure the sizes of populations that existed prior to 1492 by looking at variation within the genome of ancient samples. This is a critical issue for Native Americans, as there is evidence for about a tenfold collapse in population size in the Americas following the arrival of Europeans and the waves of epidemic disease that Europeans brought, leading to the dissolution of previously established complex societies. The relatively small population sizes that European colonialists encountered when they arrived in the Americas were used to provide moral justification for the annexation of Native American lands.

I felt as though the temple curtain had been drawn aside without warning and I, a goggle-eyed stranger somehow mistaken for an initiate, had been ushered into the sanctuary to witness the mystery of mysteries. I saw a phantasmagoria, a living tapestry of forms jeweled in minute detail. They danced together like guests at a rowdy wedding. They changed their shapes. Within themselves they juggled geometrical shards like the fragments in a kaleidoscope. They sent forth extensions of themselves like the flares of suns. Yet all their activity was obviously interrelated; each being's actions were in step with its neighbors'. They were like bees swarming: They obviously recognised each other and were communicating avidly, but it was impossible to know what they were saying. They enacted a pageant whose beauty awed me. As the lights came back on, the auditorium seemed dull and unreal.I'd been watching various kinds of ordinary cells going about their daily business, as seen through a microscope and recorded by the latest time-lapse movie techniques. The filmmaker frankly admitted that neither he nor anyone else knew just what the cells were doing, or how and why they were doing it. We biologists, especially during our formative years in school, spent most of our time dissecting dead animals and studying preparations of dead cells stained to make their structures more easily visible—"painted tombstones," as someone once called them. Of course, we all knew that life was more a process than a structure, but we tended to forget this, because a structure was so much easier to study. This film reminded me how far our static concepts still were from the actual business of living. As I thought how any one of those scintillating cells potentially could become a whole speckled frog or a person, I grew surer than ever that my work so far had disclosed only a few aspects of a process-control system as varied and widespread as life itself, of which we'd been ignorant until then.

Galileo's Two New Sciences was in certain respects one long raspberry at the Inquisition, whose treatment of G.G. is infamous. Part of this agenda was to have the dialogue's straight man act as a spokesman for Aristotelian metaphysics and Church credenda and to have his more enlightened partner slap him around intellectually. One of the main targets is Aristotle's ontological division of (infinity) into actual and potential, which the Church has basically morphed into the doctrine that only God is Actually Infinite and nothing else in His creation can be. Example: Galileo ridicules the idea that the number of parts that any line segment can be divided into is only 'potentially' (meaning unreal-ly) infinite by showing that if you bend the segment into a circle-which, 'a la Nicholas of Cusa, is defined as a regular polygon with a (infinity) of sides-you have "reduced to actuality that infinite number of parts into which you claimed, while it was straight, were contained in it only potentially.

The cessation of art is something that can only be accomplished when art disappears into its own excess. And that occasion, according to Baudrillard, has already happened. In fact, "art" disappeared a while back (When? Sometimes in the 70's, probably, when information technologies were electrified and became the dominant way in which Western cultures mediated its self-expressions), and its sublimations into the everyday order of simulation was overlooked. Too busy watching reruns of I dream of Jeannie or betwitched I suppose. What is called "art" now is itself a continuous rerun, a rerun of the image of its own disappearance. But said another way, which I'm sure some would rather it be said (though it makes no difference) art is everywhere one and the same with the image of the everyday, if not actually, then potentially. Under these circumstances, because art and the reality that is supposed to set off aesthetic properties have lost their operational difference, unmusic is everywhere Music is not. However, according to the logic of simulation, Music is everywhere so unmusic is nowhere. Yet being everywhere is the same as being nowhere, therefore Music is nowhere, which makes unmusic everywhere. But this is hyperreality and hyperreality trucks no difference between the real and the unreal (artifice), the musical and the unmusical. Thus unmusic eschews Adorno's dialectical impasse to the extent that it is total nonsense, a byproduct of the hyperreal that supervenes a discourse of contradictions and paradoxes where everything is coming up signs.

Individuality, conceived as a temporal development involves uncertainty, indeterminacy, or contingency. Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world....genuine time, if it exists as anything else except the measure of motions in space, is all one with the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties. Everything that can be said contrary to this conclusion is but a reminder that an individual may lose his individuality, for individuals become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms. Genuine time then ceases to be an integral element of their being. Our behavior becomes predictable, because it is but an external rearrangement of what went before....surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual....the artist in realizing his own individuality reveals potentialities hitherto unrealized. The revelation is the inspiration of other individuals to make the potentialities real, for it is not sheer revolt against things as they are which stirs human endeavor to its depth, but vision of what might be and is not. Subordination of the artists to any special cause no matter how worthy does violence not only to the artist but to the living source of a new and better future.

While irrational faith is rooted in submission to a power which is felt to be overwhelmingly strong, omniscient and omnipotent, and in the abdication of one's own power and strength, rational faith is based upon the opposite experience. We have this faith in a thought because it is the result of our own observation and thinking. We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and of love. The basis of rational faith is productiveness; to live by our faith means to live productively. It follows that the belief in power (in the sense of domination) and the use of power are the reverse of faith. To believe in power that exists is identical with disbelief in the growth of potentialities which are as yet unrealized. It is a prediction of the future based solely on the manifest present; but it turns out to be a grave miscalculation, profoundly irrational in its oversight of the human potentialities and human growth. There is no rational faith in power. There is submission to it or, on the part of those who have it, the wish to keep it. While to many power seems to be the most real of all things, the history of man has proved it to be the most unstable of all human achievements. Because of the fact that faith and power are mutually exclusive, all religions and political systems which originally are built on rational faith become corrupt and eventually lose what strength they have, if they rely on power or ally themselves with it. To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and stake everything on these values.

As we examine our things with a critical eye, we may be surprised how much of it commemorates our past, represents our hopes for the future, or belongs to our imaginary selves. Unfortunately, devoting too much of our space, time and energy to these things keeps us from living in the present. Sometimes we fear that getting rid of certain items is equivalent to getting rid of a part of ourselves. No matter that we rarely play violin, and have never worn that evening gown- the moment we let them go, we'll eliminate our chance to become virtuosos or socialites. And heaven forbid we throw away that high school mortarboard- it'll be like we never graduated. We have to remember that our memories, dreams, and ambitions aren't contained in those objects; they're contained in ourselves. We are not what we own; we are what we do, what we think, and who we love. By eliminating the remnants of unloved pastimes, uncompleted endeavors, and unrealized fantasies, we make room for new (and real) possibilities. Aspirational items are the props for a pretend version of our lives; we need to clear out the clutter, so that we have the time, energy and space to realize our true selves and our full potential.

The fact is, your creative potential is unrealized without execution. You love Apple products not only because they’re beautiful, you love them because they work really well. You love your favorite restaurant not only because the food is great, but because it’s consistently great.

Second, the work is a process, and that process lasts a lifetime. Every time you gain a new plateau, a massif of unrealized potential soars above you. In this sense, you never “arrive,” once and for all, on the mountaintop.

The revolutionary paradigm shift the intellectual world requires – the new Copernican Revolution – is to leave behind the notion of mathematics as an unreal, abstract world of potentiality while physics is the real, concrete world of actuality. The current paradigm says: mathematics unreal, physics real. The new paradigm says: mathematics real (noumenal, ontological), physics phenomenal, concerned with appearances, but not real in itself.

Of what use is unrealized divinity to anyone? If he is unconscious of his higher self, is a man any better off? The link of being linked with God potentially is not enough. It must also be personally discovered, felt, known, and demonstrated in living activity.

It brought Duran back to his childhood, where he’d seen a lot of things kids weren’t meant to see and some stuff beyond that. It had been like a tour of duty, his childhood, a state of mind to be endured. His senses had been alive then, that was for sure. So much unrealized potential, so many dreams of who he could be and what he’d do when he got there.

Think about what you think about is much more than a clever grouping of words. It’s largely the difference between maximized and unrealized potential.

We have fabulous powers and potentials. Some are muted, unrealized, and immanent. Others glimmer brilliantly about us. All around are people and policies, circumstances and conventions, contingencies and conceptions that may nurture and emancipate these powers or that may crush and degrade them. (7)

Epstein was one of thousands, if not millions, of people—undoubtedly mostly men—who’ve been suckered into thinking a machine was a potential date.

potential unrealized turns to pain.

It might be the noisy troublemakers who disappear, first, when the institution you serve falters and shrinks. But it’s the invisible who will be sacrificed next. Someone hiding is not someone vital. Vitality requires original contribution. Hiding also does not save the conforming and conventional from disease, insanity, death and taxes. And hiding from others also means suppressing and hiding the potentialities of the unrealized self. And that’s the problem.

Similarly, effective recovery is unwinding the natural potential you were born with out of your unconscious. This is your innate potential which may be, as yet, unrealized because of your childhood trauma.

But Freud was also wary of art's tendency to confuse reality and unreality. If Leonardo was a neurotic, then he needed to be cured. Freud, like his near-contemporary Wölfflin, was biased towards order and composition: composition of the artwork, composition of the personality. This bias supported a sequestering and marginalization of avant-garde art, whose basic principle was mistrust of composition. But then Freud was not an avant-garde thinker. Like Aby Warburg, he saw the potential for disorder in the human personality but sought to contain that potential.

Activating unconscious content is important because the unconscious contains unrealized potentials, which if discovered and integrated into one’s consciousness, can result in a personal transformation. To discover and nourish these potentials within Campbell called the “pathway to bliss”. Myths of individuals undergoing heroic adventures as they attempt to actualize their higher potentials and find their own unique pathway to bliss are abundant in many cultures throughout history. While these myths vary in detail depending on their time and place of origin, they share a common pattern which Joseph Campbell coined the “myth of the hero’s journey”.

What makes a bad idea bad? There’s the bad idea that’s so crazy that nobody will go along with it, rejected immediately, like expired milk. That bad idea’s not dangerous—it safely remains in the realm of unreality, dismissed out of hand. No, the truly bad idea is powerful because it convinces those who know it’s bad to go along with it. Because there’s a chance, however remote, for deliverance. Long odds make improbable success more attractive, even romantic. A bad idea with potential. Now, that’s my kind of bad idea.

In the guv, we train the young people to do mindless tasks until they can supervise other young people doing mindless tasks. There's an actual talent pool there if only we’d develop it.

Louis's reign was one of largely unrealized potential. The king of France was born with every advantage. He was diligently educated and admired.The first three decades of his life were spent in the protective care of an extremely competent mother, who bequeathed him the largest, strongest, most stable kingdom in Europe. The depth of anguish that resulted from his first crusade, and his obvious desire to redeem himself through good works, was so poignant that his subjects generously forgave him the disaster and shame. The world respected his suffering and looked to him as a moral compass. For a brief, exalted period he made good on the principles he so piously espoused. He made peace with his neighbors, fed the poor, dispensed justice to the best of his ability. He built the exquisite Sainte-Chapelle. But in the end he used all of that trust, goodwill, and deference not to improve his subjects' well-being about which he professed to care so much, but as an excuse to lead them to a ghastly, fetid plain in Tunisia with the intent of annihilating an alien culture for the greater glory of God.

By making the vision of God and the contemplative life the highest aim of life, by emphasizing the spiritual as godly and withdrawal from the world as holy, the middle ages in a sense surrendered the world to the devil. The world and matter were either to be tightly governed by spirit or to be renounced, or both. Sacerdotal celibacy was emblematic of the fact that the kingdom of God and the common life were incompatible. The kingdom had to be superimposed upon the world; it could govern the world, but it could not coincide with the world. The Reformation doctrines of justification by faith, the priesthood of all believers, and the Christian calling and vocation made possible the potential coincidence of the kingdom and the world as an historical objective, not, of course, to be fully realized in this life but to be approximated and the proper goal of historical activity. Thus the Reformation was a liberation and the promise of life, but a promise thus far unrealized.

That's the hardest thing to cope with when a young person dies—especially when they've been murdered. The unfulfilled dreams, the unrealized potential. The people close to them—family, friends—thought they had so much time to make up for mistakes, plenty of time down the road to tell that person they loved them. Suddenly that time is gone.

The paradigm shift creates an awakening of the self, where what was previously unexpressed and unrealized is now awakening in someone, potentially turning their entire world and relationships upside down. People may not just be waking up to their nonmonogamous desires or orientation, but also aspects of their sexuality, important identities or forms of oppressions that have previously been denied, exiled or completely unacknowledged. An attachment crisis gets catalyzed from the transition into nonmonogamy.

the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one’s death anxiety.

Life is like a game; strive to be the boss, not just an NPC.

Potential is untapped power, not defined solely by past performance, Potential is a latent ability, not useful until put to purposeful action, Potential is a hidden capacity, not just a measure of immediate success, Potential is unrealized aptitude, not limited by circumstances. Potential is a dormant talent, not realized without effort, Potential is a seed of possibility, a gateway to greatness not yet fully explored.

Having knowledge but not applying it is like begging for unrealized potential.

HISTORY OF NIGERIA Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and the world’s eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption, and an ailing economy. Toyin Falola, a leading historian intimately acquainted with the region, and Matthew Heaton, who has worked extensively on African science and culture, combine their expertise to explain the context to Nigeria’s recent troubles, through an exploration of its pre-colonial and colonial past and its journey from independence to statehood. By examining key themes such as colonialism, religion, slavery, nationalism, and the economy, the authors show how Nigeria’s history has been swayed by the vicissitudes of the world around it, and how Nigerians have adapted to meet these challenges. This book offers a unique portrayal of a resilient people living in a country with immense, but unrealized, potential. TOYIN FALOLA is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include The Power of African Cultures (2003), Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria, 1945–1965 (2004), and A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir (2004). MATTHEW M. HEATON is a Patrice Lumumba Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He has co-edited multiple volumes on health and illness in Africa with Toyin Falola, including HIV/AIDS, Illness and African Well-Being (2007) and Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa (2007). A HISTORY OF NIGERIA

The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so backward relative to what was available in Europe and the United States, so large gains could be reaped by reallocating resources to the industrial sector, even if all this was done inefficiently and by force. Before 1928 most Russians lived in the countryside. The technology used by peasants was primitive, and there were few incentives to be productive. Indeed, the last vestiges of Russian feudalism were eradicated only shortly before the First World War. There was thus huge unrealized economic potential from reallocating this labor from agriculture to industry. Stalinist industrialization was one brutal way of unlocking this potential. By fiat, Stalin moved these very poorly used resources into industry, where they could be employed more productively, even if industry itself was very inefficiently organized relative to what could have been achieved. In fact, between 1928 and 1960 national income grew at 6 percent a year, probably the most rapid spurt of economic growth in history up until then. This quick economic growth was not created by technological change, but by reallocating labor and by capital accumulation through the creation of new tools and factories. Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy.

This is the power of hard work. You suddenly realize you can do things you never thought you could do. You have power you never knew you had. There are endless stories of people who have been told, “You can’t, you won’t, you shouldn’t . . .” and who have overcome all the odds to do it anyway. Will you be one of those people? When you know who you are and what you are capable of achieving, why would you not finish first? Unrealized potential is some of the greatest pain in the world. If you are suffering or hurting, there is a way out—work hard. We are wired for hard work. Some of our greatest pain in life is because we are avoiding work. Build your life in the way of a champion. Be memorable. Be unique. Be different. Be special. Be the absolute best version of you. We get only one shot at this thing called life. If you’re not satisfied, there is a reason. It’s time to stop sitting around wasting time, waiting for what you want your life to be like; it’s time to start going after the amazing things you know are possible for you. It’s time to begin realizing the unique potential that has always been waiting for you.