The Weight of Unrealized Promise
What happens when you stop protecting who you might become and start being who you are
I used to think potential was a crown. Turns out it was a shell.
There’s this scene in Burnt where Bradley Cooper’s character spends hours shucking oysters as some kind of penance - blade in, twist, separate. I must’ve watched that scene a dozen times because I knew I needed my own version of it. No applause. No audience. Just me, early mornings, and a quiet street.
So I set my alarm for 2:40 a.m. Rolled out of bed into the same uniform every day, caught the same night bus to a deserted station, then walked three kilometers to the depot. Bus driving wasn’t a career move. It was a confession. Every single step felt like I was finally admitting:
Not the entrepreneur I’d bragged about being.
Not the writer who somehow got paid €5000 EUR to write 20 words... one time.
Not the husband I promised I’d be - I completely failed at that.
The only thing I’ve managed to do halfway right is being a dad.
The truth? I peaked early. And I was so caught up in my own bullshit that I didn’t even notice the descent had already started.
Blade in. Twist. Separate.
Then came the warehouse job. Pallets. Labels. Boxes everywhere. Stock in, stock out. Didn’t need to be a genius - just had to show up. That became my daily shucking: pry away another layer of ego, chuck out what was rotten, keep what was actually edible.
Blade in. Twist. Separate.
Nothing glamorous about it. Definitely nothing you’d put on Instagram. But it was real. And real was the only thing that didn’t just collapse under its own weight.
When everything in my life finally crumbled, I tried to hold onto all of it. The titles. The dreams. All those stories I’d been telling myself and everyone else. But it was like trying to clutch sand—the harder I gripped, the faster it all ran through my fingers. In the end, I kept only two fistfuls. My eldest in one hand. My youngest in the other. Everything else? I just let it wash back into the tide.
Blade in. Twist. Separate.
This is what happens after you stop worshipping potential and start actually carving out a life you can taste.
Eat what’s real.
Let the shell fall where it may.
The Inheritance Nobody Wants
There’s this video I saw a few years back and I still can’t shake it.
Credit: linkyear.com
A whole crowd of teenagers lines up on a field, shoulder to shoulder, backpacks dumped on the ground. Someone’s put a hundred-dollar bill at the finish line. Deal is simple: first one there gets the money.
But before the race actually starts, the announcer begins asking questions:
“Take two steps forward if your parents are still married.”
Two steps. Some laughing. The line starts shifting.
“Take two steps if you grew up with a father figure in the home.”
More movement. More separation happening.
“Take two steps if you had private education. If you had a tutor. If you never worried about your phone being shut off. If you never had to help pay the bills. If you never wondered where your next meal would come from.”
Step by step, the whole pack just fractures. Some kids surge way forward. Others stay completely rooted at the starting line. By the time the whistle actually blows, half the race has already been run before anyone takes a single real step.
The announcer doesn’t soften it at all: nothing you did earned you this head start. None of it was your choice. It was simply given to you.
And that’s where I began. Not at the back of the pack. Not even at the starting line. Halfway up the bloody field already. Parents still together. Always had food on the table. Healthy body. A mind that just seemed to pick things up quickly without much effort.
People called it potential.
But potential’s a strange inheritance, isn’t it? Looks like a gift when you’re young. Acts like a debt when you get older. You get praised for advantages you didn’t create, then you end up crushed by the weight of trying to live up to them.
The labels came fast:
“Tall.”
“Strong.”
“Handsome.”
“Smart.”
Each one sounded like a crown when I was young. But together? They welded into a cage. A prison of expectation that got built before I ever had the chance to figure out who I actually wanted to be.
The Three Deaths of Promise
Potential doesn’t just vanish in one blow. It unravels in stages. Like watching a rope fray strand by strand. Each cut is small enough to ignore in the moment until one day you realize you’re just holding threads that can’t carry any weight anymore.
The Calendar Shock
The first death arrives quietly. But it cuts deep when it finally hits.
It’s the morning you wake up and realize your potential has an expiration date. Like finding milk that’s been left too long in the fridge. You’re scrolling LinkedIn at forty+ish and you feel it right in your gut: the world doesn’t actually care what you could do anymore. It only asks one question: what have you done?
The announcements just keep piling up in your feed. Promotions. New ventures. Fresh titles. Each one’s a reminder that your “someday” has already been claimed by someone else’s “today.”
Blade in. Twist. Separate.
The Overtaking
The second death? That one tastes way bitterer.
It’s watching the kids you once pitied - the ones without all the labels, without the trophies - just pass you by. They didn’t need perfect. Turns out they only needed real. They built stuff. They failed. They tried again. And while you were busy polishing your image, they were actually pouring foundations.
Now their ordinary lives look pretty extraordinary next to your uncashed promise.
They were free because no one ever expected them to shine.
You were trapped because everyone did.
Blade in. Twist. Separate.
The Mirror Moment
The last death is the Hardest one.
It doesn’t come from the outside—not from comparisons, not from timelines—but from your own reflection. Three in the morning. The house is asleep. Bathroom light humming above you. You catch your face in the mirror and you see a stranger looking back.
Not the prodigy anymore. Not the promise.
Just some bloke carrying debt he can’t repay: “could have been,” “should have been,” “once was.”
The gap between the story you told everyone and the life you’ve actually lived has grown into this ocean. And you’re just left there staring across waters you know you’ll never swim.
Blade in. Twist. Separate.
The Unraveling
You’d think after all that, the story ends. But endings are merciful. What actually comes instead is this slow unraveling.
Here’s the real curse of potential: it isn’t even failure that kills you. It’s the endless daydream of what you might do while your hands just stay still.
It’s like standing there with a bow drawn, arrow trembling, waiting and waiting for that perfect shot that never comes. Year after year, the gap between could and did just stretches wider. Until it’s not even a gap anymore but this massive canyon. And you’re still standing there on the ledge, knuckles white, bowstring cutting into your fingers.
Still fucking waiting... for perfect.
Blade in. Twist. Separate.
Five years ago, my life finally snapped. A failed venture forced me right out of the story I’d been desperately clinging to. I HAD to take 2 jobs that didn’t require any resume of brilliance: bus driver and warehouse worker.
At first, honestly, it felt like exile. Like punishment. Like proof of how far I’d actually fallen.
But staying? That was my choice.
And I didn’t know it back then, but stepping down turned out to be the first real step forward I’d taken in years.
These jobs killed my ego inch by inch. Every bus route, every warehouse shift just cracked another layer off my “I’m too good for this” shell.
Blade in. Twist. Separate.
Each day scraped away another illusion until there was only the naked human left.
No genius. No prodigy. Just a hi vis vest with a timecard. A steering wheel. A pallet jack.
And in that stripping away, I actually found freedom.
The freedom wasn’t in climbing higher. It was in finally having permission to start low. To begin again. To be ordinary. To be real for once.
I was forced to think about that tortoise and hare story a bit differently. Maybe the hare’s problem wasn’t even arrogance. Maybe it was being too aware of how fast it could run. The tortoise won because it never wasted time thinking about what it could do - it just did what it could.
Slow. Steady. Real.
From Promise to Pain
Look, this wasn’t just about work.
Life stripped everything away, piece by piece, like someone pulling blocks from a Jenga tower until the whole thing finally topples. First went my business - the one us “high potential” people always say is going to be great. Then my marriage broke apart. Turns out even love can’t survive on promises alone.
Then my mom took her own life.
Suddenly, all that thinking about living up to my potential meant absolutely nothing. My mom was dead. That’s when you really learn what’s real and what’s just pretty words about tomorrow that never comes.
Now I watch my father fight cancer. They gave him 13% survival odds. And I’m learning about this completely different kind of potential: not the potential to achieve something, but the potential to just endure. He is my hero - if I could be just a fraction of who he is.
Life teaches you what actually matters. But bloody hell, its lessons hurt. When everything you thought made you special is gone, you find out what’s actually important.
And it’s never the potential you were born with. It’s what you do with today.
The Freedom in Falling
After my business died, then my marriage, I started seeing a therapist who told me something that genuinely changed everything:
“Stop saying ‘failure.’ Say ‘struggle’ instead.”
Sounds simple, yeah? But it wasn’t just playing with words. It was giving myself permission to be human. To be messy. To be unfinished and not have that mean I was broken.
That’s when I finally saw it clearly: I wasn’t actually afraid of failing. I was trapped by potential.
So I did the one thing that seemed completely mental: I chose jobs where I had no special talent whatsoever. Bus driver. Warehouse worker. Jobs that my “gifted” self would’ve laughed at years ago.
Here’s the weird thing about stepping down: it actually sets you free.
When no one expects you to be amazing, you can just focus on getting better. When you don’t have to protect some genius reputation, you can take actual risks. When you stop carrying around tomorrow’s promises, you can finally build something today.
The Identity Collapse
Freedom has a price though: killing the person you thought you’d be.
Potential isn’t who you are. It’s just raw material. Like ore still in the ground or stone that hasn’t been cut - completely worthless until you actually break it down and build something real with it.
Driving buses taught me something about potential: it actually gets worse with time.
Every year you spend protecting your “gifted” identity, that gap between what you could do and what you’ve actually done just gets bigger and bigger. Until one day you realize you can’t cross it anymore.
I saw this pattern everywhere. Universities. Companies. Startups. The “high potential” people were always the most stuck. Like archers who never shoot their arrow.
Why?
Because picking one target means missing all the others, doesn’t it? And when everyone’s told you your whole life that you could hit anything, hitting something specific feels like you’re failing at everything else.
It hurts to change. Every time I start my bus or ship a pallet, I feel the old me dying a bit more. When “gifted” is your whole identity, every single below average task feels like proof you were actually a fraud.
But here’s the thing about driving buses: being “gifted” doesn’t matter at all. Showing up matters. Actually doing the work matters.
Here’s the trap: the very thing that was supposed to make you special ends up being the thing holding you back. Like a ship that’s too afraid to leave the harbor.
But ships that never sail don’t just sit there looking pretty. They rust. They rot. They sink anyway.
Killing who you could be makes room for who you actually are.
And that space between the two? That’s where real life actually happens.
Five years of driving buses and shipping little boxes taught me something pretty fundamental: the only potential worth anything is the potential we’re willing to destroy today.
Everything else is just stories we keep telling ourselves about tomorrow.
Potential is probably the heaviest thing you’ll ever carry. And here’s the beautiful thing about weight:
You can put it down literally anytime you want.
My alarm will go off tomorrow at 2:40 AM. I’ll wake up. Put on my uniform. Catch the night bus. Walk three kilometers to the depot in the dark through streets I know by heart now.
After driving people to places they themselves don’t want to go I will head to the warehouse. Ship some boxes. Do inventory. Nothing special. Nothing remotely remarkable.
And then I’ll come home.
At 14:45, my oldest will burst through the door, bags sliding off to the floor. My youngest will be not much after him, already launching into “I have a question” that had been brewing all day. And I’ll be there. Not thinking about being there. Not promising to be there someday.
Just there.
That’s what happened when I stopped protecting potential and started living real.
Blade in. Twist. Separate.
The shell falls. What’s left tastes like right now.