When I was doing an exit interview to a job I held as a mid-level executive in a manufacturing company, my boss told me that he had never had an employee with greater potential than I had. But, he wasn’t saying that as a compliment at all, because the rest of the interview was about how I had failed to live up to it.  I was leaving voluntarily to return to law school, so I wasn’t upset by what he said, but the sadness of it all is that I didn’t take it to heart either.

It really wasn’t until I began to get sober in 1983 that I really was able to fully understand what that guy had told me 13 years before. And it really wasn’t until I had to really buckle down to successfully complete a body for life challenge that I full put those ideas into practice. Here’s what I now know.

1. POTENTIAL is not an asset. Your potential is essentially the gap between your ability and what you produce in life! So, if you have lots of potential, that simply means you are either immature or underachieving.  Reducing potential by optimizing performance is the goal! Those who dwell on their potential, and who view it as a personal asset, are making a big mistake!

2. Good intentions, which some people also view as a a virtue or an asset, are neither one, and for much the same reason as potential. Good intentions alone are meaningless. Jesus told a quick story to illustrate a point. He said that a father had two sons and asked them both to work in his fields. One said he would do so gladly, but never did. The other said he would not, but did. Jesus asked, “Which one did the will of his father?” The answer was quite simply the one “who worked in the fields.” In other words, good intentions count for nothing, either in the kingdom or God or on earth!

Having watched and assessed the efforts of people over the last several years to do a successful challenge, I firmly believe that these two mindsets, that potential and good intentions will somehow translate into good results are major reasons why so many fail to complete a successful challenge.  In the power mindset tape, Bill Phillips talks about what mindsets will work and which won’t. Those who are focused on the negatives clearly fail, and that’s the major flawed mindset that Bill talks about. Those who are focused on future goals and the process to completing them will usually succeed. But those who get confused and instead of focusing on future goals,they focus on their own “attributes” seem to fail just as often as those who focus on negative things.

So, be optimistic; be enthusiastic, but above all be REALISTIC, and WORK HARD! That’s how you avoid these two pitfalls, along with realizing that they are not assets but potential liabilities to your success.