Potential Is A Drug
Why We Keep Starting Over and What It Costs Us
When I started writing this essay, I opened my Google Drive and searched for the phrase “New Life.”
Seven results.
“New Life Plan (draft.)”
“New Life Plan FINAL.”
“New Life (be serious yaar).”
All of them had the same fundamentals: a colour-coded schedule, some righteous bullet points about “non-negotiables,” maybe a macros tab, definitely a reading list. All of them fizzled out somewhere around Day 4.
If an anthropologist had to reconstruct my personality from my documents alone, they’d think I’d lived twelve completely different lives and abandoned eleven of them in week two.
You probably have your own version of this. The untouched planner that still smells like the store, the half-set-up Notion “Life OS,” the gym membership that gets most of its exercise from auto-debit.
There’s a very specific high in that first moment.
New Google Doc. Blank Notion page. A notebook with the plastic still on. You sit down “just to plan” and suddenly you’re rearranging headings, choosing fonts, calling a document “Q4 RESET”.
For a while, your entire life feels exfoliated. The page is clean. You feel clean. The future looks like a well-lit study vlog.
Nothing in the outside world has changed. You haven’t cooked a single vegetable, sent the scary email, had the hard conversation, opened your bank app. But staring at that unsullied plan calms something deep inside you. The outline of your life feels better than the lived version.
I used to feel a faint shame about this. Now I’m mostly fascinated by how predictable it is.
Because this isn’t just “I’m dramatic and I need change.” This high is biochemical.
Katherine Milkman, a behavioural scientist at Wharton, has spent years studying what she calls the fresh start effect. She and her co-authors looked at millions of datapoints like gym check-ins, goal-setting websites, Google searches for “diet”, and found the same pattern looping over and over. Right after certain dates that feel like psychological chapter breaks (Mondays, birthdays, New Year’s, new semesters), people are much more likely to start something aspirational: exercising, saving, learning.
You recognise the graph immediately:
sharp peak, then a sag.
The first week of January, the gym is full. By February, you can hear your own footsteps again.
Milkman’s argument is that these “temporal landmarks” let us mentally file our past self away. The old you was the one who ate badly and watched reels till 3 a.m. The new you has a conistency spreadsheet and a moral glow.
Fresh starts work. They really do make it easier to begin. But the dopamine that got you there has no idea how to survive a normal Wednesday.
The plan felt like a transformation. The work feels like… work.
And our brains are not great at tolerating that slump.
When the New Job Becomes Just Your Job
Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell wrote, back in the 70s, about something they called the hedonic treadmill. Our tendency is to adapt to good and bad things faster than we think we will. The lottery winner and the accident survivor both drift, eventually, toward their old baseline of happiness.
Sonja Lyubomirsky, who has basically dedicated her career to asking, “Why doesn’t good stuff make us happier for longer?”, keeps finding the same pattern: we get a lift, and then the lift fades.
The job you were breathless about on LinkedIn becomes… Outlook, Teams, badly formatted PowerPoints, one colleague who types like they’re punishing the keyboard.
The relationship that felt like a Karan Johar B-side becomes “What are we eating?”, “Did you pay the BESCOM bill?”, and two people scrolling in mutual silence.
The city you moved to for adventure becomes traffic, rent, and your usual problems, just with better coffee.
The gym stops being a glow-up montage in your head and becomes a room with harsh lighting and a trainer who keeps saying “last two reps” when he’s lying.
This is hedonic adaptation in action. The extraordinary becomes background music. It’s not a sign that your life choice was wrong. It’s a sign that your nervous system is doing its job: normalising whatever you expose it to repeatedly.
Progress lives in this very unremarkable middle stretch. Most of us hate that.
We’re so used to associating change with intensity, big decisions, dramatic “I’ve had enough” moments, aesthetic vision boards, that when progress shows up dressed as “I did the same thing again on a boring day,” we don’t recognise it. We call it a rut. We go hunting for a new high.
The Girl in Your Head and the Girl Who Has to Wake Up Tomorrow
Psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius gave us this beautiful phrase: possible selves.
Possible selves are all the versions of you that live rent-free in your mind. Who you might be, who you hope to be, who you’re terrified you’ll become.
There’s the self who wakes up at 6, lifts, drinks water from opaque bottles, answers emails within 24 hours, and has a basic handle on her taxes.
The self who has a book in bookstores and doesn’t break out in hives when someone says “can you send us a bio?” The self who has a calm, kind relationship with her body and doesn’t treat the weighing scale like a referendum on her worth.
These selves are not useless fantasies. Markus and Nurius argue that they’re how we organise our hopes and fears. They give the present some direction: “I want to move closer to that; I desperately don’t want to move closer to that.”
The trouble starts when your favourite version of you only lives in conditions you do not actually have.
The girl in your head has a silent house, a perfectly optimised morning routine, a manager who respects boundaries, a nervous system that isn’t fried, and absolutely no one texting her, “Can you talk? It’ll only take five minutes,” which we know is a lie.
She exists in HD.
You exist in patchy Wi-Fi and 4G.
Every time you try to move towards her, reality intrudes. Your mother calls. Your knee hurts. Your boss prepones your review. The sink is full. Blinkit delivers the wrong thing. Your period shows up early. The friend you were waiting to hear from sends a lukewarm, semi-dismissive response and your entire sense of self-esteem jumps into a dustbin.
The possible self in your head has never dealt with any of this. Of course, she’s more appealing than the you who has to answer her own doorbell.
Markus and Nurius say possible selves do two things: they motivate us, and they give us a way to judge ourselves. The judging is where things curdle. If the imaginary you is too perfect, you start using her as a stick to beat the current you with.
You’re not just late. You’re late and not that girl.
You didn’t just skip a workout. You skipped a workout and proved you’re not serious about your life.
It becomes less “this is the direction I want to walk in” and more “this is the woman I am constantly failing to be.”
At which point, staying in the land of manifestations starts to feel safer than actually taking any steps at all. The possible self remains pristine. The real self never has to be confronted.
“She Has So Much Potential” (And Now What)
If you grew up anywhere near the Indian middle-class meritocracy machine, you know this sentence:
“She has so much potential.”
We throw it around like a compliment. We write it in school notebooks. Teachers say it at PTMs. It’s often code for “seems bright but isn’t there yet.”
Psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleague Claudia Mueller ran a simple experiment that explains why this kind of praise is so poisonous. They gave a bunch of eleven-year-olds some puzzles and then praised them in two different ways.
Group A: “You must be smart at this.”
Group B: “You must have worked hard.”
Then they gave the kids a choice between easier puzzles that would guarantee success and harder puzzles that would actually teach them something.
The “you’re smart” kids ran toward safety. The “you worked hard” kids went hunting for challenge.
When the psychologists deliberately gave everyone a really tough set of puzzles, the smart kids cracked. They enjoyed it less. They gave up faster. When later asked to report their scores, a surprising number literally lied and inflated their performance to protect the “I am intelligent” image.
The effort kids weren’t having the time of their lives either, but they stuck around. They saw difficulty as a step in the right direction, not humiliation.
Dweck has spent decades since then exploring what she calls fixed versus growth mindsets. A fixed mindset treats ability as innate: you either have it or you don’t. A growth mindset treats ability as changeable: you can get better with practice.
If you’ve grown up marinated in “you’re so bright,” “you’re gifted,” “you’ll do something big,” you end up living in a very expensive cage.
Because then every hard thing becomes a test. Mess up once and the jury in your head bangs the gavel: you were a fraud all along.
It becomes much more tempting to stay in your comfort zones, where people keep saying nice things about your potential, than to enter arenas where you will unavoidably look average for a while.
Planning lets you stay in the compliments. Doing forces you to risk the silence.
It’s not that you don’t want to grow. It’s that growth requires you to be visibly unskilled in public for longer than your ego can comfortably tolerate.
Much easier to open a new document and rename it “New Life Plan: FINAL (updated).”
Perfectionism Is Fucking You Up
Perfectionism doesn’t always look like colour-coded notes and a spotless room. Often it looks like your sink full of dishes at 1 a.m. because you couldn’t start your real work until everything felt “right,” and now you’re exhausted and still haven’t done the thing that actually matters.
Psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett have a much harsher definition of perfectionism than the one we coyly use in interviews. For them, it’s a personality style defined by impossible internal standards, ruthless self-criticism, and tying your sense of worth to whether you’ve matched some imaginary ideal.
They and their colleagues talk about the “procrastinating perfectionist”, which is specific kind of person who deeply cares about doing things well and therefore…doesn’t start. Or starts and then abandons the effort at the first sign of mess.
Most of us underestimate how violent perfectionism is. You make one mistake in a deck and your inner voice goes straight to character assassination. You miss two days at the gym and your brain declares the entire fitness journey a sham. You fumble one line in a presentation and your body reacts like you’ve been publicly stoned.
It’s not simply “high standards.” It’s all-or-nothing thinking. If it’s not exceptional, it’s worthless. Which, if you step outside your own skull for half a second, is a completely deranged way to approach human development.
Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill did a meta-analysis a few years ago and found perfectionism rising across generations. Young people today are reporting higher levels of three different kinds of perfectionism: toward the self, toward others, and, my personal favourite hell category, the belief that others are demanding perfection from you.
Put that inside a culture of Instagram, LinkedIn, hustle porn, and everyone posting only their best angles, and it’s no wonder that so many of us cling to potential. Potential is the one place where perfection is still intact.
The future you has done everything right.
The present you can’t load the washing machine correctly on the first try.
So the present you keeps subcontracting her life to a future self who never actually shows up.
The Tyranny of “Keeping Your Options Open”
Zoom out even more.
We live in a moment that worships optionality. The educated, English-speaking Indian twenty-something today is told, implicitly and explicitly, to keep all doors open as long as possible. Don’t “close yourself off” too early. Don’t pick a lane. Don’t get “stuck.”
Economist and philosopher Barry Schwartz called this the paradox of choice, the idea that more options don’t make us freer; they just make us more paralysed. More choices mean more comparison, more potential regret, more pressure to optimise.
Mihir Desai wrote about Harvard MBAs living under what he called the tyranny of optionality. They end up structuring their entire careers to preserve maximum flexibility, and then discovering they’d constructed lives full of exits and no actual home.
You don’t need to be at Harvard to feel this. In our version, it looks like:
Doing a degree you don’t care about because “it keeps lots of paths open.”
Taking jobs that look good on LinkedIn rather than ones you actually want to be good at.
Hovering in situationships because committing would mean you can’t keep flirting with the fantasy of someone more exciting.
At some level, it’s rational. In a precarious economy, with insane urban costs and very visible inequality, you want optionality. You want the ability to pivot. You don’t want to be caught on a sinking ship.
But as a personality style, “I keep my options open” can easily become code for “I don’t build anything long enough to let it change me.”
Duckworth would call that an under-committed life. High on exploration, low on depth.
Potential fits very neatly into this culture. You get to feel like you could do many things. You don’t have to sit with the grief of choosing one direction over others.
The problem is: skills compound. Trust compounds. Love compounds. Reputation compounds. Depth is, annoyingly, what makes everything easier and more interesting over time.
And depth is only born in the middle.
Grit Is Not “Rise and Grind”; It’s “You Showed Up on a Bad Day”
Angela Duckworth’s work on grit got colonised by LinkedIn motivational posters, but the original insight is much more…obvious?
She followed West Point cadets, Spelling Bee contestants, students, employees. Across all these groups, the people who achieved the outcomes we care about weren’t the ones with the highest test scores or the biggest initial hype. They were the ones who could keep showing up for one goal over a long period, even when they were bored, even when they’d failed, even when nobody was clapping.
Grit, as she defines it, has two pieces: perseverance of effort and consistency of interests. Put crudely: you keep working, and you don’t change your mind every four minutes.
It’s not “never quit ever.” People pivot. People change fields. Duckworth is not advocating for staying in abusive jobs or doomed relationships. She is saying that if you want to build something substantial, you cannot switch objectives every time the middle gets uncomfortable.
Anders Ericsson, the psychologist whose work underlies all the pop-science about “10,000 hours,” made a similar point. People who become truly skilled don’t just repeat things mindlessly; they engage in what he called deliberate practice. Slow, targeted, feedback-driven work at the edge of their ability.
Deliberate practice doesn’t feel like a montage. It feels like irritation and micro-failure. It feels like writing a paragraph, hating it, rewriting it. It feels like doing the same movement under a coach’s eye, again and again, while your muscles shake and your pride hurts.
I have never read anyone who said, “I loved deliberate practice. It was such a great experience.” Because it’s NOT. It’s terrible! What they say, in different words, is: “I loved who I slowly became because I stuck with it.”
You do not get that from potential. You only get that from progress. And progress is, nine times out of ten, boring when you are inside it.
So What Does Growing Up Around This Actually Look Like?
Here’s the part of the essay where I’m supposed to give you a framework. I don’t have one. If I had a five-step system, I would have sold it to a productivity app by now.
What I do have are a few working principles I keep coming back to, mostly because my own life keeps breaking whenever I ignore them.
I am learning that fresh starts are not sacred. They’re just a tool.
Use them the way you’d use a double espresso: to power the first concrete, unsexy steps of something you actually want. Sign the form. Schedule the session. Block the calendar. Move money into the SIP. Tell one person you trust what you’re trying to do.
Don’t use them as periodic personality rebrands to avoid the middle.
I am learning that “staying” has to be embarrassingly specific.
“I’m going to be more disciplined” is nothing. It’s words. Milkman’s research on the fresh start effect is clearest when she talks about implementation intentions. The boring details of when, where, how.
“I will write my Substack essay on Sunday afternoons, even if it’s just a horrid draft,” is different from “I will write more.”
“I will lift on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, after work, for 45 minutes,” is different from “I will get fit this year.”
The middle starts to exist the moment you have a place to stand inside it.
I am learning to expect the crash.
If you know hedonic adaptation is coming, you don’t interpret boredom as a cosmic sign. You treat it like weather. You don’t rage at the sky for raining. You decide whether you’re the sort of person who carries an umbrella.
The day your gym feels pointless, your relationship feels ordinary, your job feels like admin work, that day is not proof about whether you chose wrong. It’s proof about whether you know how to keep walking when there are no fireworks.
I am learning to be seen in an unfinished state.
This is the part perfectionism hates. Show your work while it’s still ordinary. Publish the blog before you’re a Thought Leader. Say “I’ve started strength training” when your body looks exactly the same. Tell your friends you’re trying to spend differently when your account balance still looks tragic.
If you wait to be impressive before you show up, you will never show up. You will live and die inside the clean page.
I am learning to choose one thing to be bad at for a long time.
One domain where your explicit goal is not excellence but endurance. The thing you do that makes no sense to your CV, that doesn’t produce content, that doesn’t get you praise. The thing you do because you want to know what it feels like to be a beginner, then a little less terrible, then quietly competent.
It could be lifting. It could be Carnatic music. It could be longform writing. It could be managing people. It could be learning how to actually rest.
The point is not that it becomes your “thing.” The point is that you train yourself to survive the middle in at least one place in your life.
The Radical Move: Stay
The older I get, the more I’m moved by people who are very slightly bored and still keep turning up.
The friend who has been in therapy every week for six years.
The colleague who didn’t jump funds every year and now genuinely understands an asset class.
The couple whose love story wouldn’t make it to a Netflix script but who know how to apologise and reorder biryani after a fight.
The woman who has been lifting since 2018, and now her knees work and she carries her own suitcase.
None of these lives look as glamorous as potential. They don’t photograph as well as the before/after transformation shot. They don’t come with trumpets.
But they feel different. Less drama, more doing.
Barry Schwartz would say they’ve voluntarily reduced their options in some areas so that something real could grow. Markus and Nurius would say their possible selves have been forced to reconfigure around the person they actually are, not the fantasy they perform. Duckworth would say they’ve chosen a few “ultimate concerns” and learned to endure the boring bits. Lyubomirsky would say they’re working with hedonic adaptation instead of against it, finding ways to vary and appreciate what they already have, rather than endlessly trading it in.
I would just call it adulthood.
Not the grim, “give up and stop dreaming” adulthood our teenage selves were terrified of. The gentler kind, where you realise that someone has to put water into the fridge or there will be nothing cold to drink, and maybe that someone can be you.
You don’t have to stop loving fresh notebooks. You don’t have to stop making playlists called “New Era.” You don’t have to give up on your dramatic Google Doc titles. God knows I won’t.
But the next time you feel that rush of “this time I will change everything,” ask yourself:
What am I willing to keep doing when this rush fades?
Can I tolerate being ordinary at this thing for a while? Can I bear to be my current self, not my fantasy self, while I do it? Can I sit in the middle long enough for something to take root?
Potential is the high of the clean page. It is delicious and addictive and sometimes very necessary.
Progress is whatever you keep doing once the page is full of scratches, the margins are crooked, and you’re slightly embarrassed by your own handwriting.
One lets you pretend you’re a different person for an evening.
The other is how, slowly, on hundreds of unremarkable afternoons, you actually become her.
Things I read to write this:
Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, & Jason Riis: the “fresh start effect” people.
Sonja Lyubomirsky: patron saint of “why can’t we stay happy for longer?”
Hazel Markus & Paula Nurius: the possible selves duo.
Claudia Mueller & Carol Dweck: “praise for intelligence vs effort” study.
Paul Hewitt & Gordon Flett: chronicling the many ways perfectionism wrecks us.
Thomas Curran & Andrew Hill: perfectionism is rising, and no, you weren’t imagining it.
Barry Schwartz: wrote The Paradox of Choice and ruined supermarket aisles for me.
Mihir Desai: the one who pointed out that infinite optionality feels terrible.
Angela Duckworth: grit.
Anders Ericsson: “deliberate practice” and the deeply unsexy mechanics of mastery.