Potential Energy and Being Actually Self-actualized

You have a lot of potential, we are sometimes told by other people. For instance, the young may often demonstrate a certain knack for some abilities, be it sports, writing, painting or playing music. We can often – or at least think to – spot talent when we encounter it. Then as a parent, teacher, or friend, we try to encourage these people to capitalize on their talent, i.e. to become famous and make loads of money from it.

Yet the question is whether talent should or needs to be exploited for monetary and commercial reasons. Some call it vocation, or a gift of God, and when it comes to certain activities, these people are indeed substantially better than others at it. They seem to born with it, meaning that we think of it rather as a natural expression than a hard-earned sweat-and-brow effort.

I am thinking of Mozart, the fountain that simply brimmed over with talent and who could, perhaps at will or call, pour out his emotions in such a light, effortless yet constantly grandiose manner that the faces of the competition, i.e. other musicians, must have turned green like Irish pasture.

Although people make you believe that you can be or do anything under the sun that pleases you, in reality, there are many limitations. Mine is painting. I have tried (believe me I have), but not even stick people turn out to be what I intended or what they are supposed to be. Of course, I could work hard, take classes, draw and paint the life out of me, but I will never become the next Picasso (Although some of Picasso's work may look simple, you still have to know how to paint first before you can undertake your own sets of experiments.)

But, to return to my question, why should it be necessary to turn your talent (talents if you are even luckier) into a goldmine? Is it to convince the rest of the world that you have talent like on one of those scouting my country “got talent” shows? 

But then again, true talent or genius has almost always been exposed to mixed, polarized reviews. (I am still in shock that although some recognized and acknowledged its merits, Malick's masterpiece The Tree of Life was booed or walked out upon by others who should actually know better!) All this may come down, at least superficially, to how much money you can make, but then that would mean Roland Emmerich has more talent than Terrence Malick? Really?

To return to our main issue here, it should be your task or duty to not let your special talents to go to waste. In other words, to create what you know and do best and hence to refine and draw upon your given talents. Then, the pleasure that you have found in the artistic or athletic endeavor can (but not must!) be used in order to give pleasure to others, spectators or listeners. Whether they like it or not depends mostly on them and may not always reflect upon the quality of your work as long as you deem the work an honest reflection of yourself and your capabilities.

But let us say that the young talented person decides not to profit from his potential and merely writes and draws in his own corner ultimately for his own pleasure. We might feel disappointed, in extreme cases, even get angry with him because he did not reach the level of fame and fortune we thought he had in him. Why let it all go to waste?

And he might respond, well, what does potential really mean? I mean, we may agree on the matter of talent, but is the fact that I have talent (more so than you) not enough; do I need to prove it (and show it off) to others who might not give a damn anyhow? Do I need to suck the life out of it by making a 9 to 5 profession out of it?

Potential energy means that the energy contained is within it but we won't know for sure until it has been released or actualized. The atomic bomb has the capacity to wreak havoc but we did not fully know this until we actually dropped it (but we are told that our more modern versions are many times more devastating than the first ones and we hope to never find this out!).

That may work for physics, but is it the same for talent? Again, I am certain that talent is the first step and most of us, not being Mozart or Picasso, must work hard to fully develop, hone and ripen those skills. That is then the level of output. If you are keeping it within, you are letting it go to waste unused, the same way a battery has stored energy but if not put to the test resembles any other empty battery ready to be recycled.

At the same time, it could be like Kafka who kept his work mainly locked up and wished to have it destroyed after his death. Thank God, his friend Max Brod did not follow through with it because we would have been deprived of a great and unique voice of the century.

Yet nobody (that I know of) would say that Kafka had potential. He was, in fact, talented and like the aforementioned Mozart or to add Poe to the mix or actually any other host of geniuses, his actualization as an artist had little or nothing to do with money or even his audience; they did what they did best and through this act magically turned potential into self-actualization.