Maximizing Your Potential

Chapter Two

How To Become Your Potential What you have done is only a mere fraction of who you are.

Slowly the young man worked his way through the brush and the young trees that had grown up through the cracked foundation of the dilapidated house. Cobwebs filled openings where windows had once been and hornets’ nests clung to the scorched beams of the floor above. A partially burned-out staircase hovered in the corner and a broken oil lamp lay dashed on the first step. Years of dirt and debris littered the floor, with an occasional wildflower providing a discordant note of charm and warmth. At the base of the staircase, the young man halted. Dared he try to climb the stairs to the main floor above? He doubted the rotted wood would hold him, yet the desire to go higher impelled him cautiously on. For years he had wanted to explore this shell of a house, but his mother had strictly forbade it, reminding him that the forlorn gate to the fence that surrounded the property contained a faded “No Trespassing” sign and warning him that it was not safe. How long the house had stood this way, he didn’t know, for within his memory it had always been so. Today no one could stop him, however, for only a few hours before he had bought the land on which the house stood. Moving carefully from one step to another, testing each before putting his full weight upon it, the young man gingerly mounted the stairs. Here and there he skipped a step that threatened to give way beneath him. At the top, he paused to survey the charred remains that surrounded him. He stood at the end of a long room that appeared to have once been a kitchen. Broken pottery and twisted metal littered the floor. A warped candlestick lay on the edge of what must have been the family table. Here and there scraps of material waved in the breeze that blew through the paneless windows. Nearly one whole wall of the room was missing, gaping into a room beyond. Though he wondered what that room might reveal, a step in that direction quickly changed the explorer’s mind, for his foot went through the