Maximizing Your Potential

Whenever you compare your skills and abilities with others— either favorably or unfavorably—you forfeit the opportunity to become your potential because you try to make equal but different people the same. God created you with your specific blend of personality, skills, and abilities to fulfill your purpose. To maximize your life you must understand that you are unique, original, and irreplaceable. There is no comparison. 13. Opposition Satan has a way of snuffing out our great dreams by causing us to compromise. Most often this occurs because we give in to opposition. If he can’t stop us, he’ll push us to make a deal that is not God’s deal. Then we have no hope of attaining our goal because we are trying to accomplish our God-given vision with human values and specifications. Opposition is natural to life and necessary for flight. If everyone agrees with your dream, it’s probably a nightmare. Let’s say God gives you a vision to establish an adoption agency to place orphans of war. Because you don’t raise the funding as quickly as you had hoped, you become impatient and look for additional sources of revenue. When a local businessman offers his support, you eagerly accept his gifts. At first this arrangement works very well, but when the businessman demands a position on the agency’s board and begins to dictate who can be sponsored for adoption and who can be adoptive parents, you begin to wonder if your decision to accept large sums of money from him was a wise one. Yet, to safeguard the financial support you receive from him, you agree to his conditions. In so doing, you compromise your vision. To fulfill your vision in life you will usually have to swim upstream against the tide of popular opinion. Opposition is proof that you’re swimming, not floating. Compromised vision always kills potential because a vision that is attempted outside God’s guidelines cannot reveal His power. Take your dream and be willing to die for it. This is a requirement for maximizing potential. To maximize your life you must accept and understand the nature and value of opposition. 14. Society’s Pressure Finally, pressure from society’s standards and expectations is a threat to potential. The word society comes from the same Latin root as the word social, meaning “a companion,” and ends with the suffix ity, which means “the state or condition of something.” Thus, society means “the condition of being companions” and refers to the people we frequently associate with. The people we associate with, if they make judgments based on age, race, financial status, ancestry, and education, may pressure us to relinquish a dream because they do not believe we can accomplish it: “Your daddy was nothing, so I