Is 60% of Your Potential Untapped?

How much of you are you actually using?

The Navy Seals have a concept called the 40% Rule. It’s about how your mindset affects your performance. Jesse Itzler explains it this way in his intriguing book, Living with a SEAL:

“When you think you’re done, you're only at 40% of what your body is capable of doing. That's just the limit that we put on ourselves.”

Itzler says almost everyone quits at the 40% point. They think they’re tapped out. But they have another 60% of unused potential.

I read somewhere else that people generally use only 65% of their potential, with a few as low as 20% or as high as 100%.

Here’s the point: We each develop a habitual pace—a routine level of effort and output—and that becomes our personal norm. Now and then we’ll have spurts of higher productivity as well as occasional slumps. But the law of averages soon prevails, and we regress to our individual mean. That’s what we come to expect from ourselves.

And you’re expecting too little.

I’m not saying you’re lazy. Or that you’re not busy. You may be hard-working, efficient, and smart. Let’s say you’re successful, hopefully you’re happy, and you might say, “I’m trying as hard as I can.” But I promise, you have amazing untapped abilities that are yours for the taking.

At this moment, you have the potential to make a quantum leap in performance. In certain areas of your life you can multiply your effectiveness and go from you to you². Whether you realize it or not, you’ve done that sort of thing before and you definitely can do it again.

Maybe you’re an entrepreneur. You might be an athlete, parent, corporate executive, or some lost soul trying to redirect your career. It doesn’t matter who you are.

You just need to choose the right goal. You need a sense of purpose—a tight aim toward something really big and important to you—to call forth a chunk of your potential that’s lying dormant.

A quantum leap goal functions like a growth hormone for performance. It strengthens you psychologically and brings out your best. It energizes you, toughens your spirit, and sharpens your eye for opportunities. It activates parts of you that otherwise lie idle.

The you² handbook states:

“Making a quantum leap means moving outside your mental boundaries. If you will rethink how you’re thinking, you can multiply your performance potential. You must let your desires guide you, instead of allowing yourself to be boxed in by perceived constraints.”

How much of your potential is going untapped? Change your mindset, and you’ll change what’s possible.