Potential & Promise by Wilberg Rivera

Ideas, organizations, and investments, have potential; people have promise. It’s important to know the difference when trying to assign value to anything. Learning to evaluate potential and promise will help you determine where you should invest your resources and time.

Let’s start with potential. The marketplace for ideas is boundless. Everyone has ideas about how things are or should be. Often academia has the best process for sifting through complicated concepts though sometimes these interpretations can be theoretical and can fall apart when making contact with reality. I’m more prone to take a contrarian view because by the time something becomes a popular viewpoint, people are just going with the trajectory of it rather than doing the work to understand all the moving parts. I call his herd mentality where ideas are propelled without serious examination. The most important question to answer when evaluating the potential of an idea is to what evidence is there for this? Sometimes there isn’t much public evidence for certain views and at that point you should trust your intuition and compare it to what is already empirically known. Organizations can also be evaluated for potential. Two things are important when evaluating this: the purpose/mission of the organization and what kind of people are they able to hire not tied to financial incentives? What is it about the organization that makes it stand out in a field of competitors? Human capital is made up of ideas and people and it gets to the core of what makes an organization stand out. People want a sense of belonging because ultimately the money isn’t enough of an incentive to make someone go beyond the minimum. How do these organizations treat their employees and their mission partners? Do they cut corners or try to find ways to deliver value to the people or ideas that benefit from their work? These are all important questions. The best organizations aren’t always the most popular but the most stable and purpose driven. At the end of the day, you have to examine who is benefiting from the ideas, profit, or fulfilled potential. Investment potential is also important as that is how we individuals grow both in ability and treasure. Attention, money, and time are all investment inputs that deserve our careful consideration. All of these are limited and often the more diversified our investments are, the better. If you’re devoting resources to an endeavor, you should start by evaluating the potential return on investment. How long can returns be sustained? All investments are selfish but ultimately, you should learn to invest in a way that if you lose out you won’t feel bad about it. The goal of all investment should be growth, whether or not that is monetary.

Finally, promise is the ultimate capital humans have when they are just starting something. Promise is the hard to gauge in a person if you don’t know them that well. It takes time to draw out the attributes that makes someone promising at anything. Its starts with values and work ethic. How easily does this person give up when confronted with challenging situations in the way of their goals? Does this person know how to recognize a doomed situation versus something that simply requires more effort? How does the person react to failure? Can they win and lose gracefully? The people with most promise are the ones who are most transparent with their goals. Their ideas are loud and take space and if they’re wrong or fail they don’t become bitter. Its hard to develop grit or resilience if you have never failed at anything. There is a different between ambition and entitlement. Promise is ultimately about developing the wherewithal to meet your life purpose and being adaptable if things fall apart.