The Gap Between Potential and Proof - Ep. 12

Hey, welcome to another debrief session, Solar Reflection, where I unpack the lessons, patterns, and ideas that have stayed with me from recent conversations and from within my own journey. Today's debrief session is going to be on the gap between potential and proof. So one of the hardest parts of growth, whether that is in business, life, in a hobby, or anything, is feeling capable of something before there's any evidence. Right? So, like this is feeling something emerging internally, but the scoreboard still saying otherwise. My experience, and I know founders' experience, is that this is something that they experience constantly. You know, the question is how do you keep believing in yourself when your current results don't yet reflect your true capacity or your true potential? So I think people confuse their current output with their actual potential. So as humans, we're conditioned at a biological level to trust visible evidence. So we assume that our current results equals our current potential. But founders out there, we all know that growth is nonlinear. And the results often will lag behind development. This is true not only in business, but in really anything. And a parallel I've drawn recently to this is another golf parallel where I've been working on my swing, working on the craft at the range, putting in practice, yet on the course, during actual rounds, I've actually been playing worse than I have had been prior. And so the results are not there, but I know that my actual potential is completely different to the results that I'm getting. Other examples are founders, you know, becoming a CEO before revenue or results in the business actually reflect that. Or a speaker becoming powerful before having a big audience. So there's something important here is that invisible growth is still growth. And I experienced this with golf yesterday, at the time of this recording, this episode. Like I said, I've been playing worse, and my handicap actually went up in the last week, even though I feel like I was having breakthroughs in the evolution of my swing and in my practice sessions, my results on the course got worse. And so I knew that in golf, as it is true in business, that breakthroughs do look sudden externally. But internally, it's it's all about repetition, emotional regulation, your ability to have you know your subconscious pattern recognition. It's about decision making, it's about resilience. And a lot of that often will come quietly. And so yesterday I experienced what it was like for the results to actually come out for all of the stuff that I've been doing behind the scenes. And it was in the highest stakes of moment that I've ever had in a golf setting. So at the golf club I'm a member at, they had a tournament yesterday. It was four-man teams, uh member day where you can invite non-members to come and join, and you do a team golf game, and then at the end there's a playoff, they call a horse race. I didn't know what a horse race was until yesterday. And each hole in this horse race, and there's four of them, there's teams that are eliminated at the end of each hole until you're left with three going into the final hole, and at the end of that hole, a winner emerges. Now, no one except me and my team expected us to make this horse race, and I don't even think my team thought that we would win the entire thing. But at the end of everything yesterday, we won the playoff, the horse race. And for me, on a personal level, with this uh my golf journey and this, all of the pieces started coming together yesterday. All of the practice and the intention and the working on things behind closed doors, and myself knowing that my potential didn't match the results that I was having on the course during rounds, yesterday it finally came together, and I was able to string consistency when it mattered most. And so, externally, anyone there who was a part of that horse race who knew me thought that this was, and I assume, thought that this was out of nowhere. Actually, a guy there uh who I really like who runs a great barbecue restaurant in Kansas City, Slaps Barbecue. If you're in the KC area, definitely check that out. Their potato casserole is amazing. But he asked a guy on my team halfway through this horse race if I've been playing like this all day or it just came from nowhere. And when he said that, like, you know, that is what I'm talking about here. Externally, it is going to appear when you have that breakthrough, because as founders, we have to know and believe that that breakthrough is inevitable because we're doing the stuff behind the scenes, and we know what our potential is, and there is just a lag behind the results reflecting the potential that you know you have. And so when he said that, to him, this was out of the blue, out of nowhere. But to me, this was finally my performance catching up to my potential and my results. A good metaphor for this is the bamboo tree metaphor. So bamboo grows underground for years before it's ever visible above ground. You know, root systems are developing before any vertical growth happens, and so in business works similarly. Operational maturity develops before scale. Leadership capacity develops before opportunity arrives. Strong cultures are built internally, invisibly, before results become public. So I think it's key and it's important to remember that a lot of this growth is happening underground long before the world sees anything above the surface. Now, I know from experiencing this in business and golf and multiple other things throughout my life, that there is an emotional difficulty of delayed validation, right? Like the market rewards you after you've already become capable. And so that lag between you having those results and living up to that potential that you've always known, but that being reality and what is actually happening, that lag can create doubt. It sure has for me. And that's where founders can go down that dark rabbit hole of questioning themselves too early. I think this is where a lot of people, a lot of founders, quit too early, they pivot emotionally, they abandon the processes, they compare timelines to others, and they try and force their growth prematurely. This is not something that you can force. This is something that will happen on your own timeline, and that timeline probably won't be the same timeline that it happens for someone else, because no two situations and two people and two circumstances are the same. I think there's a lot of great things never were given the time to come to fruition because of pivoting or quitting early. So then there's that, how do you get through that plateau before you take the leap? Because the plateau might feel like stagnation. But what if they're actually consolidation? What if it's actually the nervous system integrating all of the complexity before being able to stabilize for a breakthrough? I think the most mature and successful founders and leaders that I've talked to understand the concept of delayed gratification. They understand that patience is not passive. Patience is more of an emotional stability during the invisible progress phase. The scoreboard often doesn't update until after the identity has already changed. We have a choice in this on what direction we go. I think most people stop because they can't emotionally tolerate the gap between effort and visible evidence. And the hardest part of growth is continuing to trust what you know is developing internally before the world can validate it externally. So keep going, keep pushing through, and just and keep believing that the breakthrough is going to happen. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And just stick to your process, stick to your development, keep going, because it will happen.