Be All You Can Be: A Challenge to Stretch Your God-Given Potential (4 page)

I think there area three reasons why people do not become successful.

Many people just don’t feel the need to succeed
. These people are secure; they don’t need to prove anything. They’re happy, content, and they like what’s happening to them. But if success means becoming all that God intends us to be, and we’re satisfied with less than that, we not only fall short of God’s glory ourselves but we limit what others can be for him.

The greatest responsibility of leaders is that they not shortchange themselves, thereby shortchanging those whom they lead. If God has given a gift, we are to use it and succeed, so that we not only enhance the kingdom from our perspective but from our followers’ as well.

The second reason people do not succeed is that
they are afraid of success
. What are some of the reasons people fear success? Sometimes we are afraid because success puts pressure on us to continue to succeed. A person who gets straight As on a report card sets a pattern of achievement and must keep achieving. Often we just don’t want to be responsible, so we shrink from success.

People who have poor self-images will always shy away from success. Others don’t want to be successful because they don’t like to be lonely. They would rather be with the crowd; it’s lonely at the top. Risk is another reason; people don’t want to stick their necks out.

There are many more reasons, but the main point is that some people are afraid of success.

The third reason why many people fail is that they are suspicious of success. It’s as if they think that if you want to be successful, you certainly can’t be spiritual: Successful people can’t be humble. We’ve almost equated humility with poverty. Yet when I look through the Word of God, one of the things that impresses me most is that the Bible is chock-full of successful people who chose to enter into the arena of action and give themselves to a cause that would better humanity. They were successful in changing lives for eternity. Think of people like Joseph, Nehemiah, the apostle Paul, Joshua, David, and Abraham. Many of the men of the Bible were what we would consider to be successful. To fail to become all that God created you to become limits not only yourself but also those under your influence.

Let’s take each letter of the word success and make an acrostic. The first letter,
S
, stands for “select your goal.” The reason most people don’t succeed is simply that they really don’t know what they want out of life. The apostle Paul wrote, “One thing I do” (Phil. 3:13). He knew what he wanted to do. I heard a fellow say one time that success is the “progressive realization of a predetermined, worthwhile goal.” We have to know where we are going.

The goal is predetermined. Success is not an accident; it’s not luck or fate. It is predetermined.
Success is worthwhile
. Nothing is successful that does not contribute in a positive way to help people.
Success is continual
. It’s not an event but a journey, an ongoing process. It’s not an accolade that we receive for a race won or a job well done. Success is the positive result of steady forward movement.

Research shows that approximately 95 percent of us have never written out our goals in life, but of the 5 percent who have, 95 percent have achieved their goals. In 1953 at Yale University, 3 percent of the graduating class had specific, written goals for their lives. In 1975, researchers found that the 3 percent who wrote down their goals had accomplished more than the other 97 percent put together.

I wonder how much we don’t achieve because we don’t establish definite goals and put them in writing. I run into people all the time who don’t set definite goals because there are too many factors in life over which they have no control. There are physical limits to what we can do. I can only throw a ball so high and so far—beyond that maximum I have no control. But within the limit of my ability, I have total freedom. Determinism and free will are both a part of life, but it is better to make the most of what we can do than to bemoan what we cannot do.

The average person’s lifetime includes twenty years of sleeping, six years of watching television, five years of dressing and shaving, three years of waiting for others, one year on the telephone, and four months of tying shoes. To help you understand the importance of goals and to facilitate your own goal-setting, let me give you six important guidelines.

Your goal must include others
. No goal is worthwhile that is only for yourself. Set a goal big enough to include and help other people.

Your goal must be worthwhile
. There is no such thing as a successful frivolous goal.

Your goal must be clean
. If you don’t know where you are headed, a map will be of no use.

Your goal must be measurable
. You need a way to see if you are making any progress toward the goal.

Your goal must be expandable
. Don’t set your goals in concrete. If your goal is not expandable, it’s expendable. As we grow, we see the picture more clearly, and we continually need to “up” our goals. It’s a sad day when we realize we have achieved our goals and have nothing else to do.

Your goals must be filled with conviction
. Conviction is the unshaken confidence that the goal is worthwhile. It’s the fuel that pushes us to achieve.

Most people only use about 10 percent of their potential; if they use as much as 25 percent, they’re called geniuses. If we can go from using 10 percent of our potential to using 20 percent, we could double our productivity and still have 80 percent of our potential untapped.

Michelangelo worked on forty-four statues in his life. He only complete fourteen of them.
David
and
Moses
are probably the most famous. The other ones were never finished. They’re just blocks of stone, with perhaps an arm or a head. There is a museum in Italy where you can see these unfinished works, the unfulfilled potential of a great genius.

It is sad enough to realize that there are unfinished works of Michelangelo, but what is even more sad is to look every day at the people around us and realize that they are like blocks of stone that haven’t yet been developed. If we as leaders could somehow, through the wisdom and the power of God, take the chisel to our people—not the ball bat, the chisel—and begin to peck away, define what they are, and begin to release them from that granite block that has kept them from being what they should be, then we would be doing our people a great service.

How do you unlock your potential? Here are just a few ways to begin.

Look up
. The first thing is to look up and find a model, somebody who is doing a better job than you are. Are there any people that you know who are reaching more of their potential now than ever before because they know you? Can you think of anything better as a parent, an employer, or a pastor to do for others than to help unlock their potential by being a model for them?

Nothing can be more challenging than to be the person whom others look up to.

What we need is somebody a little bigger and a little better than we are, and we need to spend time with them. Let me give you an example. I play racquetball with a colleague of mine. He is a good racquetball player; in fact he is better than I am, and he always wins the first game. I’m challenged because he’s better than I am, so I give it my best. If you have ever played anybody who is worse than you, you know that you start going downhill. You get lazy, and you don’t keep your mind on the game. That’s what happens to my colleague. By the third game, I win. When you play somebody better, you stretch; when you play somebody worse, you shrink.

So if you want to unlock your hidden potential, spend your time with people who will stretch you. Find somebody who thinks faster, runs faster, and aims higher. Those are the people who will lift you up.

Give Up
. To reach your potential, we must give up at any moment all that we are in order to receive what we can become. Many people don’t understand this. They want to hang on to what they are and at the same time be all they can be. You have to let go.

In the Bible there are all kinds of beautiful illustrations of men of God who gave up something to rise higher. Abraham gave up his home to seek a better country. Moses gave up the riches of Egypt. David gave up security. John the Baptist gave up being first so he could be second. The apostle Paul gave up his past and made a radical turnaround. Jesus himself gave up his rights. And you will find that you, too, will have to give up something good if you want something better.

You’ll never find anybody who achieves great success in life without a give-up story. Nothing comes free.

Fire up
. I’m talking about what Phillips Brooks meant when he said, “Sad is the day for any man when he becomes absolutely satisfied with the life that he is living, the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing; until there ceases to be forever beating at the door of his soul a desire to do something larger which he seeks and knows he was meant and intended to do.”

Show up
. Nothing will help you reach your potential like facing the challenges of your life. Some people never become all they can be because when they see a challenge coming, they fail to show up for the match. They close the door and hide in the corner while the challenge is met by someone else. Don’t be intimidated by challenges: Meet them head-on.

Go up
. If we look up to a person who is reaching his or her potential, if we give up anything that hinders us from being our best, if we fire up our desires until we are no longer satisfied, and if we show up to our challenges and not become fearful, then we will go up. We’ll go up to the top of our potential—but only after we look up, give up, fire up, and show up.

Ted Engstrom said, “Success means a person is reaching the maximum potential available to him at any given moment.”

If success is what Ted Engstrom says it is—tapping into the available potential that we have and making the best use of it—shouldn’t Christians be more successful than non-Christians? The power God gives to Spirit-filled believers ought to make a world of difference between them and nonbelievers. “Greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). We have all these things through the power of God’s Spirit that should enable us to live on a higher plane.

How do I find God’s plan for my life? How do I commit myself to God’s plan? There are seven questions to ask yourself.

Commit yourself to God’s plan.