The "Not Living Up to His Potential" Label and ADHD

This sentence starts with a compliment: "So smart, so talented." Then a comma comes and the sentence changes direction: "...but he is not living up to his potential."

The first half lifts you up, the second half drops you from there.

I do not remember whether anyone ever said this sentence to me directly. My grades were not low, I did my homework even if on the last night; the system had no complaint about me. But the sentence settled in me anyway, because I was saying it to myself. When a homework I had pushed through on the last night got a good grade, the first thing that went through my mind was not joy but a calculation: "What would have happened if you had started on time?"

This article is to open up that sentence.

The two assumptions inside the sentence

To say "not living up to his potential" is to assume two things at once.

First: capacity is fixed and visible. If someone has seen you shine once, that brilliance is your real level and you should be there every day.

Second: the gap between capacity and results is a choice. If you want it enough, it closes.

In ADHD both assumptions are problematic. The first ignores skill fluctuation: the same person can do very well one day and struggle a lot the next, and the good day does not cancel the bad day. The second misses that the distance between knowing and doing also depends on things beyond will. I explained that distance itself in the article on whether ADHD affects intelligence. Here I want to look more at the label itself and the mark it leaves.

The gap is real, its explanation is incomplete

In criticizing the label, one has to accept this: there is a real gap between ADHD and academic results.

A meta-analysis combining studies published since 1990 found a significant, medium-to-large gap in academic achievement between participants with and without ADHD (Frazier et al., 2007). In the Pittsburgh study, which followed people diagnosed with ADHD in childhood into young adulthood, educational and work attainments were also lower than those of people with no history of ADHD on almost every variable. The same study also notes that there was great variety within the group in educational outcomes (Kuriyan et al., 2013).

So the gap in results is not made up. What is made up is the idea that the only explanation of that gap is "not wanting to."

The gap is measurable. Laziness is not the name of what is measured, it is an interpretation of it.

Does the label disappear once there is a diagnosis

Here I read something I did not expect.

Before the diagnosis the label is "not living up to his potential." You would think the label will go after the diagnosis. Metzger and Hamilton looked at three waves of a large data set that followed children starting school in America over years. Teachers were more prone to rate students with an ADHD diagnosis below grade level, independent of the ability they showed on subject-specific tests, and less prone to acknowledge that they were performing above grade level (Metzger and Hamilton, 2021). The authors interpret this as the diagnosis working like a stigmatized label.

So there are two separate traps. When there is no diagnosis, the gap is attributed to effort. When there is a diagnosis, the gap can this time be attributed to ability. In both, what the child can actually do stays in the background.

That children and adults with ADHD are at high risk of encountering stigma, prejudice and discrimination is also set out in a review collecting research in this area (Mueller et al., 2012). I dealt with this side more broadly in the article on stigma in ADHD.

When the sentence settles inside

The longest-lasting effect of the label is that it keeps working inside years after being heard from outside.

In a study comparing 43 adults with ADHD with a comparison group matched for age and sex, the self-esteem and self-efficacy of the adults with ADHD came out lower; part of their personal resources was also reduced (Newark et al., 2016). The authors recommend adding sections that support self-esteem and strengths to treatment programs.

Reading this finding I thought about my own inner voice. The sentence "you could have done better" looks like a motivational tool. In fact it writes a debt on top of every success. A good result turns into an incomplete copy of what you could have been; a bad result is evidence of a verdict you already knew.

For someone who masks, this cycle works even more quietly. While everything looks fine from outside, you stand on compensation strategies inside, and every compensation is recorded as "you could not do this the normal way." The accumulation of these records is called toxic shame in the glossary; I wrote about how it can be softened in the article on shame and self-compassion.

Success can be a cover too

When this label is discussed, a student with low grades and a messy desk is usually imagined. I think this sentence sticks most to students who get by from outside.

For someone like me, whose grades were not low and who handed in homework even on the last night, the system's gaze is relaxed. The problem is not visible, because there is a result. What is not visible is the cost of that result: how many nights were spent sleepless, how much I bargained with myself to be able to start a task, the tiredness that builds up after every submission. Nobody measures this price from outside; for years I did not measure it either.

Masking works twice here. First I hide that I am struggling from others. Then I hide it from myself, because the result is there, and with a result there, speaking of struggling feels like being spoiled. I covered what masking is and why it is tiring separately in the article on masking.

In recent months I wrote that I was worn out while trying to keep up with everything. Looking back, I see that part of that exhaustion was fed by exactly this sentence. A person who believes they are not living up to their potential feels they have to add something extra to every task. Everything added extra asks one day for all of it back at once.

Maybe that is why writing this article gives me a strange lightness. For the first time I am reading the label from a bit of a distance: a sentence, a few assumptions, and the mark those assumptions have left over the years.

Is potential a storehouse

The word "potential" is used like a storehouse: there is a certain amount inside and you either take it out or you don't.

I now think of potential as a matter of conditions. I do not see the days when I can sink into a subject that interests me for hours as days when a hidden storehouse opens; those are days when the conditions fit. The subject is interesting, the time pressure is in the right place, nothing is stealing my attention. Instead of splitting those days into "the real me" and the other days into "the lazy me," I ask: what was there that day, what is missing today?

This question takes me from guilt to a design question. And the answer to a design question is often small and doable.

Turning the sentence into a question

When you come across this label, from outside or from inside, there are a few translations I find worth trying.

If you are saying it to yourself: instead of "I am not living up to my potential," "I do not yet fully know under which conditions I work well." The second sentence starts a research project, the first files a lawsuit.

If you are about to say it to a child or a student: instead of "Why aren't you doing it?", "When does it get easy, where do you get stuck?" The answer gives far more information than the grade average.

If someone is saying it to you: Do not feel obliged to explain. But if you wish, you can say: "You saw that I could do something; you did not see that I am not under the same conditions every day."

A week in two columns. For one week, write two things every evening: a task that went easily today, and the conditions in which that task happened (hour, place, who was with you, how long it took). At the end of the week look at the columns. You will have seen, from your own record and without guessing, under which conditions what you call "potential" shows up.

A note for parents and teachers

Most adults who use this label do not mean harm. Often they have really seen the moment the child shone and are trying to understand why that moment is not repeated every day. The real issue is the burden the sentence leaves on the child.

Instead of telling a child "you are not living up to your potential," naming a moment that went well concretely ("Yesterday you started that homework yourself, how did it go?") and trying to find the conditions of that moment together is a way to use the same observation without turning it into blame. With a child who has been diagnosed, the opposite also needs watching: the diagnosis should not become a justification for not seeing what the child can do. The teacher-rating finding above shows that this risk does not stay on paper.

Sometimes a person carries someone else's sentence for so long that they take it for their own voice. I still hear that sentence. The difference is this: now I can answer it.