01.10.2026 Diary XXXI Entelekheia: potential is not a promise

01.10.2026 Diary Page XXXI

If a seed does not become a tree, the seed is not to blame. First you look at the soil.

Thursday. The first day of the month, and a clean page on the desk.

It is hard to explain what a clean page does to me. One side of it is a relief: last month is over, the account is closed. The other side is a threat: if this page does not get filled either, this time there is no excuse.

The sentence that came to my mind on the first morning of October was this one. The sentence I heard for twenty years, in the same form, from different mouths:

You are not using your potential.

The assumption inside that sentence

The person who says this sentence, even when they mean well, assumes something. They assume that potential is a stock. An amount sitting in a warehouse, ready to be drawn out whenever you want.

If the warehouse is full and nothing is being drawn, the problem lies with the person drawing. That is the logic.

Aristotle built this subject with three words we still use today.

Dynamis means capacity. A thing's ability to become something else. The seed's ability to become a tree, the marble's ability to become a statue.

Energeia means act. The capacity being at work. The seed germinating, the marble being carved.

Entelekheia is completion. The word is made of parts that mean carrying its end within itself: the state of a thing having arrived at what it could be.

The important side of this triad is this: dynamis is not a promise. It is not a debt at all. It is a condition.

The seed's conditions

This is the part that gets overlooked in Aristotle's seed example.

That the seed can become a tree is in its capacity, true. But for that capacity to pass into act, soil is needed, water is needed, light is needed, a season is needed. If one of the conditions is missing, the seed does not become a tree.

And nobody gets angry at the seed. Nobody says to the seed, "you are not using your potential."

When it comes to a person, the logic turns upside down. Because the conditions are not visible, the capacity is counted as the only variable, and the whole gap is written to the person's account.

Executive functions are exactly that invisible condition. I explained this in detail in the article on executive functions: starting, sequencing, switching, sustaining. These are not decorations added to the capacity, they are the road on which the capacity passes into act.

If the road is broken, there is no point in arguing about the traveler's strength.

But there is a trap here

I can hand this idea to myself far too easily, and I do.

The sentence "the conditions were not there" is a cover that can be thrown over everything that was left undone. I could put the whole twenty years under that cover and nothing would show beneath it.

Aristotle does not allow this. Because in his system a human being is a creature who sets up some of their own conditions. What he calls habit is exactly this: changing the capacity by repeating the act.

So here is the difference between being a seed and being a person. The seed cannot choose its soil. I can choose mine, partly.

Partly. The whole word is that.

What the diagnosis did

I received the diagnosis when I was twenty-three, and my capacity did not change that day. What changed was that the conditions became visible.

In the account before the diagnosis there was a single variable, and that variable was me. After the diagnosis a second variable appeared, and for the first time the equation became solvable.

I can say it was a relief, but not completely. Because the appearance of the second variable does not remove the first. I am still here, there are still choices, there are still things I am not doing, and the reason is not executive functions every time.

I wrote about being caught between these two in the grief after diagnosis article. On the first day of October I am standing in the same place again, hurting a little less.

What I will do with the word potential

I thought of giving up this word entirely, and I could not. Because there is something true in it: there really can be a gap between what a person can do and what they do, and seeing that gap sometimes does good.

Instead of throwing the word away, I changed how I use it.

I used to see potential as a promissory note. It sat somewhere and I was not paying it.

Now it is a map. It shows where one can go and says nothing about the going itself. You cannot read the road conditions from a map.

The difference looks small, but it is what changes when I sit down at the desk in the morning. Sitting there as a debtor and sitting there as someone with a map are not the same thing.

What I did today

I did not make a goal list for October. I made a list of conditions instead.

Three items. The first: not opening a screen in the first hour of the morning. The second: next to every task, writing the place where I will do that task. The third: planning nothing one day a week.

None of the three is about capacity. All three are about soil.

I will see at the end of the month whether it works. But I already know one thing: this list is more honest than the "I will work harder" list.

Knowing and doing

Aristotle has one more distinction on this subject, and it is the one that has really helped me.

According to him, a capacity has two separate "realized" states.

Think of a person who knows grammar. Even while asleep they know grammar; the knowledge does not disappear. This is the first realization of the capacity: learned, settled, standing ready.

The second realization is that person speaking right now. They are using the knowledge. The difference is the difference between having something and putting it to work.

I think confusing the two is the most frequent misunderstanding that happens to someone with ADHD.

Because the person looking from outside sees the capacity in the first state. They see that you are smart, that you know the subject, that you have done something like it before. Then they explain the second state not appearing not by the absence of the first state but by the person's choice.

Yet the place where I struggle is exactly the passage from the first to the second. The knowledge is there. The key that has to put it to use turns out, every time, to be in a different pocket.

Aristotle counted this passage as automatic, because a person who knows grammar can speak when they want to speak. In his system the passage is not a problem, it is a door. What I live through is that door sometimes not opening.

The part up to here comforts me. Let me write down the side that spoils the comfort too.

If the knowledge is ready in the first state, some of the time I spend on "learning" something may actually be an escape. A new course, a new book, a new method. All of them inflate the first box and postpone the passage to the second.

I described the digital version of this in the app hunting article. What I saw today is that the same behavior can be done with knowledge too. Learning is the most respectable form of not doing.

Who sets the end

In Aristotle's system everything has an end. The end of the acorn is the oak tree; the end of the knife is cutting.

When it comes to a human being the matter gets harder, and Aristotle knows it. His answer is eudaimonia: a human being doing their own particular work well.

Here is where I get stuck. The acorn does not choose its own end. So who chooses mine?

The person who says "you are not using your potential" has already answered this question. The end is clear; you are not going to it.

Yet the end inside that sentence is generally not an end I set. A particular profession, a particular speed, a particular visibility. An oak tree that someone else drew for me.

When I noticed this, half of the "potential" argument evaporated. Because the real subject of the argument was not capacity, it was whom the goal belonged to.

I wrote the decision side of this in strategy is choosing what not to do. What I will add today is this: rejecting an end is not throwing away your potential. It is deciding which tree you will become.

This was the question I asked myself on the first day of October. How many of the things I will do this month are my end, and how many are something someone drew for me years ago?

I could not fully answer. But because I asked the question, the list got shorter.

What I listened to today

Arvo Pärt — Variationen zur Gesundung von Arinuschka.

For solo piano, very short. The same small structure comes back again and again, and each time something changes. The changes are so slight that they are not noticed on the first listen.

The reason I found it fitting for today is this: the title speaks of healing, and the music builds healing not as a leap but as a slightly different repetition of the same thing.

I suppose potential passing into act is something like that. You do not wake up one morning as someone else. The same structure repeats, and somewhere inside the repetitions an unmeasurable shift happens.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is Friday and the leftovers of the week are sitting on the desk. There is a job I have opened and closed three times this week.

Tomorrow I will open it. I am not saying I will finish it. I am saying I will open it, because the first item on the conditions list is about that job, and I wrote the item yesterday.