[grrandalf]

> So what I'm saying is that your actual potential has been exactly what you observed!

+1; How close is my paraphrasing to what you were thinking?

achievement(person) = potential(person) - adversity(person)

People implicitly assume the 'adversity' term is negligible. But in reality, the 'adversity' term can very large, and vary widely from person to person.

[yep the "equation" isn't dimensionally consistent. It's meant to be a "completion prompt" to your internal LLM to translate those tokens to a longer paragraph.]

[TomaszZielinski]

At first I thought your equation sums it up perfectly, then caveats started to appear and then caveats to caveats. And in an hour I realized a PhD could be built around it :)). So I won't give you a simple answer, but I'll write some loose thoughts, likely incoherent, etc., OK?

- I think the only real/tangible/measurable/graspable part is the `achievement` side. Although personally I wouldn't call it `achievement` but sth like `present state`. It's because `achievement` invites comparison, and if someone already compares themselves to some idealize figure, then I think it would be more helpful to use neutral terms. Also, it cannot be measured--you can measure net worth, but not empathy or compassion.

- On the right side of the equation I would treat both the potential and the adversity as unknown and fixed. By fixed I mean that in each moment of the past they had some fixed value, and by unknown I mean that it's practically impossible to measure their values. We only know the result (i.e. the left side), but not as a measurement, only as a state, so to speak.

- I can see that thinking about the potential and adversity as separate terms might be useful if someone beats themselves about wasted potential, but then can look at the equation to remind themselves that the potential is always tied with adversity, they go hand in hand together and looking only at the potential is like looking at your assets but not on your mortgage.

- Another useful angle of the equation might be that if someone is beating themselves about not working to decrease the adversity, then they might notice that working on it would "consume" the potential points! (E.g. time is required to use your potential, but if you spend it on dealing with adversity..). (But then it might be dangerous as it also conveys they idea there is a measurable, standalone thing called "one's true potential", which I don't believe exists.)

> People implicitly assume the 'adversity' term is negligible.

I thought about it for a short while and my take would be that people share (discuss) their adversities with others all the time, but when it comes to formulating the equation they often tend to end up with sth like:

    expectedAndMandatoryAchievement(person) = perceivedHighPotential(person) /* - adversity(person) */

I guess I'm saying that people don't think the adversity is negligible, but they tend to completely cover it with a newspaper when thinking about the potential vs reality.

And this is a straight path to depression...

OK, let me end here! I hope my LLM didn't hallucinate too much, but it's closer to stream of consciousness than to well though out arguments, so buyers beware!

Last but not least, thank you for a great prompt--it made me think about the topic from a different angle!