Is your potential already set in stone?

Resolving the dichotomy of being your best self today, and better still tomorrow.

The book The Big Door Prize was turned into a comedy on Apple TV. The “big door” refers to the delicious promise of a highly positive outcome to our lives – that we all desperately want to know before we get there. A DNAMIX machine (a Morpho Machine on TV) pops out a card on which your potential is written.

The central character in the story is told by the machine that his life’s potential is to be a teacher/whistler. He is already a history teacher at a local high school and is known as a fine whistler. The point? Well, if this is his Big Door Prize – what now? Does he live with this truth, like it is set in stone, and believe he can never be anything more?

The story is a parody of the idea of human potential: one character is given the potential of “gum” because he chews gum. And it is a celebration of the possibility of growing today so tomorrow can be different: it recognises that your future is a product of your actions, not some predefined outcome beyond your control.

At Entelechy we believe that you might be living your best self today and that there is the possibility of being a better self tomorrow. It is this possibility that makes living purposeful: the challenge of evolving to be something greater than before while celebrating what I am today.

This is a belief about humans: that we have Character Qualities which change and grow. The downside is that (unlike certain unnamed psychometric tests) we cannot pop out a card that gives you a simple truth about your future. We cannot tell you what the machine in The Big Door Prize claims to do – and we wouldn’t want to.

We get it. We, too, crave the certainties that those same psychometric tests offer. Yet all they’re doing is imprisoning you in a category. It feels safe, because you “know” the edges of your world.

But one of the wonders of life is that we don’t know the ending. We don’t know what our legacy will be. We are still writing our story, and we are the narrator.

At Entelechy we do not overlay our insight reports with some clever theory of people. We ask pertinent questions which you might have yet to ask yourself. We aggregate your answers and represent these with comments. We then ask your 360 assessors to offer the crowd's wisdom and present this to you, too. Likely, research of this nature has yet to be done about you. It is a unique opportunity to learn about the story you are writing.

You may find our solution of a world with no edges scary. But what’s the alternative? Psychometric tests that put you into an unchanging category; so unchanging that if you take the test again in a year – it'll tell you that you’re the same person. We all know you couldn’t possibly be. In doing so, it restricts your potential to the self-fulfilment of the prophecies contained within.

If you like that your legacy is still being written and that you are in control of the plot, then our Discover reports give you the insight to guide your actions. If you are interested to know more, contact us today.