Potential doesn't live inside you—or anything
What if we got 'potential' wrong and built everything on top of that error?
When I left my last startup unceremoniously, I had a by-myself meeting and asked one question: What do I really want to work on?
Not long after, I wrote this down:
Unrealized potential is humanity’s greatest crisis—and its greatest opportunity.
At the time, I had no idea if that was true. Almost two years later, I believe it is. And I think the reason we keep failing to address it—in education, in organizations, in entire economies—is that we’ve been looking for potential in the wrong place.
So last week, I finally published my first preprint (a ‘preprint’ is a research paper made public before peer review). You can download it here.
It basically announces to the scientific community: here are my claims, come challenge them.
Of course, in order to get their attention, I had to write in very precise language. For example, here’s the title of the paper: Boundary-emergence and potential generation in organized systems. But what I really wanted to write is The Physics of Potential.
If you’re into complexity science, sociology, or organizational theory, this paper’s right up your alley. And please, critique it or tear it apart. The work needs that.
Planting my flag
What started as a question turned into a thesis I’m willing to stake my name on:
Potential doesn’t live inside things. Not inside people, not inside organizations, not inside nations. It emerges between things—at boundaries where organized systems encounter each other.
Nope, it’s not a metaphor. It’s a physics proposal.
What’s the difference between a framework and physics? A framework organizes ideas. Physics makes predictions that can fail.
This paper says: if potential is boundary-emergent, then specific things follow—and if they don’t, the theory is wrong. I’ve laid out the predictions. Consider the gauntlet thrown down.
By the way, have you ever heard someone say, “You’ve got so much potential”?
Well, if this hypothesis holds, that sentence points at the wrong address—since potential isn’t in you, or anything else. It never was.
You know the person who did everything right? They read the books, did the inner work, stayed disciplined—and nothing moved for them?
The old model says: they didn’t want it enough. The physics says: generation requires an encounter with something you haven’t met.
This person’s work wasn’t wasted. It made them ready. But readiness without a quality encounter produces nothing. Exhibit A: just look at the suburbs.
Standing on giant brains
I didn’t start with physics. I started with a problem—patterns I’d seen over 25 years in nonprofits and startups that I couldn’t explain. I had no idea where this would take me and who I would ‘meet’.
Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for proving that organized complexity requires continuous exchange across boundaries.
Claude Shannon showed that information requires difference.
Erwin Schrödinger demonstrated that life imports order from outside itself.
Raj Chetty showed, with data on millions of families, that the neighborhood a child encounters shapes their trajectory more than the talent they carry.
Even the Siksika Nation, a tribe from Alberta, Canada, saw something that Western tradition missed.
Their results sit in separate fields. Each one points at the same thing: what a system becomes depends less on what it contains and more on what it encounters. The paper synthesizes them into a single claim—and that claim has consequences.
Three findings that matter
Here’s what the paper proposes, in plain language.
Encounters produce third things. When two organized systems meet at a boundary, something forms that didn’t exist in either one. Jazz emerged when Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms collided with European harmonic architecture in the cultural crucible of New Orleans; neither tradition alone contained its blueprint—their encounter generated it.
This isn’t limited to music. Every breakthrough, every relationship that changed you, every team that made something none of its members could have produced alone—those are third things. They carry signatures of both parents, but they belong to neither. They’re new.
Returns are asymmetric by default. The same encounter generates different things for each participant. A conversation between a mentor and a student deposits different organized complexity into each.
One walks away with a reframed problem. The other walks away with a sharper teaching instinct. Symmetry—where both sides gain equally—is the rare case, not the default. This matters because it means every boundary has a distribution question built in: who captured what, and did the architecture favor one side?
There’s a test for whether it worked. After any encounter—a product interaction, a relationship, a policy intervention, a team collaboration—one question cuts through: did both sides walk away with more capacity for future encounters, or less?
This is what separates generative encounters from extractive ones. And it explains something we all sense but struggle to name: why some systems grow by depleting everything around them, looking healthy right up until the base collapses.
Also, if the scientific jargon is a bit too much for you, feel free to download the paper, upload it to your favorite AI, and ask it to explain what the paper means, then ask, “What does this mean for my work?” Or project. Or whatever topic potential applies to.
Where this goes
The paper carries the formal claims. It’s citable and challengeable. That’s its job. This newsletter is where I get to explore what the world looks like through this lens.
If boundary-emergence holds, it touches everything in modern culture. Work, education, economics, relationships, product design, leadership, public policy, why institutions fail, why some cities produce outsized creativity for a generation, and then stop. We’d now have a shared mechanism.
The preprint is a milestone for me. It frees me to explore all the applications and implications of this claim. What it means for us. What it could mean. What it should mean. Those aren’t the same things, and I’ll be honest about which mode I’m in.
Research papers are for scientists. This newsletter is for anyone who wants to see how the world changes with new glasses—and maybe do something about what they see.
The preprint is available at Zenodo. If you’re a researcher who wants to challenge or test these claims, say hi. If you’re a builder who sees something here, same. The theory is public. For everything else, go to genesistheory.org.