The physics of becoming
The crisis of our time. A relational theory of potential. A path to transformation literacy.
A crisis of conversion
In August of 2024, after leaving my last startup, I decided to work on something I actually cared about.
That raised an uncomfortable question: what do I really care about?
Fortunately, the answer came fast: potential.
For more than 30 years, I’ve been quietly obsessed with that word. Through my own personal development journey, through a counseling and coaching career, and then through tech and startups.
I kept circling the same underlying theme, even when the work changed:
How do I help people, products, and teams realize more of what they could become?
To answer that question, I dumped every framework I had into a doc, including everything I’d learned, every model I’d collected, every intuition I trusted—and then I kept almost none of it.
I thought I’d end up with a useful model. Maybe even the framework of all frameworks.
Instead, I found something more unsettling: physics. Unsettling because I don’t know shit about physics—at least not before I started this journey.
But could science explain why people, companies, societies, etc., don’t thrive? Why, even with a ridiculous amount of resources, do we fail to convert potential into reality?
So the work began with one question:
Why does so much potential go unrealized?
If a society can’t reliably turn ability into better lives—if schools, institutions, and work don’t help people become more, or better—then we’re not really building progress, are we? We’re just managing the decay.
And the pattern is brutal:
Talent hits dead ends.
Resources are wasted or diverted into the hands of the wealthy.
“Opportunity” still doesn’t reach most people in a form they can use.
So what are we getting wrong?
Potential isn’t the point, is it?
The deeper I went, the more obvious it became:
Potential isn’t the end game. It’s the means. The end is thriving.
Think about the difference between surviving and thriving.
A company that survives, for example, keeps the lights on. A company that thrives generates more than it consumes—it compounds, delivering more value over time. It even gets healthier as it operates, not just bigger.
Think of a person who survives just to get through the day. The struggle in every area of their life. Just getting through the day is an accomplishment. But a person who thrives expands not just what they can do but who they can become.
Now apply that lens to households, institutions, cities, and countries. Anything that has potential in your eyes—including products, locations, and events. What separates the ones that merely persist from the ones that flourish?
If people take thriving seriously, make it the end game, then most mainstream conversations start to look incomplete.
Economics should produce broad-based well-being and mobility—without consuming the future to pay for the present.
Education should produce capable, curious, resilient learners—and a learning environment that keeps producing those outcomes.
Politics should secure rights, safety, and the rule of law—and develop the capacity to coordinate and solve shared problems, locally and nationally.
Organizational design should enable sustainable execution and compounding capability—not burnout and churn.
But most institutions don’t hold thriving as their north star. They optimize for growth, stability, control, appearances, status, and even extraction, hoping that maybe thriving shows up as a side effect.
It doesn’t. It never will.
The thesis
This newsletter is built on one big idea:
Unrealized potential is humanity’s greatest crisis—and its greatest opportunity.
If that sounds dramatic, let me ask you this:
Have you ever watched a talented person stay stuck for years?
Have you seen a team with smart people and decent resources go nowhere?
Have you felt the gap between what should be possible in your work, life, or relationships—and what actually happens?
And have you noticed how often the difference comes down to things that feel bigger than you: access, timing, institutions, incentives, health, support?
When people and systems can’t reliably turn potential into real outcomes, thriving becomes uneven, fragile, and privilege-bound. Progress becomes a matter of luck. Institutions decay. People burn out. And most people die inside the limits of the systems they’re born into.
But if we can make that process, the ability to steer potential into real change more reliable—or more legible, more designable, more testable—the opposite becomes possible: regeneration, capability building, and wider access to better futures.
That’s the bet I’m making here. If there’s a physics of potential, so to speak, can we reliably steer change and prevent unwanted change? Can we operationalize this? Can we understand potential well enough to diagnose what’s stuck, predict what happens next, and improve outcomes?
And when it comes to science, there’s a standard: if this theory can’t generate better predictions and, more importantly, better interventions than intuition can, it deserves to die.
The master switch
Throughout these posts, I’ll reference Genesis Theory a lot. It’s a synthesis of research I’ve done over the past year and a half, and consists of four main physics pillars:
Potential
Existence
Dynamics
Agency
These are NOT new physics. I’m proposing a synthesis of already existing, well-established, field-defining, and in some cases, Nobel Prize-winning physics.
This synthesis, from what I can tell, is novel and hasn’t been done in this way before, though there are plenty of complexity scientists, ecologists, and information theorists who continue to work on the physics in the “messy middle.”
But, from everything I’ve explored and tried to synthesize, the most disorienting idea—and the one everything else builds on—is this:
Potential isn’t intrinsic. It’s relational.
In other words, potential doesn’t live inside you like a stored-up battery. It isn’t something any one person or system “has.”
Potential only becomes possible when different systems meet under the right conditions.
A battery can be fully charged and still useless—until it meets a circuit.
That’s the core idea we’ll explore throughout these posts. And when you understand it fully, you can’t ever look at anything the same way again.
Anyway, the compressed physics version looks like this:
In plain terms:
Potential (Π) isn’t sitting inside you like a stored asset.
It depends on what you can actually encounter—access, interface, contact with difference, or gradient, in physics terms.
And it depends on what you bring to that encounter: your capacity (Ψ) and your configuration (Φ)—how ready you are to make something real from what you touch.
This updated physics view of potential says:
You can’t convert what you never encounter.
You can’t act on what you can’t reach.
And self-improvement isn’t the same thing as expanding possibility
You can read all the books you want—that builds capacity. But new possibilities usually don’t show up until those ideas meet the world: a real problem, a real person, a real constraint, a real opportunity.
If that’s true, it changes how we think about education, opportunity, inequality, innovation, and institutions—because those aren’t just “personal” issues. They’re questions of access, contact, and readiness.
And it explains why “having resources” doesn’t produce a thriving state.
The goal: transformation literacy
Understanding this physics isn’t the goal of my writing. It’s helping others become more transformation-literate.
Why that?
Because when you think about it, everything we do is about change. We either want to either change something or prevent change from happening.
And understanding how change actually works—how potential becomes real, or doesn’t—is the must-have essential skill today.
To be transformation-literate means you can look at a system that’s stuck—it could be a person, a team, a company, or an institution—and see why it’s stuck in a way that gets more precise than “mindset” or “culture” explanations.
Is it stuck because it’s not getting exposed to the right things—people, problems, opportunities?
Is it stuck because it doesn’t have the skills, time, or bandwidth to take advantage of what it’s seeing?
Is it stuck because it’s set up in a way that can’t hold growth—too fragile, too chaotic, too exhausting?
Or is most of its energy going into survival mode—defending, posturing, reacting, putting out fires—instead of building?
Transformation literacy is the ability to read these dynamics the way a doctor reads symptoms or an engineer reads a schematic: not guessing or intuition, but seeing clearly enough to intervene. And without having a medical or engineering degree.
That’s what I’m trying to build here—a sort of Rosetta Stone—so we have a shared way to diagnose what’s stuck and choose better interventions across cultures, domains, and scales.
What you can access now
As I said before, this work resolves into four connected syntheses, each with falsifiable claims and testable hypotheses:
A physics of potential — where potential comes from
A physics of existence — what systems must maintain to persist
Transformation dynamics — how change unfolds and where it stalls
A physics of agency — what changes when systems model, choose, and self-deceive
I’ve written papers on each if you want the fullest explanation. I wrote a follow-up, The Physics of Everything, to synthesize them all, even though each paper and its physics can stand on its own. You can also find them in the menu bar.
I’m also writing a plain-language 101 series to translate each concept into accessible terms. I’ll refer to it often, because if this can’t be understood, it can’t be used.
The 101 series is here, but I’ll reference it often in future posts.
What’s coming
The Physics of X: Deep dives into specific domains—education, economics, politics, work, health, organizations—using a physics lens.
One-off posts: Current events and everyday situations, analyzed through the lens—so the familiar starts to look different once you can see the mechanics.
Applications: Diagnostics, predictions, retrodictions, and interventions using familiar companies and societies, so we can put the ideas to the test. (Some will live in their own section, but they’ll show up here too.)
Updates: Revisions to the theory, test results, and the tools and applications that get built as the theory evolves.
If you feel the gap between what’s possible and what keeps happening, and want to do something about it, then you’re in the right place.
Paul
Coming next: Our first series will be: The Rosetta Stone — the missing translation layer.