You Are Capable of More Than You Think
I recently took one of the ancestry DNA tests where you spit into a small tube and send your saliva off to a laboratory for analysis. I had no idea how many fun facts my spit could reveal about me. Beyond offering up a detailed ancestry, the test also predicted with eerie accuracy random traits about me: I’m a light sleeper. I have light-colored eyes and lots of freckles. I detect bitterness in foods that some people don’t notice. I have wet earwax instead of dry, and my big toe is longer than my second toe. Page after page, the report described my likelihood to have--or not have--certain traits, conditions, and diseases.
Most of the trait analysis wasn’t a surprise, but one buried fact caught my attention: I have the “genetic muscle composition common in elite power athletes.” The report explained, “Studies have found that almost all elite power athletes have a specific genetic variant. You have the same genetic variant as these elite athletes.”
You’ve got to be kidding me?
Let me stop here for a story to illustrate the shock factor of this finding:
I met my husband, Q, in grad school. While I was studying, he was out in the world being sporty: football, volleyball, floor hockey, golf, mountain biking, road biking, backpacking, archery, mountain climbing.
After we had been dating awhile, he came to meet my parents at the ranch in Oklahoma where I grew up. While we were there, my dad saddled up horses for us to ride. Without hesitation, I mounted the horse. Q looked at me with a smile and said, “That is the most athletic thing I’ve ever seen you do.” To clarify, he wasn’t talking about riding the horse. We hadn’t even moved yet. He was talking about me putting one foot in the stirrup of a saddle and swinging the other leg over a horse’s back. That was the most athletic thing he had ever seen me do.
In other words, there has generally been a very low expectation for my athletic ability. Like, my husband cheers if he throws me the car keys and I actually catch them.
And I have the muscle composition of elite power athletes? Oh, the wasted potential!
I feel guilty wasting anything—time, food, money. So the thought of wasted potential made me immediately regretful. I could have—I should have—done more. But, then, after I thought about it, I got excited about that buried possibility.
It’s not too late to start maximizing that muscle composition, right? Shortly before I found out about my power DNA, for example, my husband and I had tried trail running together. He had encouraged me to continue pursuing it, saying I was better suited for it than road running, because my overly bouncy tendencies that expend unnecessary energy on cement actually make sense when running over rocks and logs. Maybe I should keep running these muscles!
And, since I was a child, I had wanted to try ballet. So I recently took all this wasted potential and signed up for a barre class, which felt like an appropriate grownup alternative to traditional ballet lessons. On my first day, the teacher asked me after class, “Are you a dancer? You look like you’ve been trained in ballet.”
Bless her heart. Bless her tutu-wearing heart.
Somehow knowing I’m built for endurance and strength gives me confidence that I can do more than I once thought.
What other buried potential do I have? What buried potential do you have?
The Bible says God made us “only a little lower than the angels and crowned us with glory and honor” (Hebrews 2:7). That sounds like “the-sky’s-the-limit” potential to me!
There’s no saliva test to tell us if we’re going to be good at entrepreneurship or art or public speaking. But knowing that we are just a little lower than angels, crowned with glory and honor, that should give us the confidence to try more things and be more daring.
I guess this is the thrill of buried potential, that when we realize we have it, we get the confidence to look at life’s challenges and opportunities with a lot less “I can’t do this” and a lot more “I was made for this.”