How Much of Your Potential Have You Reached?

I recently read an interesting article about Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. Although you can’t read that article here since it’s not online yet here’s another to give you a hint about the caliber of this woman.  This is a woman who has worked for the Clinton administration, the World Bank and Google and now sits on the board of directors for Starbucks.  She’s accomplished immense things in her life and is on her way to even more at Facebook as she is tasked with figuring out how to monetize this rapidly growing enterprise.  She’s close to my age so it makes me think about where I am in my own life in terms of my potential.

Being solidly in the middle part of my career I’m pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished. I’ve worked for some great companies, have created my own company, contributed to extra revenue and expense reduction of about $500k for a company while in an internal facing position, wrote a book, been featured in respected publications and all that sort of good stuff.  I’ve also traveled on my own internationally  and have successfully moved across the country several times with little money, friends and no job.

The funny thing is that I feel like I’ve only tapped into about 40% of my potential professionally.  Given this, something I’ve been pondering on is how do I realize more of my potential?  How do I scale myself?

I have some initial thoughts but I’m going to hold off on sharing them for now.  I’m curious about what other think about this.  What do you think about this?

How much of your potential do you feel you’ve reached so far?

How do you think you can reach even more of your own potential?