Okay, here’s a chance for you to earn $20.

I’ll give a Jackson, 2 Hamiltons, 4 Lincolns, 20 Washingtons or one-fifth of a Franklin to the first person who can send me a biography, autobiography, or recorded or printed interview with someone who says:

“I have achieved my full and complete potential. I have done everything possible for me as a human being. There is no way I could have accomplished any more than I did.”

Your entry doesn’t count if the person in question includes anything to the tune of, “I could have…” and describes anything they didn’t actually do in their life.

Quick experiment — think of something you could be doing with your life that you aren’t. Something that, were you not on Wii Bowling marathon, you could accomplish that might make you happier in some way.

Now, feel that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach? The one that tells you that you could be doing more, could be more?

I want to let you in on a secret:

That feeling has NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR POTENTIAL!

Of course you’re not living up to your potential… that’s why it’s called POTENTIAL!

If you were doing it, it would be called YOUR LIFE.

And no matter what you’re doing in your life, you can always think of something else, something more that you could do or could have done.

That doesn’t mean you SHOULD be doing anything different. It just means you have one of those features that comes with the human machine — the ability to imagine something other than what you’re currently doing.

And when you engage that feature and imagine something you’re not doing, especially something that you think would lead to more of something (money, happiness, fame, sex, whatever), comes an interesting side effect: a FEELING.

Think about sucking on a lemon, you get the “lemon-sucking” feeling. Think about all the cool things you could do if you weren’t surfing for porn, and you get the “I’m-not-living-my-potential… now-I-wonder-where-else-I-can-find-free-porn” feeling.

This “living up to your potential” is one of those sales pitch lines that makes me want to scream. In fact, when I read someone pitching “you can live your full potential,” I don’t just want to scream… I usually do it for real, followed by slamming the book or magazine onto the ground. And if I hear someone say it on TV, I’ll scream and then wish that I had enough money to buy televisions by the six-pack so I could throw a brick through the one in front of me (note to self: GREAT business idea — TV tubes that cost $1 and screw in and out like light bulbs… sell by the 6 pack with bricks included).

If some “personal development” dingbat convinces you that the feeling you get after imagining some other life proves that you’re not living up to your potential (instead of pointing out that it’s just the side effect of imagining something “more”), then I guarantee that said dingbat will be reaching for an order form for you to fill out and has a credit card processing machine nearby.

If you haven’t been to a “living your potential” workshop, I’ll fill you in on a secret. Nobody’s potential includes being a fry cook on the graveyard shift and the IHOP, or the French Tip gal at the nail salon, or a  paraplegic on a ventilator.

The bottom line is this: You always have “potential” until you’ve just exhaled your last breath. So you’ve only truly lived your potential once you’re done living. So, dying is your ultimate potential!

And here’s another secret (though you probably already knew  this one): As far as I can tell, everyone who has ever lived has, at some point in their life, typically very close to the end… DIED.

What good news, since you will!

Like the 112 billion people who’ve been on the planet before you, I’m positive — anti-aging advocates be damned — that you’ll reach your fullest human potential by kicking the proverbial bucket (I guess I should put up another $10 for anyone who actually died while, because of, or simultaneous with actually kicking an actual bucket… “pails” do not count).

Nobody seems to know when the potential-fulfilling moment will happen. You may blow a gasket at the end of this sentence. Or you may engage in an impromptu physics demonstration if your mildly massive body gets slammed by a massively massive bus.

No matter how you do it, when you do, you’ll have proven that you’ve reached your potential, regardless of what you did or didn’t do with the preceding time.

Now, physics fans, chime in with how the word potential is used in the real (non-New Age) world, because that adds a fun twist to the whole “living up to your potential” thing.

And non-physics fans, just notice that the most accomplished people you’ve ever heard of still think they could have been or done more… because that thought also comes as a built-in feature with these human machine. Doesn’t mean it’s true, just means that we all get it.

Let me sum up the following post in one word:

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

If you can’t figure out from incisive and condensed comment what I’m talking about, I’ll elaborate (but only a bit, because I’m low on oxygen from screaming at the top of my lungs for the last 5 minutes).

I’ve said before that the surest sign that some transformational technology is complete crap (and, my apologies to crap for lumping it in with what I’m about to mention), is when you start seeing all the “advanced” variations of the technology, for when the basic technology doesn’t work.

Visualizing not working? Try it while hyperventilating or at the moment of orgasm or while riding a pogo stick through a vat of Jello while sining the national anthem of Lichtenstein backwards on helium.

No luck figuring out how your childhood issues caused your current inability to have the perfect relationship? Well, that’s because the real issue happened during your birth. Oh, no, wait, while you were in utero. No, sorry, at conception… oops… really when you were in your 13th past life as a slime mold (keeping the Jello theme going) in the Octulus galaxy near the 3rd ringed planet from the 4th smallest sun… or was it when you were Cleopatra? Anyway…

Feng Shui-ed your house but still not earning millions of dollars working 4 hours per week doing something you love while saving the world? How ’bout going to b-school, getting a job with a hedge fund and not worrying about your house, which you won’t ever see because you’re spending too much time making and spending your Billions of dollars.

Okay, well, with enough fanfare, here’s the news:

As if all of the featured players of The Secret having their “super advanced secret to making the Secret work that all the other players  in The Secret wanted me to keep secret” products weren’t proof enough that “Ask. Believe. Receive.” is really “Ask. Believe. DEceive.” it’s now official:

http://www.beyondthesecret.me

I won’t even justify this P.O.S. with a live link.

But I ADORE that the domain name is an “me“.

The only thing that I find redeeming about the latest in the “your fleeting thoughts change the molecules of the universe” series is that while the first movie fairy-tale featured a veritable Who’s Who of the New Age, this one is populated by a Who? Who? of B-listers (other than Bob Proctor who, in THIS life, seems to be a slime mold… and again, my apologies to slime mold).

Just when I thought T.S. had run its course and I was done explaining how when The Secret *seems* to work is nothing but our bad probabilistic thinking combined with 100,000 year old cognitive biases, now I need to gird up for round two.

Off to buy a new belt for the girding…

Every January 1st, I join about 600 other “Polar Bears” (a.k.a. boneheads) and head to the Boulder Reservoir for our annual plunge (if you were wondering about the “a.k.a.” a moment ago, you probably understand it now).

If you don’t know how this works, here’s the deal:

The ice has been cut away from a section of the “rez” so you can jump into the 32-degree water. If you’re particularly brain damaged (me), you’ll swim around for a bit… until your bits retreat as far as possible and then go totally numb. Then you hobble your way out of the drink, and make your way to the nearby hot tubs, which are closer to warm and have more chlorine and human detritus in them than actual water molecules.

The next few hours are a fascinating experience as your body screams, “What did you just do to me?!” — getting hot on the outside and cold on the inside, then cold on the outside and hot on the inside, then every other combination of temperatures you can imagine. Sort of like what happens when you microwave a bowl of frozen chili — boiling in one part and still frozen in another.

Sometimes I’ll hit the steamroom as part of the post-polar process.

Now, there’s a reason I’m telling you all this, and it has nothing to do with convincing you to join me on the 1st (though I will tell you that everyone I’ve ever talked into becoming a Bear has come back to do it again).

My reason is to highlight that once a year you can experience the seemingly obvious phenomenon that ICE is not the same as cold WATER which is not the same as hot water which is not the same as STEAM.

Oh, sure, they’re all H2O, but they are not the same. Confuse them on January 1st and you’ll be be a headline: “Par-boiled frozen dead bear found floating in tepid tub.”

You can CONVERT ice to water to steam (and, of course, vice versa), because they are EQUIVALENT, but they are NOT the same. You wouldn’t make a margarita with steam, try to de-wrinkle your clothes with water, or lounge in a towel in a block of ice (and, what David Blaine did was a TRICK).

“Duh, Steven, we know that H2O takes different forms. What’s your point?”

Glad I-pretending-to-be-you asked.

Because I’m on a personal crusade to find everyone who claims, “Quantum Physics says that everything is energy!” and throw a Newtonian pie in their non-Quantum face.

QP does NOT say “everything is energy.”

Einstein’s equation, E=mc2 (wordpress won’t let me make the 2 a superscript), means that energy and matter are equivalent, that you can convert one to another, NOT that they are the same.

And while turning matter to energy makes a big boom, I’m not aware of anyone who has gone the other way. If they were equal, wouldn’t we be able to turn on our microwave and get popcorn without needing to put in a bag of Orville’s?

A million one dollar bills equals a million dollar bill… but I wouldn’t want to hope the 7/11 can break a mil for a late-night Slurpee.

Volcanoes spew out liquid earth, but I’m not investing in that lava-bottomed condo complex, thank you very much.

Electricity can convert to magnetism (and, again, vice versa), but I’m not replacing the compact fluorescents with refrigerator magnet powered illumination.

For whatever reason, I’ve reached my limit of people co-opting a misunderstanding of Quantum Physics as “proof” of some bit of New Age magical thinking.

On that note, while we’re at it, Quantum Physics also does NOT say:

• We’re all one
• We’re all connected
• The universe is conscious/aware
• Everything came from nothing (a singularity is not “nothing”)
• Thoughts are “energy” (and since “everything is energy, you can control the universe with your thoughts)
• An atom is 99.9% empty space (so, of course, we should be able to walk through walls)

And let me give a special shout out to, “The act of observing something CHANGES it.”

ARGHHHHH.

Quantum Physics thieves use this one to suggest that if you change your perspective you are, literally, changing the outside world. This is like saying if you put on red tinted glasses, everything really does become red! Holy massive pigmentation change, Batman!

What Quantum non-Physicists (and, amazingly some actual-physicists) use to support this idea is: Depending on how you observe an electron “it is either a particle or a wave.”

ACTUALLY, it’s like this: When you set up an experiment to see wave-like qualities, an electron exhibits wave-like qualities. And, when you set up an experiment to see particle-like qualities, an electron exhibits particle-like qualities.

If we could figure out an experiment to show the pizza-like qualities of an electron, no question that Dominos would be delivering pizzatrons in 30 nanoseconds or you get it free.

We have no idea what an electron REALLY is.

And, more, the idea that our observation CHANGES reality is suggesting that, somehow, we are separate from reality, some non-changing entity that’s independent of the rest of the universe. Hello?

For what I can only hope is the last time: Quantum Physics is one way of attempting to describe the sub-atomic world. And, look, even Quantum Physicists have knock-down, drag-out, pocket-protector-throwing fights about what QP “says”.

The day someone comes up with a better description than Quantum Physics (with predictions and experimental proof to support it), “An electron is a particle or a wave” will sound like “You have a cold because your phlegm humors are backed up and these leeches will un-block that.”

The way things work in the ittiest-bittiest world is not the way they work out here… using QP to describe the macro world is just a metaphor.

Later: When you raise fruit flies in a jar with a clear lid, and then take off the lid, how fast the flies LEAVE the jar.

Followed by: When you raise fish in a tank with a clear divider in the middle, and then remove the divider, how they instantly swim into the other half of the tank.

And then: How frogs jump out of water as it heats up, no matter how slowly you heat it.

Next: Why you CANNOT trap a monkey with a hollowed out coconut and some candy.

Last but not least, just because something is really tiny, or has to do with molecules or atoms does NOT make it “nanotechnology.” Discuss amongst yourselves.