The Big Door Prize: Determining Your Own Potential
In Apple TV’s The Big Door Prize, a mysterious machine, Morpho, appears in a small town and guarantees to reveal everyone’s true potential. Members of the community are shaken up by their revealed potentials, causing them to review their life choices and make drastic changes in their lives.
The show had me thinking about my own potential. If I were in that show, what would Morpho tell me my potential is?
When I was a kid, an auntie at a Filipino party said she could read palms. We all shoved our palms in front of her, eager to hear our futures.
“Read mine! Read mine!”
She read Jon Jon’s before me. “You will be very rich!”
She looked at my palm next. “You will always struggle. You will get money. You will lose it.”
She moved on to the other palms in front of her. I felt the room close in on me. Struggle and limited financial success were my future. My potential will be struggle.
Jon Jon laughed, “You’re going to be poor! I’m going to be rich!”
Like that auntie had said, for the next twenty years, I struggled. I worked as an ICU nurse, a job I hated. I was in debt. I had a drinking problem. I had dreams of writing books but never finished writing one to completion. I dated men who reflected back to me what I thought I deserved: struggle, hardship, and dismal prospects.
When I had my daughter as a single mom, I looked down at her little face as she struggled to survive in the Pediatric ICU after open heart surgery and thought: I want to give her a fantastic life.
I changed my mindset. I believed in another potential for myself. Today, I am a software engineer making six figures, writing romance books (167 published), and waking up every morning believing in a different potential than what was once foretold to me thirty years ago.
As far as that auntie’s prophecy? It’s all in how I interpreted it.
“You will always struggle. You will get money. You will lose it.”
Is struggle a bad thing? Is struggling to become a better version of myself every single day bad? Nope.
You will get money. You will lose it. She never said how much money I would have. Billionaires make investments. They lose money. They get money. That’s how entrepreneurship works. In fact, that’s how everyday life is: I make money. I buy food with that money. Money comes and goes.
As a kid, I took her palm reading to be negative and my dismal life prospects followed suit.
Today, I don’t need any machine or auntie to tell me my potential.
If I were in The Big Door Prize, what would Morpho tell me my potential is?
I can’t be sure, but I don’t need to know.
