When You Stop Chasing Potential — In Jobs, Men, and Versions of Yourself

Taking things at face value isn't pessimism. It's self-respect.

Somewhere between December and January, I did something I’ve never said out loud until now. I opened Canva, backspaced the 2024 on my vision board, typed 2025, put it in a clear acrylic frame, and kept it moving.

That was the moment I got sick of my own shit.

Not because the year had been bad. 2024 was actually a big year. It almost always is. I’m ambitious, I always have a career year, I’m always further than I was before. But when I looked at that board, really looked at it, I knew. The big ones hadn’t moved. The scary ones. The life ones. The close-your-eyes-and-leap ones. I was still circling.

I had been chasing potential. And not just my own.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. The same pattern that shows up in my vision boards also showed up in my jobs, my relationships, and in every version of myself I’ve been comfortable drafting and not comfortable enough executing. We fall in love with what something could be. We project. We run with the projection. And then we stay. In the job, in the relationship, staring at the same board. Waiting for the thing we imagined to become the thing we have.

It doesn’t. It almost never does. And the longer you wait, the more you realize you weren’t in love with the reality. You were in love with the idea.

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The Job

A few years ago, I accepted a role as Head of Digital and Social at a company that worked with celebrity-owned brands. I’ll be honest about what sold me. The title and the brands.

Head of anything is a certain kind of signal. It suggests seniority. It implies you’re leading something. What it implied and what it actually was turned out to be two very different things.

I had no team. They eventually had a Content Producer report to me, a photographer and videographer, which made no sense. My background is marketing, not content creation. I could give direction on what I thought would perform. I couldn’t develop his craft or give him meaningful guidance on the production side. So he took his direction from the person who was actually running things. My boss.

My boss was overbearing, condescending, a micromanager in the most suffocating sense. My ideas only mattered insofar as they agreed with his. The celebrity brands I thought I’d be building strategy for? I focused on one. The rest just needed someone to schedule posts.

I was an overqualified social media manager with a title that didn’t match the job description and a boss who made sure I knew it.

Since COVID, I’ve had my social media notifications turned off. Something about watching everyone spiral online in real time, the countdowns, the takes, the noise, made me turn them off and they haven’t been on since. My boss made it clear he expected community management on weekends and he expected my notifications on.

I never turned them on. I didn’t stay at that job either. I left it off my resume entirely. As far as my career story is concerned, it didn’t happen.

But here’s what I should have caught before I accepted. Every sign was there in the interview. The promises of autonomy felt a little too enthusiastic. The org structure didn’t quite add up. I wanted the role to be what it was described as so badly that I decided it would be.

I chased the potential. The job was never going to be that.

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The Men

I want to be careful here because this is not about any one person. It’s about a pattern.

I have liked the idea of someone before. I have looked at what a man could be, the credentials, the job, the way he carries himself in a room, and run with it. I have invested in the potential of who he might become, who we might be, rather than who he actually was when nobody was watching.

That gets old. It gets old when you realize you don’t actually want the same things. When he never makes future plans. When the person you imagined him becoming never quite materializes, and you’re still waiting.

Here’s what I know now. Credentials are not character. The way a man speaks to you matters more than how he speaks to a room full of people. His title tells you nothing about whether he will show up for you.

I’ve also learned the difference between nice and kind. They are not the same thing. Nice is a performance. Kind is a practice. I cannot build anything with nice.

And the questions that actually matter, does he care about me, will he fight for me, is he afraid to lose me, none of those answers are in a LinkedIn profile.

We often don’t ask those questions because we’re too busy falling for the idea. The problem with ideas is they don’t show up when it matters. They don’t do the small, consistent things that build something real.

Believe what people show you. Not what you’ve decided they could become.

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The Self

I made the vision board smaller this year.

Less images. More focus. I reviewed everything I’d been carrying for two years, asked myself what I was actually doing to close the gap between the life I’d pinned and the life I was living, and I got honest. I had been playing it small in the places that scared me most. Big on career. Careful everywhere else.

The board lives on my laptop now. I see it every day. And for the first time in a while, I’m not just looking at it. I’m moving toward it.

There’s a difference between curating a vision and living one. For a long time I was very good at the curation. The board was beautiful. The life, on paper, was impressive. But the things I wanted most, the scary ones, the love ones, the leap-and-figure-it-out-on-the-way-down ones, I kept giving those a revised deadline.

2026 doesn’t have a revised deadline.

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So here’s my tini bit of advice.

1. Take things at face value. When a job overpromises in the interview, believe the offer letter. When a man is charming to the room but not to you when it’s quiet, that’s the data. Stop arguing with what’s right in front of you.

2. Stop dating credentials. The degree, the job title, the address, none of it tells you if someone will show up for you when it matters. Ask better questions. Watch closer.

3. Know the difference between nice and kind. Nice is a performance. Kind is a practice. You cannot build a life, a relationship, or a team around nice.

4. Make the board smaller. Less images, more commitment. A vision board isn’t a mood. It’s a promise you’re making to yourself. Treat it like one.

5. Stop donating your potential to things that aren’t ready for it. The energy you extend to jobs that overpromise, relationships that underdeliver, and versions of yourself you keep drafting but never build, redirect it. It was always yours.

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: I think about that vision board, the one I almost gave a third deadline, sitting in its acrylic frame on my desk.

This year I didn’t change the date. I changed my relationship to the thing. Less dreaming about it, more moving toward it. The board isn’t smaller because I want less. It’s smaller because I finally got honest about what I’m actually willing to do.

That’s the whole game. Not wanting harder. Not visualizing louder. Just being clear-eyed enough to see what’s real, what’s projection, and what you’ve been calling potential when it was really just hope dressed up as a plan.

What are you still waiting to become real?

Until the next round,
Jenae

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✨ THE TINI EDIT

This week's curation: "The Face Value Edit"
📖 Read: All About Love by bell hooks. She argues that most of us have never been taught what love actually is, only what we’ve decided it should be. Read it slowly.
🕯️ Scent: Maison Margiela Replica “Flower Market.” It smells like a decision you’ve already made.
🧠 Mindset Shift: Replace “I see so much potential in this” with “I see what this actually is.” Notice how fast things get clearer.
🍸 Cocktail: A dirty martini, extra olives. Some things you never stop knowing exactly what you want.