A potential product doesn’t sell. It is much harder to entice an investor with an idea, and much easier to do so with actual sales. Same with promises: much better to do something than say so.
Moving from potential to actual is creative power. In one sense, potential is equal to nothing. In another sense, actual isn’t possible without potential, and therefore all actual is really just potential.
In some ways it seems to be the balance between idea and reality, mental and physical. In man, the balance between thinker and doer.
And sometimes cause for our confusion in self-awareness. We see in ourselves all our ideas, our mental. Others see only the physical, what we have created. We have an image of ourselves that is sometimes a combination of potential and actual. Others see only the actual.
An unborn author doesn’t write books, but neither does a live author who chose to be an accountant instead, or an author afraid of what others might think. Actualization is already in us, potentially, intangibly. We spend a lifetime pulling it out, making it real.
The veil between potential and actual is thin. Powerful men move easily from one side to the other.