Main Summary: Releasing Your Potential by Myles Munroe reveals that every person carries untapped potential from birth. The author teaches that knowing God as your Source, understanding your purpose, maintaining the right environment, and embracing work are the keys to releasing your hidden abilities for the benefit of future generations.
Lessons You’ll Learn From This Post
- The Tragedy of Unreleased Potential
- How Will You Be Remembered?
- What Is Potential?
- How to Release Your Potential
- The Foundation Key
- Know Your Source
- Understand Your Function
- Understand Your Purpose
- Know Your Resources
- Maintain the Right Environment
- Work: The Master Key
- Potential and the Priority of Work
- Understanding Work
- Responding to Responsibility
Also read Understanding Your Potential by Myles Munroe [Summary]
Abortion is the ignorance of responsibility and the denial of obligation.
The Tragedy of Unreleased Potential
● The death of a seed is the burial of a forest.
● Each person comes into this world with an assignment to fulfill.
● The graveyards are full of great men and women who never became great because they did not give their abilities responsibility.
● Untapped ability is called potential, and everyone is born pregnant with unlimited potential.
● To abort means to terminate life before its full potential can be realized.
● Death, in its simplest form, is the termination of potential.
● In every seed there is a forest; in every fish, a school; in every bird, a flock; in every cow, a herd; in every girl, a woman; in every boy, a man; and in every man, a nation.
● Abortion is the ignorance of responsibility and the denial of obligation.
● When Adam broke God’s law, he aborted his seed’s potential for becoming all they were intended to be.
● The abortion of dreams, visions, art, music, writing, business, leadership, or inventions affects both nature and succeeding generations.
● Creation’s destiny is tied to the release of your potential.
● The fact that you were born is evidence that God knew the earth needed the potential you are pregnant with.
● Your released potential is the world’s inheritance.
Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.
How Will You Be Remembered?
● The greatest tragedy in life is not death, but life that fails to fulfill its purpose and potential.
● It is better to have never been born than to live and not fulfill the purpose for which you were given life.
● When you become aware of the tremendous potential that resides within you, you are obligated to release that wealth to the world around you.
● You must take responsibility for your ability—no one else can do it for you.
● What lies behind you is history, and what lies before you is the future, but both are tiny matters compared to what lies within you.
● Live fully so you can die effectively.
● Let your life write the speech of your death.
● “Well done” is much better than “well said.”
● Don’t just talk about your potential dreams, visions, and ideas—step out now and determine to do them.
● The release of your potential demands that you refuse to be satisfied with your latest accomplishment.
● Potential is the large, unknown bank of resources you were given at birth.
● What you have accomplished is no longer your potential.
● Releasing your potential requires a willingness to move beyond the familiar into the realm of possibilities.
● Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.
● Potential is given to be released, not wasted.
● Satisfaction with success kills potential.
God is the source of all potential. He is everything we haven’t seen yet.
What Is Potential?
● Potential is unexposed ability, reserved power, untapped strength, capped capabilities, unused success, dormant gifts, hidden talents, and latent power.
● Potential is what you can do that you haven’t yet done.
● Potential is where you can go that you haven’t yet gone.
● Potential is who you can be that you haven’t yet been.
● Potential is the sum of who you are that you have yet to reveal.
● You are capable of much more than you are presently thinking, imagining, doing, or being.
● The potential principle is this: In every seed there is a tree, and in every tree there are apples with seeds in them.
● When you hold one apple seed, you truly hold an entire orchard.
● Every living thing that God created was blessed with potential.
● Everything that was and is was in God before it came to be seen.
● God is the source of all potential because He is everything we haven’t seen yet.
● Omnipotent means “always full of power”—God can always do more than He has already done.
● God’s creation process involved planning, deciding on material substance, speaking to that substance, and bringing forth exactly what He spoke.
● When God wanted plants, He spoke to the ground.
● When God wanted animals, He spoke to the ground.
● When God wanted fish, He spoke to the sea.
● When God created human beings, He spoke to Himself because He planned that humans should be spirit even as He is Spirit.
● When God wanted you, He spoke to Himself.
Also read Maximizing Your Potential by Myles Munroe [Summary]
No product can be more powerful than the source from which it came.
How to Release Your Potential
● What God speaks to becomes the source for what He creates.
● All things have the same components and essence as the sources from which they came.
● All things must be maintained by the sources from which they came.
● The potential of all things is related to the sources from which they came.
● No product can be more powerful than the source from which it came.
● Everything in life has the potential to fulfill its purpose.
● The purpose of a thing cannot be known by asking anyone other than the designer or the manufacturer.
● Potential is determined and revealed by the demands placed on it by its creator.
● Potential is revealed by the faith of the manufacturer in his product and the expectations he places upon it.
● You must know your Source—God is your manufacturer.
● You must understand how you were designed to function.
● You must know your purpose.
● You must understand your resources.
● You must have the right environment.
● You must work out your potential.
● You must cultivate your potential by removing negative influences.
● You must guard your potential because Satan is intent on destroying it.
● You must share your potential because potential is given for the benefit of many, not for the benefit of one.
● You must know and understand the laws of limitation.
● Freedom without law results in purposelessness.
● Power without responsibility is ineffective.
The Bible is God’s manual on you.
The Foundation Key
● You were created to release God’s potential.
● The source of a resource determines its potential.
● Potential is determined and released by the demands made on it by its creator.
● Apart from its source, a product cannot know what it’s supposed to be or how it was designed to act.
● Your potential is wrapped up in God because you came from Him.
● When you become a Christian, God changes your name and your nature.
● God wants you to share His divine nature.
● God’s commands do not require you to live supernaturally, but naturally.
● You are supposed to be naturally like your Source.
● Without God, you can do nothing because your abilities are defined by God’s abilities.
● God has tied the revelation of His potential to your dreams, aspirations, and prayers.
● You are the key to God’s creative expression.
● God designed you to operate by faith.
● You will never know your purpose unless you figure out why God created you.
● You are not an accident—God planned your days before you drew your first breath.
● God will not entrust you with more resources until you use wisely what He has already given you.
● Disobedience brings a polluted environment, which stunts and impedes the release of your potential.
● Work is the method God established to release your potential.
● The Bible is God’s manual for you.
● A person without God is dangerous because he cannot function according to God’s intentions.
● Never confuse behavior with regeneration—proper behavior is impossible without the Holy Spirit.
● If God gives you a precaution, don’t test it to see what will happen.
● Disobedience is always followed by the assessment of the penalty.
● You cannot expect God to fix you if you are going to Satan for repair.
Also read Overcoming Crisis by Myles Munroe [Summary]
You are as valuable as the God you came from.
Know Your Source
● Your ability depends on your response to God’s ability.
● Only God knows your value and potential because you came from Him.
● God believes in you and your abilities.
● The value of the human soul is equal to the death of God.
● It is not what is paid that gives value to an item, but what it costs.
● You are as valuable as the God you came from.
● You are not what your teacher, spouse, children, or boss says about you.
● You are as valuable and capable as God says you are.
● Your potential is determined by God because you came out of God.
● You are a spirit because God spoke to Himself when He created you.
● Your spirit will live forever because spirits cannot die.
● God designed you to operate like He operates—by faith.
● Faith is not a jump in the dark; it is a walk in the light.
● You have the power to dominate the earth, not the earth to dominate you.
● If you are addicted to anything, you are being controlled by the earth.
● God gave you the potential to reproduce what you are.
● Anything you carry through from thought to action is within your power to accomplish.
● You can’t think, plan, or imagine something greater than God because God is the source of your imagination.
● If you pull yourself out of God, you are dead.
● God is the soil you unconditionally need.
● Your ability to release your potential is directly related to your knowledge of God.
● Whatever God demands of you, He knows is inside you.
● The people who know their God shall be strong and do exploits.
● Faith in God is believing and acting on what He says.
● Without Christ, your efforts are futile, and the result is frustration.
● If God is with you, it is not important who is coming against you.
Faith is the bucket that draws from the well of potential within you.
Understand Your Function
● Vision is the ability to see above and beyond the majority.
● God designed humans to be holy beings who live forever.
● Sin robbed humanity of eternal potential because everyone is born spiritually dead.
● A man without God is a paralyzed spirit in dirt, walking on two legs.
● Your body does not need God to live—it came from the ground and needs products from the ground.
● Life from the body leads to death.
● A mere person focuses on their made being (dust) instead of their created being (spirit).
● God has a name for those who detach from Him and live from the body—He calls them “mere dirt.”
● God sent Jesus to redeem your eternal potential through death on the cross.
● Redeemed means “to purchase again.”
● Jesus paid the redemptive price so you could be restored to eternal life and fellowship with God.
● God promised to return and redeem your body at the resurrection of the dead.
● You are much more than your imperfect, deteriorating body.
● God designed you to be a limitless person.
● God thinks in terms of potential—of things that are not yet manifested.
● The past is no longer motivational; only the future releases more untapped talents.
● Faith sees what hasn’t been manifested yet.
● Faith requires you to function by believing first, instead of seeing or feeling first.
● Potential demands faith, and faith makes demands on potential.
● Faith is the bucket that draws from the well of potential within you.
● Life is not always what it seems—what you see or feel is not the whole story.
● If God is the source of your dream, people cannot destroy it.
God wants you to look like you and act like Him.
Understand Your Purpose
● Life without purpose is an experiment.
● Accomplishments without a sense of purpose are meaningless.
● The purpose of something is the reason for which it exists or the manufacturer’s original intent for making it.
● Only the manufacturer knows why he created the product the way he did.
● God knows the purpose for your life because He determined it before you were born.
● No matter how you are thinking before you meet Jesus, your thinking is wrong.
● Without Jesus, you cannot come to God.
● Life apart from God leads to destruction.
● Ignorance of purpose leads to abuse.
● The word abuse comes from “abnormal” and “use”—when you don’t know a purpose, you use things abnormally.
● If you don’t know the purpose of a wife, you will abuse her.
● If you don’t know what a husband is for, you will abnormally use him.
● If you try to live without God, you will completely mess up your life.
● Knowledge of purpose is the only way to avoid abuse.
● It doesn’t matter what you do—if you don’t understand why you are doing it, you are wasting your time.
● God wants you to look like you and act like Him.
● God created you to enjoy fellowship with Him.
● God created you to dominate the earth, not to be dominated by it.
● Every problem we experience is the result of not fulfilling our purpose to dominate the earth.
● God abhors abnormal use. He created you to bear abundant, life-giving fruit.
● The presence of the Holy Spirit in your life is the key to bearing fruit.
● You must submit to the control of the Holy Spirit, or something or someone else will control you.
Sin is a waste of time.
Know Your Resources
● You can never change the world by being controlled by the earth.
● All resources should lead to God, their ultimate Source.
● God is more concerned with what you do with what you have than with how much you have.
● God loves and cares for all people, rich or poor alike.
● Poverty is not a gift from God but the result of your actions.
● Your success is not determined by what you have, but by what you do with what you have.
● Hardworking, diligent people get their hands on wealth while lazy people watch them take it.
● Understanding must precede use.
● The proper use of resources maximizes potential.
● The abnormal use (abuse) of resources destroys potential.
● Every resource God gave to Adam is still available to us today.
● God gives you resources to live on, not to live for.
● When a resource becomes more important than the purpose for which God gave it, you have crossed into abuse.
● Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
● The gifts of the Spirit are resources to build up the Church.
● The resources of your soul (mind, will, and feelings) are not available unless you allow God to transform your mind.
● Time is a temporary interruption in eternity.
● The only thing you can do with time is use it—if you don’t use it, you lose it.
● Sin is a waste of time.
● The only time you have is now.
● You have many resources that you aren’t presently using.
● View your resources as gifts to be used in God’s service instead of property to be hoarded for your benefit.
Man is a wreck outside of God’s environment.
Maintain the Right Environment
● You are what you eat, and what’s eating you.
● Violation of the environment always produces death.
● Everything was designed to function within a specific environment.
● Your potential is directly related to your environment.
● If your environment is deficient, you will fail to achieve all you were created to do.
● What happens in your life is determined by who you live with, who you keep company with, where you spend your time, and what you feed your mind.
● The atmosphere on the inside is influenced by the conditions on the outside.
● You cannot fix the rest of your life and ignore the conditions in your home.
● God is at the center of man’s ideal environment.
● You cannot live outside the environment God designed for you because you need God’s presence.
● Man is a wreck outside of God’s environment.
● Our present world is designed to destroy your potential.
● Pollution starts with the eyes—seeing is the opening through which sinful thoughts and actions begin.
● If you don’t want to eat, don’t look.
● God doesn’t have to convict you of sin because the polluted atmosphere of guilt and excuses will.
● The evil that characterized the world in Genesis still plagues our world today.
● Our environment is out of control, and we are powerless to restrain it.
● God is well acquainted with the insanity of your world.
● God offers Himself as the solution to your problems.
● Trust, faith, forgiveness, and obedience are necessary ingredients of your ideal
● Leave a wrong environment or change it.
The love of work is the secret to a productive life.
Work: The Master Key
● Some dream of worthy accomplishments, while others stay awake and do them.
● The power in our society can be reduced to two basic elements: God and money.
● You cannot serve both God and money.
● If money motivates you, greed will control your actions.
● If God empowers you, His purposes for your life will control you.
● The love of money promotes corrupt morals and perverted values.
● God wants you to be a good worker, not a good job keeper.
● Work releases potential; a job provides a paycheck.
● Thomas Edison said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
● Work as God planned it was given to man before sin entered the world.
● Work is a blessing that reveals what you can do.
● Work is the master key to releasing your potential.
● Six days you shall labor—rest is not better than work.
● Work always produces more personal growth and satisfaction than rest does.
● If you are unfulfilled, you are probably resting too much.
● Retirement is not part of God’s plan for your life.
● God hasn’t retired, and you were not designed to retire.
● The minute you quit working, you begin to die.
● You cannot get something for nothing.
● Work is God’s pathway to a satisfying, meaningful existence.
● Effort is the key to satisfaction.
● The love of work is the secret to a productive life.
● Work and the ability to handle responsibility go hand in hand.
When you refuse to work, you deny yourself the opportunity to fulfill your purpose.
Potential and the Priority of Work
● Potential is never realized without work.
● God uses busy people because their busyness shows they are willing to work.
● The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
● God worked, and He created you to work.
● God took His potential and, through effort, changed it from potential to experience.
● We must take our potential and, through work, change it from potential to experience.
● Rest is needed after a long, laborious experience, not after a tiny task that requires little effort.
● God gave Adam work to do when He put him in the Garden.
● God equates dominion with work.
● Work is a gift from God, not a curse.
● You were created to work, not to rest, retire, or go on vacation.
● God gave you birth to experience fulfillment by completing tasks through effort.
● Work is honorable.
● When you refuse to work, you deny yourself the opportunity to fulfill your purpose.
● Work profits the worker by providing for physical needs, revealing potential, unveiling blessings, giving opportunity to rejoice in achievement, and building self-esteem.
● If you can work and you are not working, you are stealing from those who are working.
● Taking the benefits of work without participating in the effort is theft.
● The absence of work is stealing.
● The cure for stealing is work—doing something useful with your hands.
● Poverty is cured by hard work.
● A sluggard is a lazy bum—someone who lies on their belly long enough for grass to grow on it.
● To be poor doesn’t mean you don’t have anything; it means you aren’t doing anything.
The release of your potential depends on your expenditure of the necessary effort to change your thoughts into visible realities.
Understanding Work
● Working for fulfillment is better than working for money.
● The purpose of a job is work, not money.
● History reveals that all great empires were built on the sweat and blood of a labor force.
● Workers control productivity and therefore the destiny of a nation.
● Work releases potential; a job provides a paycheck.
● Work arises out of a desire to contribute to the world’s wealth and well-being by giving of yourself.
● We need to get labor back into work.
● Labor is delivering the babies you will die with if you don’t work them into sight.
● Work as though your life depended on it, because it does.
● Labor delivers your potential.
● The Greek word “ergon” means “to activate” and gives us the word “energy.”
● Work is the activation of stored energy.
● The Greek word “energia” means “to become”—you cannot become what God sees in you without work.
● Potential is what you have; work is what you do.
● What you do with what you have makes the difference between a life of strength and a life of defeat.
● A fantasy is a dream without labor and a vision without a mission.
● Every time God gives you a promise, He also gives you the command to work to receive what He has promised.
● God doesn’t just deliver like Santa Claus—you have to fight to get what is yours.
● Work is the means to produce a desired result.
● Knowledge is not profitable until it is translated into action.
● Work is the translator God has provided.
● Faith without works is unproductive.
● Visionaries must become missionaries to be effective and successful.
● If you’re not working, you’re not fulfilling your purpose.
● The release of your potential depends on your expenditure of the necessary effort to change your thoughts into visible realities.
You will never know the extent of your potential until you give it something to do.
Responding to Responsibility
● The greatest need of ability is responsibility.
● Responsibility is simply the ability to respond.
● Every human being comes to this world pregnant with potential.
● You are accountable for the time you spend on this planet.
● The fact that you were born is evidence that you possess something that can benefit the world.
● No matter what you have accomplished, there is still much more inside you that needs to be released.
● Only you can release your potential.
● Necessity is the mother of invention.
● You will never know the extent of your potential until you give it something to do.
● The greatest tragedy in your life will not be your death, but what dies with you at death.
● Finishing is more important than starting.
● The race is not to the swift, but to the one who endures to the end.
● Jesus finished His task on earth and went to the grave empty.
● The wealth of the cemetery is the potential of the unfinished.
● God designed everything not only to reproduce itself but also to transfer its life and treasure to the next generation.
● No man is born to live or die unto himself.
● The next generation needs the treasure of your potential.
● Until a man can see beyond his own loins, the future is in danger.
● The essence of potential is not preservation but liberation.
● We can never transfer responsibility for the future to others.
● God has given you everything you need to fulfill His purpose for your life.
● Decide today to do something with your dreams.
● Disappoint procrastination and commit yourself to releasing your potential.
● Stop wishing and start willing.
● Stop proposing and start purposing.
● Stop procrastinating and start planning.
● Determine to die empty and leave the earth an inheritance that gives life to others.
You hold untapped potential within you right now. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Start working, change your environment, reconnect with your Source, and die empty. Leave an inheritance for the next generation. Your assignment begins or ends with what you will choose to do today.
Finally, here is a question we’d love you to answer.
If your funeral were five years from today, what would you want the speakers to say about how you used your gifts and abilities?
We would love to hear from you. Please leave your answer and comment in the comment box below.
This book is available to buy or read in various online bookstores or from your local bookshop.
If you have yet to SUBSCRIBE to our blog, please do that NOW. So you don’t miss any inspirational book summaries coming next.
Also, do well by liking and sharing this post with your friends and loved ones. Let’s spread the word together.
God bless you
