Years ago, during the early days of my consulting career, I was griping to my then manager and mentor (who I will call David for the sake of this post) about one of the coworkers on our team.

“He’s just a bad worker, David,” I vented with a frustration typical of an impatient young consultant. “He’s terrible with the clients.”

David, a man who was widely respected in the industry and who always carries a composed demeanor and a therapeutically soothing voice that could calm you down even if you were on fire, instead of adding gasoline to my impetuous temperament, responded in a way that I never would have expected.

“I don’t think he’s a bad worker. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad worker. I think there are only people who are placed in the wrong roles,” David calmly dispensed his managerial and fatherly wisdom.

And so instead of reprimanding the struggling employee, David recommended that he be moved to a more internal technical role, where he didn’t have to face clients, but where he could shine with the skills he was born with. He thrived in this new role.

David forever shaped my perspective about how we place expectations on others and ourselves. Take for example, this piece of wood that I now use as a a spoon rest in my kitchen. It was actually originally designed to be an incense holder.

But as an incense holder, it was awful in its intended role. The design is too narrow and incense ashes kept dropping outside of the holder.

However, as a spoon rest, it works beautifully. The shallow, flat and concave boat-like shape perfectly cradles my spoon in place while I wait for my food to cook.

And by simply seeing the potential of what something can do well, instead of fixating on what it cannot, I saved money and reduced waste by repurposing an object that I already had in the house. And that’s the same mentality I try to apply with myself and everyone: focus on what this person CAN do well, versus what they cannot.

Albert Einstein was credited for this quote: “…if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” And I didn’t understand this profound wisdom until a kind man showed me in practice what it means to see the best potential in everyone, including ourselves.