Importance and Excess Potential: Why Wanting Something Too Much Backfires

Importance, in Vadim Zeland’s use of the word, means the extra weight a person attaches to something beyond what it actually carries. He argues that this loading creates an imbalance he calls excess potential, and that the imbalance is what makes the thing you want most the thing you are least likely to get. The Russian author set out the idea in the Reality Transurfing series, where it does more work than any other concept in the system.

You do not have to accept his physics to recognise the pattern. Most people can name the job they wanted so badly they interviewed poorly for it, or the conversation they rehearsed until it came out wrong. This page explains what Zeland claims, where the claim is supported, where it collapses, and which parts of it should be handled with care.

What is excess potential?

Zeland’s starting picture is that nature runs on balance, and that a mind loading one thing with disproportionate meaning creates a local imbalance in what he calls the energy field. Balanced forces then move to flatten it. Because those forces are indifferent to the person’s intention, he says, the flattening frequently produces the opposite of what was wanted.

The important qualification comes early, and it is the part most summaries drop. Assessment is not the problem. Judging a cliff dangerous while sitting safely at home creates no potential at all. Standing at the edge and flooding that judgement with fear is what creates it. In his account, the size of the potential grows with the distance between your assessment and the situation as it actually is.

This matters, because it means the idea is not an instruction to stop caring. It is an argument about proportion. A person who wants a job and prepares for it carefully is doing nothing Zeland objects to. A person who has decided that this job is the difference between being somebody and being nothing has, in his terms, loaded the situation past what it can hold.

What is the difference between inner and outer importance?

Zeland splits importance in two, and the split is the most practically useful thing in the chapter.

Inner importance points at yourself. How large or how small you have decided you are, how much your work says about you, how much a flaw of yours means. Outer importance points outward. How much this event has to mean, how much this person’s opinion weighs, what this number decides.

His claim is that every unbalanced state he goes on to describe is one of these two in disguise. Irritation, anxiety, worship, contempt, guilt, pride, despair and idealisation all resolve into meaning loaded in one direction or the other. In a later volume he narrows it further and names guilt and low self-worth as the two predominant forms of inner importance, with everything else derivative of those two. That is the clearest statement of his own taxonomy anywhere in the series, and it connects the idea directly to identity and to the self-image.

Why does wanting something too much push it away?

Zeland distinguishes three kinds of wanting, and only one of them, on his account, gets anywhere.

The first is desire that converts into action and discharges itself in the doing. The second is idle longing, which sits in place and goes nowhere. The third he calls dependent desire: the outcome has been made to carry the person’s worth. If I get this, I am somebody. If I do not, I am nothing. He argues that dependent desire is the most reliable way to lose the thing, because the stakes attached to it have nothing to do with the thing itself.

He names the healthy version pure intention, which he defines as desire plus action minus importance, and illustrates with the deliberately unglamorous image of walking to a shop to collect a newspaper. You do not want the newspaper intensely. You do not doubt you will get it. You go.

Aversion, he says, works the same way in reverse. The harder you push against something, the more of your attention it occupies, which is why in his phrase you tend to get what you love to hate. Stripped of the energy language, that is a claim about attention, and it is one where research broadly agrees with him.

Why can’t you just tell yourself to relax?

Zeland’s best image is a plank. A plank lying on the ground is easy to walk along. The same plank laid between two rooftops is not, and no amount of talking to yourself changes that, because the stakes are real and your nervous system knows it.

His conclusion is the unexpected part. He does not recommend positive thinking, which he regards as useless here. He recommends a safety net: an alternative, a fallback, a counterweight, something that lowers the actual stakes rather than arguing with the feeling they produce. You do not lower the fear, in his framing. You lower what the fall costs.

He is equally blunt that trying to relax the grip directly does not work, because the effort of trying is itself a form of importance. The grip loosens when the meaning drains out of the situation, not when you strain at it.

That should sound familiar to anyone who has read Maxwell Maltz. Maltz built a chapter of Psycho-Cybernetics on Emile Coue’s law of reversed effort, the observation that conscious straining tends to produce the opposite of the intended result, and on the idea that the success mechanism works when it is not being forced. Two authors, two vocabularies, one structure: direct effort against an internal state strengthens it. Neville Goddard’s law of assumption arrives at a third version, arguing that the feeling of already having something works where the effort of reaching for it does not.

Is confidence the answer to insecurity?

This is the claim that earns the concept a place on the site, and it is not the one most readers expect.

Zeland argues that confidence is not the cure for insecurity but the same excess potential with the sign reversed. Both are built on importance. Both depend on measuring yourself against something outside you. Both take energy to hold up, which is why the confident version tends to collapse at the first serious test. On his account, reducing importance is not a route to confidence. It removes the need for it.

He follows this with a specific and recognisable observation: that the morning affirmation of unshakeable confidence has a shelf life measured in hours. Research turns out to be closer to him here than to the self-help consensus he is arguing against. Reviews of the self-esteem literature by Roy Baumeister and colleagues in 2003 found that high self-esteem predicts much less about real outcomes than was widely assumed. A 2009 study by Joanne Wood and colleagues in Psychological Science found that repeating flattering self-statements left people with low self-esteem feeling worse than before, not better.

None of that confirms excess potential. It does mean that his pessimism about manufacturing confidence is better founded than the advice it contradicts.

Where does importance show up?

Zeland works through a series of everyday forms, and most of them have a recognisable shape even where his explanation does not hold.

Dependent relationships. Conditions (“if you loved me you would”) and comparisons create the imbalance. He separates love, which he treats as admiration without possession, from idealisation, which projects qualities onto a person or an imagined future that are not there. Idealisation, he says, always ends with the myth being debunked.

Superiority and inferiority. Boasting and self-deprecation generate the same amount of potential with opposite signs. He argues that fighting a complex or concealing a flaw magnifies it, and that compensating with a different strength works better. Notably, he tells shy readers to stop fighting their shyness, which is close to the acceptance-based approach used in several modern clinical treatments.

Guilt. He treats guilt as pure excess potential, says manipulators reach people through it, and observes that obligation language works best on those already carrying a heightened sense of it. Part of this is useful. Part of it is not, and the care section below explains which.

Money. His position is that money is an attribute that accompanies a goal rather than a goal in itself, and that pursuing the money instead of the thing you actually wanted leaves you unable to tell when you have arrived. That narrow point stands up. The claims he builds on top of it do not, and this site does not repeat them.

Perfectionism. He traces a chain from ordinary conscientiousness, to obsession, to judging everyone else by the same standard, to appointing yourself an arbiter of how other people should live. He argues the perfectionist reliably gets the opposite of what they demand and makes life difficult for the people nearest them.

Several of these ideas reappear in his treatment of pendulums, the group structures he says feed on attention, and in his broader model of choice, which is covered in Reality Transurfing explained.

What does Zeland say about reducing importance?

He is specific that it is not suppression. Forcing a feeling down, he argues, produces more of the imbalance rather than less. What changes the potential is the attitude the feeling comes from.

His four questions, restated from the later volume, are worth knowing as a description of his position. How not to be afraid: have a fallback. How not to worry: do something, and the something need not relate to the worry. How not to want too much: accept the possibility of defeat in advance. How not to wait: act. His general principle is that excess potential disperses through movement rather than through introspection, and that intention is purified in the doing.

He ends with a caveat he repeats in both volumes, and it is a good sign for his honesty. Applied fanatically, the principle eats itself: you can attach enormous importance to keeping your importance at zero. He tells readers to allow themselves to lose rounds and to set no ultimatums, and he compares over-explaining the method to the centipede that can no longer walk once someone explains walking to it.

This page explains the model. It does not teach the practice. The auditing and reduction work is guided material, and we cover it in coaching rather than in an article, because it deals with guilt, self-worth and stakes that are specific to a person’s actual situation.

What the research says

Zeland’s explanation is not supported. Balanced forces, thought energy and a law of nature that penalises meaning-making have no evidence behind them. The pattern he is pointing at, however, is one of the better-studied effects in psychology, and the mechanism turns out to be attention and arousal rather than balance.

Zeland’s claim	What research shows
The more something matters, the worse you perform	Supported as a pattern. Choking under pressure has been studied since Roy Baumeister’s 1984 work; Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr (2001) showed that explicit monitoring disrupts skills that normally run automatically. Dan Ariely and colleagues (2009) found that incentives worth several months’ pay lowered performance on most tasks tested.
You get what you love to hate	Partly supported, as an attention effect. Daniel Wegner’s ironic process research (1994) found that suppressing a thought increases its frequency, especially under cognitive load.
Dwelling on the wanted outcome works against you	Supported. Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer (2002) found that positive fantasy about an achieved outcome predicted lower effort and worse results than contrasting it with obstacles.
Staking your worth on an outcome is costly	Supported. Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe’s work on contingencies of self-worth found that when a domain carries your worth, setbacks there hurt more and motivation suffers. This is the closest research analogue to dependent desire.
A safety net lowers the stakes and helps	Contested, in both directions. Jihae Shin and Katherine Milkman (2016) found that thinking through backup plans reduced desire for and performance toward the primary goal. Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor’s work on defensive pessimism found that for some people, imagining what could go wrong lowers anxiety and improves performance.
Guilt is uniformly destructive	Not supported as stated. June Tangney and colleagues separate guilt, focused on an act, which predicts repair and is broadly adaptive, from shame, focused on the self, which predicts withdrawal, depression and aggression. Zeland collapses the two.
Perfectionism damages the perfectionist	Supported as an association. A 2017 meta-analysis by Limburg and colleagues links perfectionistic concerns to depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation; Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill (2019) report perfectionism rising across cohorts. The causal story he tells is untested.
Idealising a partner ends in disappointment	Mixed. Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel (2008) found that stated ideal-partner preferences did not predict actual attraction in live meetings. Sandra Murray and colleagues found the opposite effect as well, with some positive illusions predicting relationship satisfaction.
Confidence cannot be installed directly	Closer to supported than not. Baumeister and colleagues (2003) found self-esteem predicts less than assumed; Wood and colleagues (2009) found positive self-statements backfired for people with low self-esteem.
Money arrives once you stop chasing it	Not supported, and not repeated on this site. Research on money and wellbeing finds diminishing returns rather than indifference, and materialistic values are associated with lower wellbeing (Dittmar and colleagues, 2014). No page here makes any claim about anyone’s income.

Who should take care with this idea

Three parts of the source material need naming plainly, because a reader who goes to the books will meet them.

The guilt and violence passage is false and we reject it. Zeland argues that a person carrying guilt has in some sense agreed to be punished, that this explains why they are attacked, and that a reader who drops their guilt will never again face the threat of violence. This is victim blaming, and the research points the other way: self-blame after an assault is associated with worse recovery, not with having invited the assault. A related passage treats a woman being beaten by her husband as a state she has driven herself into and answers it with importance reduction. Abuse is caused by the person committing it. If any of this describes your situation, the right response is safety planning and professional or legal help, not a change of attitude.

Health and money claims are excluded. Passages presenting illness or depression as a natural correction for overwork, or money anxiety as the cause of losing money, are not supported and are not repeated here. Nothing on this site suggests delaying medical care, ignoring public health guidance, or treating a financial problem as an attitude problem.

Guilt, shame and self-worth belong with a professional. Guilt about something you actually did is answered by repair, not by release. Persistent shame, and guilt that does not track any act, are worth taking to a licensed professional rather than to a technique. The same applies if reading this page made you recognise a pattern of feeling responsible for other people’s behaviour toward you.

One further limit is worth stating even though it is not a safety matter. Zeland’s advice to let go of a desire that causes discomfort is poor guidance for an anxious reader, because for anxiety, avoidance is the thing that keeps it going. The useful version of his point concerns stakes you have inflated, not situations you find uncomfortable.

So is the idea worth anything?

The honest summary is that Zeland described a real and under-named pattern, gave it an explanation that does not hold, and drew from it a set of observations sharper than most of what surrounds them. The observation that wanting harder makes you worse at getting it is correct. The claim that nature is rebalancing your energy field is not. The observation that confidence and insecurity are the same structure is genuinely valuable. The claim that dropping guilt makes you safe from violence is harmful.

What remains is a question worth asking about any goal you are currently gripping: what have you decided this outcome says about you? In this system’s terms, that is where the inner importance is hiding, and it is also where the site’s own position begins. The weight is not on the outcome. It is on the identity underneath it, on whatever you believe about who you would be if it did not arrive. Ideas about false beliefs and the self-image approach the same ground from another direction, and the broader account of how inner states are said to shape outer ones sits in the manifestation hub.

Reading about this will take you a certain distance. Working out what you have loaded onto which outcome, and what to do about the ones involving your own worth, is specific to you, which is why we do that part in coaching rather than on a page.

Frequently asked questions

What is excess potential in Reality Transurfing?

Excess potential is Vadim Zeland's term for the imbalance he says forms when a person attaches far more meaning to something than it actually carries. He argues that natural forces then move to flatten the imbalance, and because they are indifferent to what the person wanted, the result is often the opposite of the intention.

What is the difference between inner and outer importance?

Inner importance is meaning loaded onto yourself, your worth, your work or your flaws. Outer importance is meaning loaded onto something outside you, such as an event, a person or an outcome. Zeland argues that every unbalanced state he describes, from anxiety to contempt to worship, is one of these two wearing a different coat.

Why does wanting something too much push it away?

Zeland's explanation involves balance in nature, which research does not support. The evidence supports a different mechanism for the same pattern: when stakes rise, attention shifts to monitoring yourself and to the outcome, and skills that normally run automatically get disrupted. Psychologists have studied this as choking under pressure since the 1980s.

Is reducing importance the same as not caring?

No, and Zeland is explicit about it. He argues that suppressing a feeling builds more of the imbalance, not less. His claim is that the meaning drains out when the attitude behind it changes, not when the feeling is forced down, which is why he says trying to release the grip tightens it.

Does excess potential really exist?

As a physical force, no. Balanced forces, thought energy and a law of nature that penalises meaning-making have no supporting evidence. The psychological pattern Zeland is describing is real and well studied, which is why the idea is worth understanding even though his explanation is not.

Is confidence the cure for insecurity?

Zeland argues it is not, because both are built on importance and both depend on measuring yourself against something outside you. Research is closer to him than most people expect: reviews of the self-esteem literature found that raising self-esteem directly predicts far less than assumed.

This article is educational and is not medical, psychological or financial advice. Talk to a qualified professional before making major changes, especially if you live with a mental health condition. Read the full disclaimer.