The shirt is white, and the words are white, and the ramp is white. You have to look twice to see the whole diagram. At the top left, a dashed circle sits on a short ledge. At the bottom right, a solid ball rests on a flat ledge. Between them, a curved ramp descends. Above it all, in capital letters: I HAD POTENTIAL.
It is a physics joke, or a joke about physics, or a joke about the distance between the two. The dashed circle is the ball where it started—outlined, not filled, a shape that could be anything. The solid ball is where it ended up. The ramp is the path between. The shirt does not say what happened on the ramp. It only shows the before and the after, and lets the gap do the talking.
That gap is the argument. Potential, in physics, is energy that is stored and waiting—not yet kinetic, not yet moving, but real. The dashed circle is potential in that sense: a position with promise, a shape that hasn’t committed. The solid ball is what potential becomes when it stops being potential and starts being something. The shirt’s joke is that the something is smaller, lower, and less interesting than the promise. The ball didn’t roll up. It rolled down.
I keep thinking about the dashed line. It is not a failure. It is a drawing convention. A dashed circle in a diagram means this is where the object was, or this is where the object could be, or this is the shape we are tracking. It is a placeholder for something that hasn’t arrived. The shirt uses that convention to make a small, self-deprecating point: the person wearing it is the solid ball now, and the dashed circle is the version of themselves they remember.
But there is another reading, and I think it is the more useful one for anyone who spends time in rooms where people are trying to make things happen. The dashed circle is not just a memory. It is a position. It is the place where the ball could have gone, or could still go, if the ramp were different. The shirt doesn’t show a broken ramp or a missing ramp. It shows a ramp that works exactly as ramps do: things roll down. The joke is not that the ball failed. The joke is that the diagram is honest.
That honesty is what makes the shirt wearable. It is not a shirt about being lazy or wasted. It is a shirt about the difference between the shape you were and the shape you are, drawn in the plainest possible terms. The dashed circle is the promise. The solid ball is the outcome. The ramp is the part nobody draws because it is just gravity.
If you want the object itself, the I Had Potential shirt is listed under the Quirky Cotton Collective brand. The design is minimal—white on white, no border, no extra text. It relies on the viewer to complete the diagram, which is a lot to ask of a t-shirt and also exactly the point. The shirt is not explaining itself. It is showing you a dashed circle and a solid ball and letting you decide which one you are.
I think the best use of a shirt like this is not as a punchline but as a boundary. It says: I know the difference between the shape I was and the shape I am. It says: I am not asking you to fix the ramp. It says: the dashed circle is still there, and I can see it, and I am not going to pretend it isn’t. That is a small, sturdy kind of honesty. It is the kind of thing you wear to a meeting where someone is going to ask you to be the person you were three years ago, and you need a reminder that the ball has already rolled.
The transferable practice is this: draw the dashed circle. Not to mourn it, but to name it. In a notebook, on a whiteboard, in the margin of a agenda—put the shape you were next to the shape you are, and draw the ramp between them. Then ask the question the shirt asks without answering: what would it take to change the ramp? Not the ball. The ramp. That is the part of the diagram that is still under construction, even if the shirt doesn’t show it.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.