I choose Gryffindor!

For me personally, sorting hat's method of sorting was as confusing as it was to Harry. I mean he should be in Slytherin. Shouldn't he? He did have all that it his head. His comradery always seemed to overshadow his courage , at least to me . And Slytherin 'would' help him reach his potential. Same with Hermione. There wasn't anyone as brilliant as her in Ravenclaw. Her bravery , although admirable, mostly came second to her never ending thirst for knowledge.

It has taken me a number of years but finally I have understood what the sorting hat or rather Rowling was trying to tell me. Many people have potential for many things. Parents of kids who love breaking and then trying to fix the stuff are always of the view that their kids have great 'potential' to be an engineer. Similarly kids who right good essays are often told by their teachers that they
 can be good writers (greatness is mostly up to fate ). In the end it doesn't matter if 500 people had the
potential to be writers. The only person who becomes a writer will be the one who actually wants and tries to become a writer.

I am a medical student. The ultimate dream of people around me is to become a cardiologist or surgeon or something equally significant. Some of them write really well. Some have blogs. Some are editors of college magazine. And some write Facebook posts fit for Charles Dickens .But they see writing as just a hobby (as most people should in medical school). For me it's completely opposite. It's not that I want to waste my five years of medical education (which itself is a hot topic these days ) and I am pretty sure I wont. I'll go in a good field of medicine and get a good job etc. But I always see author as my future profession. When people say they want to become doctor like Dr. Khawaja Azeem or Dr. Faisal Masood, deep down I want to be a doctor like Shafiq ur Rehman whose literary achievements largely overshadow his medical ones though he did practice medicine (and that too in armed forces).

The potential is a good thing to have. It'll give you a 1-5% boost. Sometimes it's the first 5% , others times the very last. But it's you who decides if you even want that boost. We always have other paths open. We can decide to forgo that bonus for a field we actually love even if we have no extraordinary potential for it. The choices we make guide our path of life. Not our potential. If we keep whispering 'not Slytherin' nobody can force us to go there even if we have all the potential in the world for it.