Well your question was not perfect, but acceptable. the idea of energy may sound easy, but deeply it is a very strange Idea.
but the answer to your question: no it doesn't mean it "potentially" gonna gain. I see that you read <PERSON>'s lectures, that's very good, but these speeches actually are for people who accepted the idea of energy blindly, and didn't think hard enough to see how abstract it could be.
See it is just the matter of modeling. we model the world around us in the "matter and energy" phenomena. there is something named Energy that let the objects move. that's the first clue of the energy! but we will encounter with a problem:
Imagine a you are holding the ball in the air. it is not moving, so we say"Okay it doesn't have any ENERGY right now" but as soon as you let it go it start to move! but how? it gained energy some how. from where?
this is when the potential energy comes to the mind. when you grab the ball and raised it to a level, some energy is stored inside! some energy that is potential in it and ready to go out of the object as soon as you let the ball go. 621
this potential energy in this example is called Gravitational potential energy . because it is due to the gravity.
but the potential energy can be used in so many places. like electrical potential. generally a moving object has energy. the energy that the object has due to it's movement is called Kinetic energy with the sign of $k$ . but for a non-moving object it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that it doesn't have any energy. there is some energy stored Inside the object that we call Potential energy and we show it with letter $U$ .
and the most famous equation is this : $E=U+k$ . and it means any mechanical energy that an object is the sum of energy inside and the energy due to it's movement! and we can say the total amount of energy doesn't change.
the energy turns from inside energy to kinetic or another way around, but it never changes.
so the word potential is for"potential to move". the energy that is stored inside the object that we can not see. 927