THE CURSE OF COMPETENCE

THE CURSE OF COMPETENCE
When Ability Becomes the Enemy of Purpose
Personal Story by Alex Searle

Throughout my thirty-five years alive, I've shown myself to be pretty good at a wide range of things.

I can write and I can think. I can present and speak comfortably in front of a crowd. I'm creative and I can be reasonably logical. I can run a business, collaborate with others well, and generate new ideas. I can sing, play guitar, play squash, run and practice yoga. I'm a good dad and partner to my wife. I'm a decent friend.

For both greater humanity and me, even writing this is a kind of phenomenal statement of progress. For tens of thousands of years, we've earned our place in civilisation by specialising. Now, the reality of being able to feed a family and build a career through a far broader skills set, and have enough cognitive and social intelligence to pull it off, seems like a modern luxury.

At the same time, my above-average level of competence leaves me stuck in the agonising middle. Along with a billion other fairly talented people, we must trudge through life watching the effortlessly brilliant fly overhead and the lesser-so skate by below on blind determination and choiceless necessity.

My wide palette of interests and highly receptive curiosity means that I can develop a basic level of skill in something new very quickly. It's easy for me, for example, to pick up a musical instrument, hear someone speak about a new subject or scrub to the middle of a podcast and, within about a minute, have an elementary sense of how to navigate what's going on and what to do next.

Speed and context-switching make me effective, but they’ve also scattered my focus and diluted real depth. It has also left me with a deeper, more painful question: what if being competent is getting in the way of something I'm truly born to do or make?

This is the curse of competence.

Artists and writers whom I deeply admire, like Sting, Bjork or Alain de Botton, have earned their place in history because each of them have been able to evade or supersede the competence curse. Instead of being relatively OK at most things, they were likely terrible. This simple truth helped to erase most alternatives right off the bat and reduced their focus to just one or two, where their singular talents could be much more easily recognised and, crucially, invested in.

Alongside enviable technical or natural talent, all of these people had something even more fundamental: a deep compulsion to keep going, even in the absence of any reward or reasonable alternative. There's a lovely four-letter word for that: grit.

This is at the heart of the curse of the competent: at any time it gets hard or boring, there are other viable distractions to turn to. It's unbelievably easy to put the guitar down and switch over to writing or something else. Instead of working through the difficulty of boredom or the recesses of open space, which requires me to find the mettle to keep persisting and focus my attention, I can simply do what I am used to doing: aimlessly shift to the next reasonably good diversion.

There's much to be said about simplifying and lessening the load. When there's only one or two core objectives or passions at play, it's far easier to know where to focus your energy. When there are ten or twelve or fifteen, all vying for your full attention, occupying the same time and space in your head and heart, it's not just impractical, but wasteful and delusional. How on earth can you expect yourself to balance an utterly unbalanceable weight? The only outcome you're ensuring is falling over and bruising yourself with nothing to take home.

When I encounter the sensation of resistance, boredom or difficulty, I'm learning to adopt a different strategy: to greet it as an invitation to inspect, rather than a sign to move along and avoid. It's easy to convince yourself with coy slogans like 'well it wasn't meant for me' or 'I can do this later when I feel like it'. It becomes apparent that my most polished skill is being generally acceptable at many things, and I’ve grown comfortable with that fact. Locating my inner grit becomes trying, and so goes untested and unseen.

But in being increasingly attentive to this, a powerfully revealing set of sensations begin to surface. They appear in the form of dull twinges in various points in my body, connected to nameless thoughts that seem to say, perhaps I think I don't deserve to be great at something. Another whispers about my need for real recognition or how fast I need to make money.

These utterances vary in truth, but are all useful in helping me to uncover the root of why I imprison myself in the middle. I'm compelled to listen and feel where they take root, not just in my body, but amongst the unquestioned beliefs that invisibly direct my life.

It is certain to me that the real work in undoing the curse begins there.

Being good, or even great at many different skills or interests may be my most dangerous threat to discovering the truest and most outstanding talent I have on offer. It's the smothering and jumbling and scattering of my best energies that blurs the picture I'm otherwise destined to paint, but wasting precious time by not making sufficient space for it.

If I steel myself and willingly listen to those voices in my body, eventually I can hear another one, more soothing. It tells me, less is more, focus on the essentials and make space for the unknown. Take a chance and bet big on what makes it hard, because time is short.

And life is even shorter to be merely competent anyway. ∎

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