5 Truths Competent People Know

Wisdom for those seeking control in their work and life

When I begun my career in medicine, I was a little slow to find my footing — I liked exploring new ideas and treasured an empty calendar, whereas being a medical intern is a tedious administrative job. You don’t make big decisions, you organize information for senior colleagues to use and you deal with minor issues and paperwork. Your main instruction is, ‘don’t forget to…’

After a few hard months I got up to speed. I started to notice that people could detect competency or its absence very quickly, and that they were ruthless at the expense of the less competent ones. When a doctor faltered, nurses looked at each other nervously. In the pub after work, the doctor’s colleagues bitched about them until last orders.

H. L. Mencken said about the press,

“The primary aim of all of them… was to please the crowd, and to give a good show; and the way they set about giving that good show was by first selecting a deserving victim, and then putting him magnificently to the torture.”

Being incompetent is a lonely position.

There’s a particular aura that a competent person gives off, the aura of entering a room and knowing that you can deal with anything in it. It transforms the situation. Fundamentally it’s about understanding the reality you operate in. To that end, here are some truths that must be recognized.

1. Competency is Social

In his 2012 book ‘Mastery’, Robert Greene wrote

“Often the greatest obstacle to our pursuit of mastery comes from the emotional drain we experience in dealing with the resistance and manipulations of the people around us. If we are not careful, our minds become absorbed in endless political intrigues and battles. The principal problem we face in the social arena is our naïve tendency to project onto people our emotional needs and desires of the moment.”

Greene continued

“By moving past our usual self-absorption, we can learn to focus deeply on others, reading their behavior in the moment, seeing what motivates them, and discerning any possible manipulative tendencies. Navigating smoothly the social environment, we have more time and energy to focus on learning and acquiring skills. Success attained without this intelligence is not true mastery, and will not last.”

There is no competency independent of social skills. Competency is the ability to genuinely help someone (as opposed to, say, being “nice” to them). You need to understand what people really need. They won’t reveal what they need because that would be the same as revealing their weakness, so each individual has to figure out how they can truly help others and especially how to do so without threatening the person’s ego. You need to develop credit among your superiors and to have people happy to be delegated to.

Society’s most competent members tend to be loners. They do everything differently. This fools their admirers into believing they do not need to develop social intelligence, which is a fatal misapprehension. Certainly you have to embrace isolation at times, to be able to walk away from relationships and to be impervious to the conditioning and the second-hand wisdom of the culture you work in. But these qualities are being multiplied by zero if you cannot also get the right people to like you and to want what you have to offer.

Inevitably you will sometimes feel like you’re being fake, ingratiating and forced into behaving in ways that go against your authentic values. My answer to that is that social life would be unbearable if people always acted according to their values. We wouldn’t have five minutes of peace. If you’re having major struggles against your conscience as you play the social game, you won’t be able to suppress it by force. I suggest leaning into the doubts, retreating and self-examining, reading authors like Kapil Gupta or Jed McKenna who will show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Having seen through and become comfortable with the necessary falsehoods of society, you will be free to re-enter on your own terms, to pursue your ambition more forcefully and even to play around a little.

2. Create a bias for action

“We live by information, not by sight. We exist by faith in others.”

— Baltasar Gracian, 17th Century Spanish Philosopher

Hesitation and overthinking is often a product of lacking some missing information — action will acquire the details eventually; further thinking never will.

Action is “smarter” than thought because

• It increases skin in the game — now you have risks to face so you pay closer attention and your B.S. detector sharpens
• It increases the “sample size” of personal experience available to you, which you can reference new insights against
• In the short term, it increases randomness in your life. You don’t know how the next 20 minutes is going to go. This improves your best case scenario. You want to find the “convex” situations in which the upside is disproportionately large, compared with the worst possible scenario

Overcome inertia this way — if you can’t face your afternoon’s work, get out of your chair and start walking. Then, initiate a conversation with a coworker (but don’t go to the tea room). If you have to make a phone call you’ve been putting off, pick up the phone without full preparation. You can always call them back with the remaining info, and it will have been worth the minor annoyance. If you don’t allow yourself to scroll your phone, your mind will naturally start to want you to do something and you will be much more willing to get up and work.

3. Cut Off Points of Failure

“First, do no harm” — Hippocrates

“First, avoid stupidity” — Charlie Munger

It’s much easier to avoid stupidity than it is to actively pursue brilliance.

If you try a new technique, it may give you a 5% improvement over the previous way. If you make an avoidable mistake, it could make things 10 times worse. When you prevent mistakes, you allow compounding to take effect.

I found this quote in Shane Parrish’s newsletter:

“There’s this premise that the success of player depends on ability, which is made up of technical, physical, tactical and phycological aspects, and that this is then multiplied by their availability,” the doctor points out during the interview. “Many players have told me that Arjen Robben could have been close to Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi in ability, but he didn’t make it because he didn’t have much availability (emphasis mine).”

— Jurdan Mendiguchia (the world’s most in demand physio, speaking in an interview in which he expressed amazement that the priority of every elite sports team isn’t preventing injuries).

If you remove the points of failure, Nature will fill the vacuum and will have no choice but to produce something great. Your capability will have seemed to arise automatically. Nature will have seemingly acted through your body, and rather than you having been the author you will be an honorable mention in the footnotes. Which is good, because all things which are done well are done without a ‘doer’ at all.

4. Competence Naturally Arises From Obsession

Most people are obsessed with something. It could be food or video games or an ex-partner. In the most unlikely situations, their thoughts turn back to the object of obsession.

One expects a leader to be a little more obsessed with their area of expertise than the average person. It makes them attentive to hidden details, points of failure that could easily be missed. It’s an extension of the ‘skin in the game’ principle — your focus is heightened; you naturally seek perfection and the mere presence of someone lacking interest almost repulses you.

If you seek a leadership role in an area where you lack obsession, your thoughts will drift in the direction of what you are obsessed by. Only superlative talent can compensate for this.

Unfortunately society tends to regard the behavior produced by such obsession as strange, and so it can get conditioned out of a person by the beginning of adulthood. One of the ways to find out what naturally compels to you is to think of something that led you to an “irrational” decision or behavior. I used to get unreasonably annoyed at the incorrect use of words, e.g. ‘literally.’ I hated hearing cliched turns of phrase; well-crafted sentences had a thrilling, full body effect on me. Obviously, I was supposed to become a writer.

Humans are naturally grandiose creatures. We imagine ourselves as great poets, entrepreneurs or film directors without ever having set foot in an artistic or business environment. When we don’t get immediate positive feedback, we tend to assume that our great calling is elsewhere. The thought enters our head, “this job has an atmosphere of conformity” or “the whole profession embraces mediocrity.” We should have picked a different college degree. If only we could have gotten the guidance early in life, found the right mentor who would have been the midwife of our genius.

Obsession allows a person to take negative feedback without changing tack or falling into despair for too long. Though we can lose confidence, something in us doesn’t give us the choice of quitting. We are lured back to our craft like reconciled lovers. Despair turns to reflection and we close off another point of failure.

5. The Most Effective Leader Understands His/Her Own Mind

Your natural tendency in a leadership position is to try to convince and encourage and impart wisdom. You have ideas on how to improve the organization and remove recurring points of pain. Then there are the constant demands on your time and a thousand other frustrations.

In each case, there is an essential truth which has to be recognized. It may have to with the setup of the institution or the level of interest or ability of the staff. It is a “truth” because it cannot be paid to go away.

A person’s mind usually takes them away from truth, toward the natural grandiosity or insecurity that tends to inhabit a leader. The mind is like a nerve that shrieks at the unwelcome touch of reality. It can’t be silenced by meditating or adopting the seven habits of highly effective people. It must be understood.

Conclusion

These truths are meant to inspire slight adjustments. If you are constantly trying to make yourself over you will lose your power of deep intuition. You must keep direct contact with the reality of your environment, and this requires discarding most of the advice and prescriptions that you hear. I suggest that you don’t take mine or anyone else’s word for it, instead taking your guide as whatever resonates with your direct personal experience.