♟ Competency porn

There is a scene in No Country For Old Men where the protagonist, Josh Brolin’s character, hides a briefcase filled with $2 million in a motel room. But he doesn’t just stick it under the bed. After surveying the small cheap space, he pops open his pocket knife and begins unscrewing an air vent situated just above head level, using a bedside table to boost him up.

Next, he goes over to the curtains and snips off the rope used to retract them, around 8 feet in length. It’s a clean motion with a satisfying sound. Using the rope, he ties a knot to the handle of the briefcase before raiding the closet and unhooking the hanger bar.

With the 6-foot curtain rod in hand, he remounts the bedside table, lugs the briefcase up into the dusty air vent, and slowly inches it back towards the rear of the duct making sure that the rope is readily accessible for future retrieval.

Only when the briefcase is tucked back far out of arm's reach in a dark corner of the long narrow passageway does our protagonist rest.

In all, the scene lasts for just over a minute. But for some reason, it is endlessly entertaining. There is something so creative in the way he goes about his work. So efficient. So competent.

Turns out that competency is an essential ingredient in so many of the movies we know and love. The Martian, Moneyball, Apollo 13, Ocean’s 11—the list goes on. We love watching people do their jobs well.

We love competency porn.

Competency vs Mastery

Competency is fun to watch because it’s aspirational. How nice would it be to always know precisely the right thing to do in any circumstance? But it’s also oddly attainable. I caught myself thinking I could hypothetically take the same steps as Josh Brolin’s character and hide the money.

But that’s where competency and mastery diverge.

Mastery feels a lot less attainable because it’s the result of countless hours of specific intentional practice. Whereas competency is a nebulous concept that applies to a wider swath of actions, mastery implies a deeper and narrower focus.

As such, we can’t connect with it quite as well.

It’s much easier to imagine ourselves hiding money in a briefcase than scoring a free kick like Messi or playing guitar like John Mayer.

But that can lead to a trap.

The trap of competency

One of the things I’m worst at in the world is windsurfing. One time in Greece my sister and I went to a beach and rented boards on a windy day to try our hand at it.

She picked it up relatively quickly. I did not.

I still had fun, but never achieved competency and never even sniffed mastery. It’s stuck with me because I have kind of made it my goal in life to be competent at everything. And I mean everything.

Chess. Ping pong. Settlers of Catan. Calculus. Cleaning bathrooms. Cooking. Golf. Making small talk. Improv. Pencil drawing. Doing a Rubik’s cube. Taking pictures of my girlfriend.

These are all things, among others, that I have devoted a sizable chunk of time to in order to achieve competency. I love being competent at stuff. I want to be jack of all trades. It’s a superpower that allows you to step into any situation— athletic, academic, artistic, social, or otherwise—and know that you have something to contribute.

And yet, the most successful people in the world are less competent than me.

I feel confident in saying that I am better than Warren Buffet at ping pong. Or Mark Zuckerberg at improv. Serena Williams can’t do a Rubik’s cube (I looked it up). These masters of their fields kinda suck at most everything else in life save for one or two things.

That’s because they went deep. After all, I didn’t finish the phrase: it’s ”jack of all trades, and master of none.”

There is a trade-off you have to make between competency and mastery. Balance and obsession. Neither is inherently right or wrong, but at some point you have to choose which path to take.

Is it worth it for me to get better at windsurfing? Hell no. But I still want to because I have chosen competency.

Early career angst

The choice between competency and mastery is something that evolves throughout your life.

When you first enter the workforce, you just want to appear competent. Competency is an uphill battle and mastery is the furthest thing from your mind.

Eventually, you do gain competency and the terrible anxiety in your stomach recedes as you grow into your role.

The next step is often looking for a new challenge, a new place to build upon your competency. Eventually, you either slow down and decide to go deep in one area, or continue piecing together different building blocks of competency until you have a tower of mastery that only you preside over.

David Perell calls this your Personal Monopoly.

Eventually, you can become competent at enough things—newsletter writing, social media management, podcasting, etc.—that you become a master of a domain of your creation.

That’s the goal for many modern-day young people including myself. Mess around until mastery appears from the mist.

Competency porn is not only enjoyable to watch in Hollywood, but it becomes a driving factor for how we steer our lives.

Again, this is not for everyone—some people want to be a doctor or a pianist from a very early age and go deep until they achieve mastery.

But I think the far more common path these days is to be more like Forrest Gump. A ping-pong player, an army hero, a runner, a shrimp boat fisherman, and an all-time great storyteller.

Final thoughts

Those of you who have read the book Range by David Epstein are probably familiar with some of the concepts I’ve talked about in this piece.

Epstein frames it as a battle of generalists vs. specialists, with the former oftentimes performing better in life despite what Tiger Woods’ father may have you believe.

I don’t necessarily think that one approach is superior to the other. But I do think competency is a whole lot more fun.

So my advice would be to collect an infinity gauntlet of competency before you try to “figure out what to do with you life.”

And if you ignore that advice, and hated this piece, at least you know how to competently hide a case of $2 million in a motel room.

See you next week, Players.