The Curse of Competence

This is the side of ambition no one talks about.

The world loves people who perform, and once you do, everyone, including you, will never want to be anything less. The applause fades, and what’s left are expectations that settle in like concrete.

Yesterday’s win becomes today’s standard.

Whether it’s a new feature in a project, a higher Codeforces rating, or that run before sunrise, you stop chasing the thrill and start running from failure.

In my life, it resonates with virtually everything I do.

From the track to the terminal. I chose to put in the work not because I had a good work ethic, not because I was obliged to, but because I was competent.

And competence, I would learn, is a credential that comes with conditions.

Being competent means the bar is set by your prior self, and it will only go up. The teammates I trained with got faster, and I couldn't afford to fall behind in a sport where there is no catch up.

Every practice, every pitch-black, ice-cold preseason morning, it wasn’t about chasing greatness.

It was about not losing ground you fought for yesterday. Because the thing about competence is that it forces you to sign this invisible contract.

One that says:

Once you can deliver, you must always deliver.

That there is no off-season.

And when I switched gears to coding, it was the same game just a different scenery.

The peers I sat alongside grinded LeetCode day in day out, and I wasn't going to let them beat me in a technical interview.

Not because I was desperate to win, but because losing suddenly felt unacceptable.

You see, I had learned something about systems by then.

They reward you for performance, then trap you in the performance itself.

And of course, there’s also the real pressure of wanting to build something meaningful before I’m just another developer-for-hire.

If it came down to building your own startup or being someone else's intern, which would you choose?

I don't know about you, but I sure as hell am not choosing the latter.

Even people I’ve never met, like those polished LinkedIn overachievers featured on that one subreddit 🔗 flexing their Goldman Sachs or Jane Street internship, became benchmarks in my head.

I’d scroll, and the voice in my head would whisper:

You're not doing enough.

But perhaps that voice doesn't belong to me at all. Perhaps it's simply the echo of a system that profits from people who can't afford to stop moving. We speak of ambition as if it were pure, as if it came from within. But I wonder now how much of it is ours, and how much is installed.

That’s when you know the curse has sunk in. When motivation stops coming from curiosity and passion and starts coming from the fear of falling behind.

At that point, you’re not chasing growth. You’re defending territory. Every hour spent studying systems and LeetCode, every late-night debug, every side project isn’t about discovery.

No, you've made it about maintenance. You’re just trying to prove that the “you” everyone thinks you are still exists. The problem is, that mindset never ends. It’s like crossing a lava field on disappearing stones. Stop moving, and you burn.

And that’s the real danger. Competence makes you feel like you can’t afford to rest. But if you don’t learn to step off the treadmill, all that momentum just starts to turn into noise, and what you thought was ambition is nothing more than anxiety.

I tell you this not as someone who has solved it, but as someone still caught in it. The difference, perhaps, is that I now see the mechanism for what it is.

By all means honor your competence, but don’t let it own you. Let it be the engine, not the cage. Build because you’re curious and you're passionate, not because you’re scared of what happens if you don't.

Otherwise, even once you do reach the top, you’ll still feel like you’re running.

And you'll wonder, as I have, whether the person running is still you, or just the shape you've learned to hold for an audience that never stops watching.

Thanks for reading.