The Curse of Competence

you strive to do great things, and let's say you do end up pulling it off. you build the projects, you win the awards, you get the results. you do it so often that success becomes the baseline. this makes victory, not a cause for celebration, but the minimum level of acceptable performance. anything less becomes unsatisfactory, and is deemed a failure.

congratulations. you may become very successful. you might also become very miserable.

as seen on Chris Williamson's channel.

this is the side of ambition no one talks about. the world loves people who perform, and once you do, everyone, including you, 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 the get-go.

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.

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 (and also cause i need to pay rent). and yeah, 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 start-up 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 (don't look at me) featured on that one subreddit flexing their Goldman Sachs or Lockheed Martin internship, became benchmarks in my head. i’d scroll, and the voice in my head would whisper: you're not doing enough. 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.

so yeah, 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.

thanks for reading.