Competence is clarity

How do you know if you're good at something?

Cross-posted from Twitter.

I was telling my friend Jack yesterday about how I didn’t know I was good at writing until last year when several pieces of mine went viral. He seemed really surprised by this and I, taken aback by his surprise, tried to figure out why I never think of myself as good at a thing even when people tell me so. Basically, what do I even think makes someone good at something? And I realized that I never view myself as being on a spectrum of competent to incompetent; instead I use a spectrum of how much clarity I have about something, how much I can understand it and explain it to others so they know what I mean. Once I adopted this new definition, I realized that maybe I am pretty decent at it after all. He joked that I have this ability in conversation to pinch zoom into anything and summon more details at will, just keep going in pixel perfect clarity and reproduce that in words. And I really liked that. Thanks Jack.

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Photo: Chiaki Kuriyama, photographed by Kishin Shinoyama

Real competence is having clarity around a subject, interest, or skill. Signs of having clarity include being able to express ideas in writing, teach how something works to others, or apply your understanding to execute a high quality project that adds value to people’s lives. I find looking for signs of clarity or understanding a lot more useful for assessing competency than looking for whoever is most hyped up or admired. Highly competent people tend to naturally be admired and sustain a reputation of being competent because they have the substance to back it up, but the people who invest heavily in impression management, capitalizing on hype, and making the right friends who will say good things about them to other people usually perform worse long-term (on their projects and in maintaining the reputation they engineered).

Competence is a socially desirable trait and there are incentives to game it, or create the impression that it exists even when it doesn’t or that there is more of it than there really is. Hence why adjectives like “cracked” quickly fade to mean nothing about the person’s actual competence to be basically a “thumbs up I like this person” indicator, and people like to engage in personal branding and LinkedIn theater in online spaces where audiences are mostly strangers or people on the edges of your social graph and real competency can be harder to verify.

Clarity on the other hand is very hard to fake. If I ask you questions about something you claim to be an expert in, you should be able to break it down for me even if I’m starting at zero knowledge. I’m talking basic questions (I’m not trying to pull any gotcha’s by asking questions I secretly already know the answers to and holding them over your head). If you say you’re a tennis coach I may ask about what type of people tend to hire you for help, any patterns you’ve noticed among them, your guesses for why you think those patterns exist, how you discern which strategy to use and when to help them learn tennis better, or any other question that asks you to recall incidents that required a mix of strategic discernment and intuition. If you can answer such questions well and your explanation matches or can clearly refine my understanding of how that thing works in my head, that’s a good sign.

I also notice that their demeanor reveals a lot: a highly competent person receives these questions and shares thoughts in a calm and matter-of-fact way, as if they were checking their notes to find an answer for you, and they get excited or engaged when you ask a question they don’t have an answer to because they’re curious too. There’s a feeling of being grounded by genuine interest in what they’re working on or learning about, and a lot of humility in how they approach it. They don’t care if you view them as an expert or not, because they’re not trying to manipulate your impression of them. They just want to work on the things that make them feel alive and find others to do it with them.

In contrast to that, someone who flounders when they don’t know the answer to a question you’re asking or defensively switches the topic of conversation probably isn’t that genuinely interested in what they’re doing or is deathly afraid of being “found out” (assuming of course you’re not questioning them adversarially to make them feel threatened). When I notice this I don’t call it out because it’s kind of cruel and impolite to poke someone who’s already wincing from themselves, but I do notice it as strange and remember them as being not that authentically aligned or good at the thing.

I want to mention it’s okay to not be “good” at something. You should find the things you enjoy and do them and not pay too much mind to people who are trying to recruit you to do things you don’t authentically support. If you discover for example that what you really want to do is make music and you’re willing to take an unrelated job that pays enough to support your lifestyle but takes very little time so you can devote yourself to music outside of it, and the whole configuration of your life gets you the things you value in the order you value them, then who cares if you’re bad at it? You’re living the life you want. And even if you haven’t figured it out, it’s okay to be anxious or not sure of yourself or need time to figure out what you really care about.

But at the same time, competence is real and beautiful. It’s powerful and worth aiming for. It can push the edges of what we know, it can pull new things out of nothing by being extremely intentional or strategic or fluent in a domain. It’s a very sharp but fluid and intuitive knife that not everyone can wield, and at times can even be employed in harmful ways, but we cannot deny that its existence makes the world better for everyone. I admire the efficiency of Tokyo’s metro system and how it can accommodate six million people a day. I love eating bread that has been baked well. I love watching movies that make me question how I view reality through masterful cinematography and storytelling. I love working with people who know, with stark clarity, what they’re doing and why. Clarity, to me, is a sign that you cared enough to navigate through the haze of a chaotic world that came with no built-in instructions and decided to make this life your very own, and I deeply respect that.