Most people would categorize folks as incompetent, competent and exceptional.
Over this year, I spent some time thinking about these and developed some ideas around what drives incompetence and what fuels excellence.
Incompetence
If you ask the question- what makes someone incompetent? The answer is not as simple as the lack of talent.
Most tasks that we perform in everyday life don’t require a high IQ or exceptional talent.
Even the most complicated jobs are just a set of simple tasks that can be performed by a high school graduate.
How then do some talented people still manifest incompetence?
How do some smart people have failed relationships, messy apartments and poor health?
Cleaning your room or lifting weights are not exactly high intelligence tasks?
The answer is simply laziness.
Conversely, competence is the lack of laziness.
If you can do so much as get out of your lazy habits and do what is needed to be done, you can be competent.
No matter the genetics you were born with or circumstances you find yourself in.
Incompetence is just laziness in disguise. Competence comes when you overcome it.
Excellence
We have established that one can be competent by simply abandoning laziness. But what drives excellence?
Excellence comes from a combination of conscientiousness, curiosity and compassion.
Most exceptional people are not exceptionally talented. They are just curious and conscientious and compassionate. All at the same time.
Curiosity makes you discover new ideas and venture into the unknown. It is the source of all knowledge. You know because you want to know.
Conscientiousness gets you to follow-up on those ideas and perform your tasks relentlessly.
Compassion makes it possible for you to build teams and seek help from others’ to solve problems.
As computers get more talented at procedural tasks and knowledge becomes cheap to access, the only human skills that remain valuable are these.
As the tools available to us get more powerful, the curious, conscientious and compassionate among us will become more powerful with them.
And thus my biggest takeaway from 2023 is to do away with laziness. To value curiosity, conscientiousness and compassion over talent.