You’ve become the go-to person for something. Maybe it’s client presentations, or debugging production issues, or translating technical specs into executive summaries. People Slack you when they need it done right. It takes you twenty minutes; it would take anyone else two hours. This feels like recognition. It’s actually a cage.
Here’s what’s really happening: every time you handle something quickly and well, you train your organization to route that type of work toward you. You’ve created a gravity well. And like actual gravity, it doesn’t care about your career goals—it just bends incoming requests toward the mass you’ve already built. The work finds you not because it’s important, but because you’re good at it. There’s a difference.
The conventional wisdom says to lean into your strengths. That’s catastrophically wrong. Your competence is eating your future.
The Invisible Opportunity Cost
Organizational behavior research has a name for what’s happening: path dependency. Once a system finds a solution that works, it stops searching for better ones. You fixed that category of problem efficiently three times, so now every similar problem gets routed to you automatically. No one’s being malicious. They’re being rational. Why would they assign work to someone who’ll struggle for four hours when you can nail it in forty minutes?
But here’s what nobody’s measuring: while you’re executing flawlessly in your zone of competence, what aren’t you learning? Anders Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice reveals something uncomfortable—skill development happens exclusively at the edge of your current ability, in the zone where you’re slow and uncertain. Every minute you spend being excellent is a minute you’re not spending being a beginner at something that matters more.
The math is brutal. If you spend 70% of your week in your competence zone, you’re allocating 70% of your growth capacity to skills you’ve already mastered. You’re compounding expertise in a domain that may not matter in two years, while the skills you actually need to develop—the ones that feel clumsy and inefficient—sit untouched.
Competence Gravity
Think of your current strengths as creating a gravitational field. The better you are at something, the more that type of work accelerates toward you. This isn’t metaphorical. Transaction costs are real: the organizational overhead of finding someone new, explaining the context, and accepting slower execution. It’s almost always cheaper to send it to you.
The problem compounds. Sarah, a senior product manager, was brilliant at stakeholder communication. She could turn a tense client meeting around in minutes. So every client escalation landed on her calendar. Within eighteen months, she spent 60% of her time on stakeholder management and almost none on product strategy—the skill she actually needed to develop to reach director level. She wasn’t blocked by lack of opportunity. She was blocked by being too good at the wrong thing.
Here’s the trap: competence feels productive. You clear your inbox, ship the work, get praised. Incompetence feels like waste. You fumble, take three times longer, need help. But only one of those states builds the skills that change your trajectory.
The Handoff Protocol
You need to make yourself unavailable for work that keeps you competent but stuck. This isn’t about delegation in the traditional sense—it’s about creating deliberate friction between requests and your time.
Start by identifying the top three things you’re asked to do that you can execute better/faster than anyone around you. Now commit to a six-week handoff for one of them. The key isn’t finding the perfect successor—it’s accepting that they’ll do it at 70% of your quality for the first month. Alex, a senior engineer, was the only person who could untangle complex database migrations. He started documenting his process in real-time during migrations, then sat next to a junior engineer for the next three, narrating decisions without touching the keyboard. The third migration, the junior engineer led it solo. It took 40% longer. Two months later, it took 15% longer. Six months later, there were two people who could handle it.
The moment of tension Alex didn’t expect: watching someone struggle with something he could fix in thirty seconds. He had to physically leave his desk three times. The discipline isn’t in the handoff process—it’s in not taking the work back when it gets messy. You’re not looking for seamless transition. You’re looking for transfer of capability, which always looks inefficient at first.
The non-obvious move: Document the decision tree, not the steps. Don’t write “Update the config file.” Write “If data volume is under 10GB, use approach A because of X. If over 10GB, approach B fails for reason Y, so use approach C.” You’re not creating a manual. You’re externalizing the judgment that made you valuable.
The Incompetence Budget
Most people allocate time to what they can complete. Reverse it. Block eight hours a week—minimum—for work where you’ll be demonstrably bad. This isn’t experimentation or learning. It’s production work in your growth domain, where you’re slow and uncertain and will produce mediocre output.
Rachel, a marketing director known for campaign strategy, blocked ten hours weekly for data analysis—something she was terrible at. First two weeks were excruciating. A task that would take a data analyst forty minutes took her four hours. She built the wrong dashboard twice. But after month three, she started seeing patterns in campaign data that her analysts missed—not because she was better at analysis, but because she knew which strategic questions to ask. Six months in, she’d reshaped how her team approached measurement. The competence came later. The strategic value came from being willing to be incompetent long enough to build new pattern recognition.
The budget has to be sacred. The work you’re best at will expand to fill available time—that’s Parkinson’s Law meeting competence gravity. If you don’t protect time for incompetence, your competence will colonize your calendar.
The reframe you need: Being bad at something valuable beats being great at something irrelevant. Most people optimize to avoid the discomfort of incompetence. That’s exactly backward. Your growth lives exclusively in the zone where you’re slow, uncertain, and need help. If you’re not regularly embarrassed by how long something takes you, you’re not developing skills that will change your trajectory—you’re just getting more efficient at staying in place.
The goal isn’t balance. It’s deliberate lopsidedness in a new direction, even when it means watching your current reputation as “the person who can handle X” fade. Let it fade. That reputation was keeping you excellent at something that doesn’t matter and incompetent at everything that does.
Weekly action: Block eight hours for production work in your growth domain. Not learning, not courses—actual output where you’ll be measurably worse than someone else could be. Protect it like a client commitment. Your competence will try to reclaim that time. It always does. The discipline is letting yourself be slow at something that matters instead of fast at something that doesn’t.
Stop being so good at what you’re good at. Your excellence is the obstacle.
