What If You’ve Reached Your Level of Incompetence?

Years ago, as we did often, I was sitting around with some Hapkido buddies, talking about work, martial arts, books, and life.

A few of them worked in white-collar professions. Well-read, thoughtful guys who regularly handed me ideas I hadn’t run into before.

One day somebody brought up the Peter Principle.

The idea comes from a book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. People in a hierarchy tend to get promoted for doing their current job well, until eventually they land in a position they’re no longer particularly good at.

You do a great job. You get promoted. You do another great job. You get promoted again. Then one day you’re struggling in a role where the skills that got you here aren’t enough anymore.

You’ve reached your level of incompetence.

I remember thinking, Holy shit. I’ve seen this everywhere.

Maybe you have too.

Have you watched somebody who was phenomenal at their job get promoted into a position where they suddenly seemed lost? Or maybe it happened to you. You spent years getting good at something, and then the next opportunity required a set of skills nobody ever taught you.

What happened?

Did you get worse? Or did the job change?

The Best Electrician Doesn’t Always Make the Best Foreman

I saw this play out plenty during my years as an electrician.

You’d have a journeyman who was absolutely phenomenal at his craft. Knew the work. Read the drawings. Troubleshot problems. Coordinated installations. Got shit done. Everybody respected him.

So somebody offered him a foreman’s job. More responsibility. More money. A chance to move up.

Sounds great, right?

Except sometimes that outstanding electrician turned out to be a lousy foreman.

He couldn’t delegate. He didn’t know how to set expectations for the crew. He struggled with scheduling, coordination, and personality conflicts. Sometimes he tried to do everything himself, because that was the one approach he knew would work.

And sometimes the contractor made it worse by handing a good journeyman supervisory duties without the title, the pay, or the help that should come with it. More responsibility, same authority, nobody in your corner.

Here’s what stayed with me, though.

The guy hadn’t forgotten how to be an electrician. He was still excellent at his original job. He just hadn’t learned the new one.

Being good at doing the work is not the same thing as being good at getting work done through other people.

So think about your own situation.

What are you good at right now?

And what would it actually take to succeed at the next level?

More of the same skills? Or a different set entirely?

Those are two very different problems, and people get them confused all the time.

The Best Martial Artist Doesn’t Always Make the Best Instructor

Same thing in Hapkido, and I’ve seen it in other arts.

Some incredibly talented practitioners were not effective teachers.

Their technique was beautiful. They moved effortlessly. Their timing was phenomenal. But when a student couldn’t grasp something, they had no idea how to explain it. The movement had come so naturally to them that they’d never had to figure out where somebody else would get stuck.

Meanwhile, some of my best instructors weren’t the most gifted martial artists in the room.

They were the ones who had to work their asses off to learn. They knew the little details because those details had been the difference for them. They remembered what it felt like when a technique flat out wasn’t working. And they could break it down into pieces a beginner could actually do something with.

That doesn’t mean talented people can’t teach. Plenty of them do, and some of them are extraordinary.

And plenty of gifted martial artists have zero interest in teaching. Turning down that role isn’t a failure either.

The point is just that technical mastery and teaching ability are different skills. One doesn’t produce the other.

You’ve probably run into the same thing somewhere.

Maybe you were helping a coworker, or teaching your kid to drive, or showing a friend how to do something you’ve been doing for twenty years. You knew exactly what to do. And you couldn’t make it land.

That’s not a failure of your knowledge.

That’s you meeting a skill you haven’t developed yet.

Are We Even Measuring the Right Kind of Competence?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells a story in Antifragile that gets at something related. He calls it the Green Lumber Fallacy.

As Taleb describes it, a successful lumber trader apparently didn’t understand that “green lumber” meant freshly cut, undried wood. He thought it meant lumber painted green.

Sounds ridiculous. How does a guy trade a commodity for years without knowing something that basic?

But that’s Taleb’s point.

Knowing what appears important about a subject isn’t necessarily the same thing as having the abilities that make somebody good at a particular activity. The trader knew how to trade. He didn’t need to know lumber the way a guy running a mill would. And somebody who knows everything about drying lumber wouldn’t automatically be a great trader.

Two different jobs. Two different sets of skills.

Now bring that back to the electrician.

When a contractor promotes his best journeyman to foreman, what is he actually looking at? Performance as an electrician. But what is he asking the guy to do? Lead people.

What evidence does he have that this guy can run a crew, delegate, set expectations, or develop anybody?

Sometimes not much.

We take competence in one area as proof of competence in another, and that’s where it goes sideways.

Same mistake everywhere. Assume the top salesperson will make a great sales manager. The brilliant musician will be a great music teacher. The successful business owner will know how to coach other owners.

They might. But their success at the first thing doesn’t prove a damn thing about the second.

Which raises a question worth sitting with.

Are you working on getting better at the job you actually want—or just getting better at the job that got you promoted?

What If Incompetence Is Just Where the Next Lesson Starts?

This is where I think the Peter Principle describes a real problem but doesn’t tell the whole story.

Can you land in a role where your current skills aren’t enough? Absolutely. Does that mean you’ve hit your permanent ceiling?

Think back to the first time you learned something hard.

Driving. A trade. Starting a business. Walking into your first martial arts class.

Were you competent on day one? Of course not. You were a beginner. You didn’t know what you didn’t know.

Then you practiced. You made mistakes. You asked questions. You learned from people who knew more than you did. And eventually things that were hard became ordinary.

Why would that process stop just because you’ve gotten good at something else?

If an apprentice can learn to become a journeyman, why can’t a journeyman learn to run a crew?

If a white belt can become a black belt in a complicated art, why can’t that person learn to teach?

If somebody can learn a whole profession, why can’t they learn to run a business built on it?

They might not want to. That’s a different question, and we’ll get to it.

But not knowing something today doesn’t mean you’re incapable of learning it.

This is where Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There did real work for me. The book helped me see that the habits and skills that produced your success at one level aren’t necessarily the ones that carry you through the next. Sometimes the very traits that made you successful become the things you have to change.

The journeyman who takes pride in personally solving every problem has to learn to stop taking over and start building his crew. The martial artist who can demonstrate a technique beautifully has to learn to slow down and explain it. The employee who becomes an owner has to stop thinking only about doing great work and start thinking about building something that delivers great work without him.

You’re not starting from zero. Your experience still counts.

You’re just learning a different game.

What if your next promotion makes you a white belt again?

Learning to Swim in Deeper Water

Looking back, my career was a long series of being thrown into water deeper than I was comfortable in.

First I learned to swim. Then somebody put me in a bigger pool. Then the water got deeper. Then the waves got choppier.

The contractors I worked for didn’t exactly run an outstanding mentorship program. It was mostly sink or swim. Here’s the job. Figure it out. If you survived, congratulations, here’s a bigger one.

Sometimes I had support. Sometimes I had to work out a hell of a lot on my own.

I wouldn’t recommend it as a way to develop people. It worked on me, but plenty of good people got chewed up by that model, and I’m not going to pretend the neglect was a favor.

What it did teach me is that every time I landed in unfamiliar water, I had a choice. I could decide I’d hit my limit. Or I could figure out what I needed to learn next.

Eventually I was running the building management systems crew on the LAX Midfield Satellite Concourse project. Huge new terminal. My watch telling me I was walking something like 25,000 to 27,000 steps on some days, moving between spots around the building where my crews were working.

I had to coordinate people, solve problems, work with other trades, and handle situations the younger version of me wouldn’t have had a clue about.

And I didn’t become capable of that overnight. It came from years of increasingly complicated situations.

That’s the part of Taleb’s work on tinkering I find useful. Instead of believing you have to know everything before you start, you learn through manageable experiments. Try something. Watch what happens. Adjust. Try again.

That’s what most of what we call experience actually is.

But there’s a catch, and it’s a big one.

Not every experiment is worth running.

And not every deeper pool is worth jumping into.

Just Because You Can Climb Higher Doesn’t Mean You Should

I remember a big data center job in downtown Los Angeles in 1999, not long after earning my Hapkido black belt.

It was running around the clock, with two twelve-hour shifts. Enormous crews, enormous coordination.

And the work itself? I loved it. Industrial, high-tech construction, beautiful rigid conduit work, and some of the best materials you could ask for.

That was my kind of job.

My foreman, Leonard, called me “Papa Daddy.” He liked my work, and as I remember it, I had enough credibility on that crew to protect time for the college classes I had just started taking.

But I also saw what the job cost the people carrying the most responsibility. I remember a general foreman who seemed to be working extraordinary hours every week.

And I remember thinking about what that position asked of a person.

Not technically. Personally.

The hours. The stress. The pressure. The time away from everything else in your life.

Somewhere in there I realized there were positions above me I had no interest in chasing.

Not because I couldn’t learn them. Because I didn’t think the trade was worth it.

That distinction matters and people blur it constantly. There’s a difference between being unable to do something and deciding it isn’t worth what it would cost you.

Maybe you’ve been in that spot. Everybody around you treats the next promotion as the obvious move. More prestige. More responsibility. Probably more money.

But you’ve watched what that job does to the people who have it.

And you’re not sure you want their life.

Does turning it down mean you failed?

Or does it mean you’ve developed enough judgment to know what you actually value?

The Next Level Isn’t Always Higher

Taleb also talks about optionality, which in plain terms is the value of having choices and being able to change direction as you learn more.

That’s one of the real benefits of building capability. It gives you options.

But those options don’t have to lead upward on somebody else’s org chart.

You might get better at your craft. You might learn to mentor. You might get efficient enough to do more without working longer. You might build enough financial room to turn down work you don’t want. You might learn to lead people without needing the biggest title in the room.

Martial arts is the cleanest example I know. There’s always another belt, another technique, another thing to learn. But a lot of the progress that matters doesn’t come with a new rank.

You learn to stay calm against somebody bigger. Your timing improves. You stop using so much strength. You finally understand a technique that’s been tormenting you for years. You become the person who can help a beginner get past something.

You’re getting better.

You’re just not climbing a ladder.

You’re going deeper into something you already thought you knew.

So Have You Reached Your Level of Incompetence?

Maybe.

Maybe you’ve taken on more than your current skills can carry. Maybe you’re struggling in a new role. Maybe something that used to be easy has turned into a grind, and you’re wondering whether you’re cut out for the next stage at all.

Before you decide you’ve hit your permanent limit, ask yourself one thing.

Have you reached your limit, or have you reached the edge of what you currently know?

Those are not the same.

One of them is a verdict. The other is a location.

And you might also find that the next level isn’t worth it to you. That’s a real answer, not a cop-out.

You don’t have to become a manager because you’re a great technician. You don’t have to teach because you’re a black belt. You don’t have to own a company because you’re good at the work.

But if the next challenge is something you actually want, don’t confuse being a beginner with being incapable.

Find out what the job really requires. Figure out the skills you’re missing. Find people who can help you learn them. Start with responsibilities you can survive screwing up. Pay attention to the feedback. Keep going.

The Peter Principle explains why people end up promoted into jobs they weren’t ready for.

It doesn’t say they have to stay unprepared.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Pick one area where you’ve recently felt out of your depth. Work, business, relationships, parenting, leading people, whatever it is.

Then answer these honestly.

• What am I struggling with, specifically? Not “everything.” Name it.
• Am I leaning on skills that worked in my last role and aren’t enough in this one?
• What single new capability would make the biggest difference?
• Who could actually help me learn it?
• What’s one small, low-stakes way to practice it this week?
• And do I genuinely want the responsibilities that come with succeeding here?

Don’t rush past that last one.

Sometimes the answer is to build the skills and take the challenge.

Sometimes the answer is that you want something different, and you needed to see the job up close to know it.

Both take self-awareness. Both count as growth.

The goal isn’t to become competent at everything. It’s to keep becoming capable of building the life you actually want.

📚 From the Leader’s Library

​Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder — Nassim Nicholas Taleb​

Why?

Most people try to build a life that can withstand adversity, but Taleb challenges us to go further: build a life that actually grows stronger through challenges, uncertainty, and change.

Antifragile explores how creating options, reducing unnecessary dependencies, and learning from manageable setbacks can help us thrive rather than merely survive. It’s a powerful reminder that personal leadership isn’t about controlling everything life throws at us—it’s about becoming more capable, adaptable, and prepared for whatever comes next.