If you are just joining us, I suggest going back a few articles to start. It will make more sense.
In High School I connected with some folks who are still in my life. This is about one of those. Sarah. She’s up first because my memory of her is from our first week in High School.
Sarah has always had an odd relationship with time. It didn’t occur to me until reading and watching Harry Potter that Sarah DEFINITELY HAS A TIME-TURNER. I’m sure she’ll deny it, but that is the best, possibly only explanation.
As all of Rah’s old friends will tell you, in high school she operated a few minutes behind. To the point where many of us conspired to tell her that events would start fifteen or twenty minutes earlier than the real time. I’m pretty sure she was too smart for us, because for some reason that didn’t help. She’s since come to a closer match with everyone else’s timekeeping, but her tardiness then was my first experience with her.
The first day of Speech class, our first day of High School, she was late. (To be fair, our high school was originally built as a New Deal project, then was added to and remodeled repeatedly, and our Speech class was in a well-hidden basement. It’s a wonder any of us found it. I’m just now realizing we went to Hogwarts.) Anyway, the only seat left when Rah arrived was the one front and center, right next to me.
So picture two people: one a quiet, maladapted introvert with no social skills, the other a singing, dancing, outgoing theater whiz who could easily be heard in the farthest balcony (that was her default volume setting). Now imagine those two having vastly different political views (which at the time wasn’t the knife-to-throat idiocy it is today, but it felt pretty dire even then). Then put that pair together all year as partners in a class requiring constant interaction and public speaking. Recipe for disaster right? I was apparently a challenge to her ability to connect. Sarah is not one to back down from a challenge. At all. Some parts of our relationship resembled those scenes in Wicked where Galinda has decided to make Elphaba “pop-u-lar.” Rah tried her best. I stayed pretty green.
Stepping back for a moment. Today I’d like to talk about the idea of “the whole package.” Which is not some form of objectifying nonsense. I’m using that shorthand to describe something particular. When I write Competence with a big “C” in these essays I’m talking about what happens when you take the set of skills I’ve started describing one-by-one and wrap them in one person. That package of skills combines to something truly special. Someone who reaches goals and finishes projects. Someone you’d trust with what matters most to you. Someone who is a force-multiplier for anything they engage their formidable determination on. If you’ve been reading all along, you’ve heard descriptions of a few parts of “the package” so far. But it’s not just a set of skills it would be cool to have. I think it’s a set of skills that adds up to a meta-skill of Competence.
This is a point worth debating. Feel free to disagree! I have a high bar for “big-C” Competent. Lots of people are good (aka “competent”) at things. I hope I am. Everyone I’ll describe in these essays has a notable area of competence that makes them a good example. And of course I’m presenting small views into complex people in particular points in my own timeline. Some of these folks are good at a lot of things, and some of them have the whole package but I might just call out one thing or highlight one. Some I don’t know because I only saw them in one context and wasn’t in a position to see them as whole people.
But an important part of my hypothesis is that there exists a set of identifiable skills/facets/characteristics such that when combined in a single person, you get a particular “more than the sum of its parts” skill that I call “Competence.”
Important aside! I’m in no way arguing that people with that super-skill are better than great leaders, or than people with one very deep skill, or better than geniuses, or than the most ordinary non-skilled person you’ve ever met. Societies work best by having lots of kinds of thinkers and doers. No one is “better than.” Some people are better AT.
I’m talking about these particular people and their package of skills because I think they contribute unrecognized value. I think we miss them. I think that by studying a thing it’s possible to derive more value from it. I would like to see us spot these people, think “oh, that’s Competence” and do better at providing environments for success, kudos, or whatever else would make them able to “do their thing” that makes all of us better off. I’d like to offer a way for folks who may recognize “hey, I have like six of these skills, but I’m pretty poor at that other one, maybe I can work on that and suddenly be a lot more effective!” Or for managers who just KNOW they have a rockstar on their hands but they’re frustrated and ineffective, to make them happy and high-performing. I’m in no way writing these so that people can read about rockstars and think “well I suck because I’m not that.”
To illustrate, I am married to the smartest man I know. He is quite competent at a number of skills. He’s also far what I’m describing in these essays. But we’ve heard a lot about the kind of people who have the sort of genius he has. They show up in literature, TV, movies. I’ve seen them described in management training, and business personality inventories. We know how to hire people like him and how to make them successful, and how to properly appreciate them. So if you read these things and think “I’m not Competent so I’m nothing” maybe see if you’re actually something else just as good, because you probably are. Or maybe you’re still figuring it out, or on the path to being Competent or something else cool. But please take my hyper focus on one interesting kind of person only for what it is, a belief that we could stand to look harder at one kind of person.
Ok, that detour aside. Back to Sarah.
Because I’m arguing there is a package of skills, I think it’s important to describe what “the whole package” looks like in one of these essays. Not just the pieces-and-parts approach, but describing someone who lives and breathes Competence.
So what about Sarah? Why is she one of my subjects?
Sarah has the whole package.
So rather than listing them I’d like to describe her. Sarah is a dynamo. She was rough around the edges in High School, but was on a fast run to polish and acquire skills.
As of this writing, this point in her (again, weird) timeline, she is married to a cool guy with a story of his own and has three (impressive in their own right) children. They live on a farm a 30 minute drive from our home town. Which is where Sarah currently works as an elementary school counselor (a vocation she switched to after many years as a high school math teacher.)
If you correctly counted that as two or maybe three more-than-full-time jobs (farmer and guidance counselor, plus of course mother) you would actually be short a job. Sarah has been a Paramedic since just after college. She worked at a vet clinic in high school and once aspired to be a veterinarian or perhaps go to med school, until realizing that the state of mathematics education in this country needed her personal attention.
FYI, this is not one of the stories I’m fudging for illustrative purposes. If anything, I’m leaving things out. Like, Rah doesn’t do her multiple full-time “jobs” badly, she’s outstanding at what she does. She doesn’t do those jobs and have a sparse life otherwise. She and her brilliant husband are ballroom dancers. Also she’s bilingual (did not start that way, just decided to be). They travel. She takes care of people who need it. She’s a good friend who finds time to do friend things. I argue that without “the whole package” this kind of life isn’t feasible. (Or a time turner, it has to be one or the other. Or both.)
Rah has been this way at least as long as I’ve known her, probably longer. Sarah is outrageously Competent. Briskly Competent. Competent in a way that makes other competent people feel like the shirking losers we all are. Sarah is the one you need with you castaway on a desert island if you want all of those coconut-powered air-conditioners and hydroponic avocados. Sarah epitomizes the truism that Competent people do too many things. Often because they’re handed those things, but sometimes because they just want to do a lot of things and they’re good enough to make that happen.
Sarah has that je ne sais quoi that I argue wraps “good at a lot of things” into a package of dynamo. So when I say “big C” Competent, that’s ONE picture of what that might look like. There are others.
Think about your life, and those people you wouldn’t hand a project to even though they’re a respected expert on it. It takes more than deep knowledge of a subject to get stuff done. Now see if you know someone like Sarah. Think about a person you would hand a desperate project to, even if it’s totally outside of their wheelhouse. Or is there one you go to when you’re out of your depth. One you trust implicitly, even if it’s just because you can trust they’ll tell you if they can’t handle something rather than let it go bad. What are the qualities that form and exemplify those people? I think those people are hidden keystones holding our world up. They’re around us all the time making important things just “go right.” They may also be keystones we’re missing when things are falling apart.
In other essays I’ll ask how we can identify them, cultivate them, support them, and make the world a better place by making them optimally successful. Obviously whoever gave Rah the time-turner saw the value. But it’s easier to take a reductionist “one skill at a time” approach, describe the skills in the package, and then work on how we identify and cultivate people.
If Sarah is any example, one of the good things about Competent folk is that many of them are driven to find and develop what they need. They recruit helpers and identify resources. They bounce back from failure and try again. So we’re lucky. But how many more potential “big-C” folks might we be missing but for some resources and support? Good mentors, good teachers, good managers spot potential and help it flourish. I think we could spot more “almost Sarahs” out there and help them to the next level. More wild anecdotal speculation in our next episode.