Intentional incompetence
The trap in getting good at something is that being good feels like progress while you’re standing still. Execution improves. Learning stops. From the inside, both feel like momentum.
Growth needs friction, and friction means being bad at something on purpose.
The band
There’s a narrow range where learning actually happens. Too easy and you’re performing. Too hard and you have no scaffolding to attach the new thing to, so you quit — not from weakness, but because nothing is sticking.
The band is roughly: you can tell your output is bad, and you can tell why. If you can’t see why, drop a level. If you can’t see that it’s bad, go up.
Cycling across domains is what keeps this available. Ten years in one field gives you a decade of the last two years, because the field stops offering you anything you’re bad at. Move sideways — from backend to interface, from building to selling, from writing code to writing prose — and the discomfort comes back.
The cheapest version of this is a rotation into support. An engineer who spends a month on tickets is bad at it for the first week — wrong tone, wrong level of detail, escalating things that didn’t need escalating — and comes out knowing which parts of the product generate the most human cost. Neither the discomfort nor the knowledge is available from reading the ticket queue, because reading it is something you are already good at.
Where it breaks
The obvious problem: taken seriously, this is a recipe for never being good at anything.
Depth is where the non-obvious value is. The person who has done one thing for fifteen years knows the failure modes that don’t appear in any documentation, and no amount of sideways movement substitutes. Novelty-seeking dressed as growth is one of the more expensive habits available, and it’s especially seductive to founders, because switching domains is indistinguishable from strategy.
The second problem: transfer is weaker than it feels. Learning a new domain sharpens general judgement much less than the people doing it claim. It mostly just teaches you that domain. The “learning how to learn” benefit is real but small, and it’s routinely used to justify a fourth abandoned side project.
Third: you can’t run this at work indefinitely. Deliberate incompetence has a cost, and someone pays it. Doing it inside a team means shipping worse output for a while on someone else’s timeline.
The shape that survives all three: one domain where you go deep and stay, compounding — and a rotating second slot where you are openly, cheaply bad. Small stakes, real feedback, no obligation to become good. The rotation keeps the plasticity. The depth keeps the value.
Takeaway: growth = intentional incompetence.