Distordia Labs

Your 30s are when competence becomes a cage. I keep having the same conversation with my friends... "I'm bored out of my mind," they say. "But I can't quit. I have a reputation. I've spent 10 years getting good at this. What am I supposed to do, throw it all away to be a beginner again?" They are stuck...too qualified to start over and too bored to stay put. This is what I call the Competence Cage. You spend your twenties climbing a ladder - hard work, long hours, ambition. But someday you wake up and realise that the view hasn't changed in a while... You earn decent money. People respect your opinion, but you're bored and as they all seem to say "something is missing". Starting over means throwing away the identity you've spent 10 years building and giving up the salary, the status, the hard-won credibility, and the intoxicating feeling of being the person in the room who knows the answer to something. Going from expert to beginner is really scary, (I think I've been through that process 2-3 times now at 33). So often it's tempting to choose the certain misery of the known over the uncertainty of searching for something else. This is one of those moments in life where there are ONLY imperfect options, and at any time when people have only bad options, people are prone to procrastination. But standing around waiting for a perfect one to come along will cost you something even more expensive: time. The advice I've found myself giving friends... The Sunk Cost Fallacy: You are worried about wasting the previous 10 years, but you should be worried about wasting the next 40. There are few greater risks to our future, than being stubbornly unwilling to let go of the past. The Reversible Door: @JeffBezos categorises decisions into two types. Type 1 decisions are irreversible one-way doors. Type 2 decisions are two-way doors - they're reversible. Changing your career is almost always Type 2. If you leave your job to try something new and it fails, your skills do not evaporate. Your former employer would likely hire you back in a heartbeat. Therefore, the risk is not making the wrong move. The risk is wasting years procrastinating at the threshold of a door you can easily walk back through. The View from the Finish Line: When you're 80, you probably won't remember the SAFE and the SAME. You will likely speak only of the moments where your heart beat fastest. The times you were nervous, the adventures you had, the wisdom of trying, failing learning and figuring it out. I've done clay pottery wheels with my family and in-laws several times, and I think we all have a tendency to view our careers like clay on a pottery wheel; At the start, we experiment freely - squashing it, reshaping it, starting again. But the closer it gets to looking like something, the more cautious we become. We stop experimenting, taking risks and being creative. We only make tiny adjustments to the sculpture. We're terrified to touch it in case we ruin our hard work... Sculptures are admired for being finished, our lives are admired for being lived. Career's are river's and when river's stop moving forward, they start looking and feeling like a swamp. Competence is a lovely place to visit, but a terrible place to live... once you internalise a label "Lawyer", "Social Media Expert", "Branding consultant", the competence cage becomes harder to break out of. With AI disrupting everything, and the rate of change accelerating rapidly, now is a great time to learn the skill of reinvention. To learn how to kill the person you've worked so hard to become, to give the person you could be a chance to breathe.