Hey folks, welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
This week's edition is about the strangest kind of career trouble, it’s about everything going too good to be true.
Let me describe it, because you might be really confused.
Work that you used to hate doing only takes you a few hours, your salary is great and your lifestyle is something you’re content with, leadership likes you and you have an idea of how the week is going to go.
But somewhere underneath all of that, you have started to feel a little stagnant.
The thing is that when you are struggling, you know you have to move but when you are comfortable, every signal tells you to stay put.
Here is the thing I have come to believe, in the first decade of your career, you should optimize your learning rate or in other words how quickly you are still becoming more capable than you were six months ago.
And comfort is where that number goes to zero.
So when something feels smooth and fluent, that ease is often not proof you have mastered it, you’ve stopped learning it.
The writer Joshua Foer has a name for where you end up.
He calls it the "OK plateau."
The moment you decide you are good enough at something, switch to autopilot, and stop improving, sometimes for years, without ever deciding to.
Meanwhile the ground under you keeps moving.
Which means if you spend three comfortable years running on the skills you already have, the market is walking away from you while you sit perfectly still, feeling fine.
So what do you do about it, other than the usual advice to go learn something.
Every few months, ask yourself “What am I concretely better at than I was six months ago?”
If you cannot point to a specific thing, with evidence, put a goal or two and work towards it.
Sit in a room where someone is testing what you can do, and notice which question makes you fumble, which skill they assume you have that you don't.
A job description is a live readout of what the market is now paying for, and an interview is a diagnostic of the gap between that and you.
You walk out knowing exactly where you have gone stale, while there is still plenty of time to fix it.
There is real research here, from a study by Nestojko and colleagues, that people who simply expect to teach something learn it more deeply than people studying for a test, even when they never end up teaching at all.
The act of preparing to explain forces you to understand.
I know someone who runs advertising at a large agency and yet teaches one course at a college on the side.
He will tell you he does it because standing in front of a room of twenty-year-olds every week forces him to stay current, to know the new thing before they ask about it.
Comfort often means you have become the most capable person in your particular room.
That is exactly when to change rooms.
Get onto the harder project, the team where you are a little out of your depth.
Being surrounded by people you have to stretch to keep up with is the fastest way to start climbing again.
And no, not every plateau is a trap.
Sometimes comfort is earned.
Just ask yourself if you’re comfortable because you have stopped being stretched, or because you have gotten so good that you are now playing a bigger game.
Only you know which one is true.
The most expensive thing you can do early in your career is fall asleep while everything is going well.
Hit reply: when was the last time your work scared you a little?
I read every email.
Swati