Competence is clarity - by Carmen - Altered

I was telling my friend Jack yesterday about how I didn’t know I was good at writing until last year when several pieces of mine went viral. He seemed really surprised by this and I, taken aback by his surprise, tried to figure out why I never think of myself as good at a thing even when people tell me so. Basically, what do I even think makes someone good at something? And I realized that I never view myself as being on a spectrum of competent to incompetent; instead I use a spectrum of how much clarity I have about something, how much I can understand it and explain it to others so they know what I mean. Once I adopted this new definition, I realized that maybe I am pretty decent at it after all. He joked that I have this ability in conversation to pinch zoom into anything and summon more details at will, just keep going in pixel perfect clarity and reproduce that in words. And I really liked that. Thanks Jack. Real competence is having clarity around a subject, interest, or skill. S

I was telling my friend Jack yesterday about how I didn’t know I was good at writing until last year when several pieces of mine went viral. He seemed really surprised by this and I, taken aback by his surprise, tried to figure out why I never think of myself as good at a thing even when people tell me so. Basically, what do I even think makes someone good at something? And I realized that I never view myself as being on a spectrum of competent to incompetent; instead I use a spectrum of how much clarity I have about something, how much I can understand it and explain it to others so they know