Being competent is and should be the goal of every individual. The competent man or woman will always be in high demand because competency is as good as gold in any given field.

Finding a good employee has forever been the curse of every ambitious employer. All of the businesses I have previously worked for had the persistent dilemma of having just a couple of employees they could actually rely on to get things done and to do those things well, and the rest were breathing bodies that filled in the gaps.

You should be striving to be competent at all that you do, whether it is at your job, running your own business, your hobbies, and even the simple things like being a responsible adult. You’d be horribly surprised at the shocking number of human beings that are technically adults and are just terrible at it. They’re irresponsible, emotionally and mentally unstable, their homes are a total garbage pit, and they are just completely incapable at doing anything but scrape by. They are the type of person to endlessly distract themselves with entertainment and never really accomplish much at all.

And then there’s the competent ones, the people you look at and admire, who you know you can rely on, and you respect. The competent ones earn their place with hard work and intelligence, by being responsible and taking on challenges and by learning from trial and error.

It’s not an easy place to get to. You have to be willing to do things that come with the dreaded risk of failure, again and again. A lot of the competent people you know have a long history of failures that laid the foundation of their competence.

You just see the competency, and it mesmerizes you so that you can’t see past the capabilities of that person, and you think they’re just a natural, and some things do come more naturally to some people than others, but real competency comes from accepting responsibility and taking risks and failing and learning from those mistakes so that you don’t make those mistakes again.

I’ve been extremely competent at my job before, but I’m in a new field now, and although I might be considered one of the more competent ones now, I’m still relatively new, taking on new responsibilities and making mistakes.

Sometimes it absolutely sucks navigating through new challenges and flopping on my face every now and then, but I’d much rather do that and learn from my mistakes and feel capable of more and more as time passes on. I’d much rather feel useful than to just be another cog in the machine, just trying to survive.

You’re going to make mistakes on the road to competency, but the effort you put in will be recognized and making mistakes is more forgivable. Every now and then I see one of the competent guys make a mistake, and nobody gets upset about it because we all know that person was trying their best and it was an honest mistake. That person accepts responsibility for their mistakes and grows from the failures, they’re humble.

Humility is a cornerstone of competence. We all know that arrogant jerk that may be smart, but they can never admit when they are wrong or when they make a mistake. That’s false competence, it’s an impedance to growth to be incapable of accepting responsibility for your mistakes. There’s no room for growth in arrogance; you can only get so far without having some degree of humility.

I made an embarrassing mistake today. I was trusted to do something important, and I got so caught up in the more complicated aspects of my task that I totally overlooked something small, but that oversight of the seemingly unimportant details lead to a complete failure. It was rough, and I felt like I had let everyone down. It was like I was back at square one, incompetent and inexperienced.

I’ve been in that spot before and I am grateful for the peer group I have because I have a lot of competent people around me who have also make mistakes every now and then and we have a stressful job, and they didn’t add more stress to my life when I messed up. The positive that came out of those situations was that I learned a lot, and I felt so terrible about my mistakes that I never wanted to relive those experiences ever again. I leveled up my knowledge and I know what pitfalls to look out for the next time and that is half the battle when you’re doing things that involve risk.

Don’t let pride or arrogance get in the way of becoming competent. Age doesn’t determine competency, and I know that very well. I was once the younger guy at my job who was better at it than the older guys. Now, I’m the older guy with a bunch of younger guys in positions above me who know more than I do at our jobs and have more experience than I do. I have to accept that and not let it get in the way of learning and getting better at my job.

I have to remind myself to be humble and remember that even when I’m in the position of more experience and competence, that just because you may know more than someone else or have seniority to them doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from that person.

I had to write over 50 articles before I thought I was any good at it. I had to put myself out there time and time again and risk sounding like an idiot until I felt like I developed a sense of competency. Sometimes I still go back and look at articles I wrote a long time ago and cringe as I read them. Now, I can write a good article in a fraction of the time it used to take me to write something mediocre, but it took a lot of trial and error and a lot of time to get to that point.

I’ve written over 100,000 words now, and over 120 articles and I couldn’t have done that if I didn’t keep up with it for years and feel incompetent frequently along the way. I don’t intend to brag, the point I want to make is that eventually you will succeed, and that accomplishment will fuel you and motivate you to continue to pursue competence and success because it feels great.

Be open to learning and focus on growth if you want to be competent and keep humility as your close companion. There will always be a place for the competent person wherever they choose to go, and if you find yourself the competent person in a place where you feel you aren’t growing anymore or feel that you aren’t appreciated, then it’s time to move on.

There are a few words that you should embody if you desire to be competent. Those words are responsible, humble, intelligent, and determined. Put your best foot forward and never stop being a student and you will become competent. Remember that the failures and mistakes are part of the process, a necessary part of the process to become competent.