Do Yourself a Favour and Reinvent Yourself Regularly

Don’t fall into the competency trap

Image licensed from Canva

I used to have an amazing career, management-level positions at consecutive ad agencies, huge clients, responsibility, great team and seemingly endless opportunities. I was great at it, like really great.

I was smart, successful, driven, and miserable.

My opportunities were laid out in front of me. They looked pretty, but they were just more of the same. Another big client. Another campaign. Another impossible situation to solve. Another diplomatic move. Another week spent in the office, sacrificing my whole life for something I had stopped believing in already.

I fell into the competency trap. I was too good at what I was doing to consider something I had less experience with. And everyone else around me thought the same. What else would you do, they asked. This is your whole life.

I didn’t want it to be my whole life. It was getting boring and stale. It made me complacent. It made me uninterested. It made me exhausted. I stopped having fun. I stopped seeing the opportunities for what they were and they became just another hoop to jump through.

So I quit.

Two years ago, I quit and I’ve never looked back. And as scary and uncertain it was, it…