The Cost of Competence: Why You Have to Embrace Being the Village Idiot

The Socially Approved Version of Yourself

Jordan Peterson once said something that stayed with me like a pebble at the bottom of a well: “You have to be a fool first before you become a master. If you don’t want to be a fool first, you can never be a master.”

He said it plainly, without ceremony, the way people say things they are absolutely sure of. The first time I heard it, I received it with disbelieving awe because it was the kind of truth that should come with a warning label. Nobody tells you this before you start. The brochure for learning anything worth knowing does not include a section titled “You Will Look Ridiculous”. You are expected to discover that particular gift on your own.

For most of my early life, I tried very hard to avoid looking ridiculous. I spent a great deal of time deploying a multitude of personalities just to fit in. Whenever I met someone new, I would silently collect data on their beliefs, dislikes, insecurities, sense of humour, and what kept them up at night. I would then synthesise this information into a custom-built personality they would find palatable. There was the real Takura, and then there was the Takura I thought the other person could digest.

Socially, the results were remarkable. People considered me perfectly normal. Psychologically, it was exhausting. Trying to maintain multiple personalities feels like running several demanding applications on hardware that barely survived Windows Vista. Something is always freezing, something is always overheating, and somewhere in the background a tiny fan is screaming for deliverance.

I felt a deep shame discussing my actual interests because they were almost guaranteed to earn me strange looks. My love for heavy metal was culturally interpreted as devil worship. I did not worship the devil. I just appreciated distorted electric guitars and solos worthy of a Power Rangers transformation sequence. My obsession with learning Portuguese attracted criticism too, mostly because people thought I was showing off an entirely useless skill. Besides, as the joke goes, Portuguese sounds like Spanish spoken by somebody who has had one too many shots of cachaça.

Even my taste in sports was a social hazard. Trying to steer conversations towards Test cricket usually put my audience into a medically concerning coma. I cannot entirely blame them. Expecting normal people to watch twenty-two men chase a red ball for five straight days, only for the match to end without a winner, is a tough sell.

The point is that my interests drifted very far away from what most people around me considered normal. Eventually, I realised something uncomfortable: I could either fit in or be authentic. Trying to do both simultaneously felt like forcing incompatible software to run on the same machine. Something always crashed. The desire to be normal was becoming an expensive tax on my sanity.

The Deviant Phase

By 2018, I possessed a university degree and absolutely zero job prospects. After eighteen months of sending out CVs and getting completely blanked, I gave up. Looking for employment felt like repeatedly running headfirst into a brick wall and hoping to pop out on the other side. At some point, you have to stop admiring the wall and ask whether there is another road.

I realised nobody was coming to save me. I had to build my own thing.

My grand masterplan was not some venture-backed startup fantasy or a forex trading scheme assembled inside a Telegram group by a man called “Coach Blessing”. It was a simple, audacious promise to myself. I would write code every day. I would run every morning. I would read obsessively. I would learn guitar properly. I would continue improving even if nobody cared.

From the outside, this looked like a highly structured recipe for poverty. What is the point of writing software that nobody is buying? Why wake up at 5 AM to torture yourself on the road if you are not going to the Olympics? Why buy a guitar you cannot play? Why spend time learning Portuguese while unemployed? These were not stupid questions. In fact, they were perfectly sensible questions if the only evidence available was my immediate situation.

The criticism from friends and family was deafening. You quickly learn that a prophet is indeed without honour in his own hometown. The friction happens because the people closest to you often evaluate you using an outdated internal snapshot. They look at you and see the awkward kid, the broke student, the weird relative, or the bloke filming strange videos in his room. Meanwhile, you are desperately trying to become someone they have never met before.

That creates friction. A lot of it.

The village idiot, in the context I am using, is not an insult. It is a job description. The village idiot is the person in the room who does not know what they are doing yet, and has decided to show up anyway. They ask obvious questions. They get things wrong. They mispronounce the terminology, misunderstand the frameworks, and occasionally produce work that would make a more experienced person quietly excuse themselves to go and have a sit-down in a darkened room.

They also learn at a rate that makes the cautious observers genuinely uncomfortable.

The Brutal Truth About Criticism

Most motivational speakers will tell you to ignore your detractors because they are jealous haters. I am not going to tell you that. The most horrifying thing about the criticism I received was its pinpoint accuracy.

My critics were often completely right.

They pointed out that my university peers were climbing the corporate ladder while I was staring at a screen making zero cents from software systems nobody wanted to buy. They were right. I sucked at writing software, and I sucked at selling software. They mocked my running and advised me to buy better gear. Admittedly, my gear was hideous. I looked less like a runner and more like somebody fleeing a collapsed gym.

They questioned why I was wasting money on a guitar I could not play to learn a genre of music many people stopped caring about decades ago. Highly logical question. I picked up the guitar as an adult, which was either a sign of courageous ambition or catastrophic optimism. For the first few months, the evidence strongly favoured the latter. When I played, it sounded like when Pacman dies. My fingers were not so much playing notes as negotiating a hostage situation between the strings and my central nervous system, and negotiations were not going well.

When I started creating content in 2023, the feedback became even more brutal. People quickly pointed out that my videos were terrible. Again, they were right. Some of my early scripts made less sense than a beta version of ChatGPT from 2019.

Every negative comment made me question my life choices. Thankfully, I ignored them. Taking career advice from some of those people would have been like asking your barber to perform heart surgery. I gave them a mental middle finger and kept working.

The critics correctly identified my current incompetence. They incorrectly assumed it was permanent. That distinction changed my life.

The Mechanics of Improvement

I love moving from incompetence to competence. The only problem is that the middle section of that journey is painfully boring. There are no montages. Nobody is watching you proudly while a dramatic soundtrack plays in the background. If anything, the people around you are trying to figure out a polite way to suggest you consider a different hobby.

Competence is not delivered to your door. It is excavated. You dig through layers of confusion, failed attempts, embarrassing misunderstandings, and feedback that stings like a hot iron somewhere unmentionable. The only way to excavate is to pick up the shovel and start digging, even when you do not know what you are looking for and you are digging in entirely the wrong place.

Automation is what keeps software developers employed. We write code to reduce repetitive work, cut costs, and increase efficiency. Fortunately, the human brain also loves automation. If you repeat an action long enough, your brain gradually turns it into a habit, reducing the conscious effort required to perform it. That insight completely changed how I viewed improvement.

Reading "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg, "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, and "One Small Step Can Change Your Life" by Robert Maurer introduced me to the idea that long-term growth depends less on motivation and more on systems. Motivation is unreliable. Systems survive moods. Maurer’s discussion of Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous incremental improvement, particularly resonated with me.

Most people fail because they try to transform themselves in one violent burst of motivation. That rarely lasts. A better approach is lowering the barrier to action. Instead of trying to run ten kilometres immediately, you wake up, put on your shoes, and stand outside for two minutes. That is it. Sounds ridiculously easy. Good. Easy things are repeatable. Repeatable things become habits. Habits shape identity. Identity shapes behaviour. Behaviour repeated over several years becomes competence.

The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. That is not an inspiring LinkedIn graphic. It is a description of a mechanism. Failure, processed honestly, produces information. Information, accumulated over time, produces skill. Skill, applied repeatedly, produces something that eventually resembles competence. The whole chain begins with the willingness to be bad at something.

Cut the chain at the beginning and you never reach the end.

Why Software Makes This Worse

This is especially treacherous in software development, which is the field I inhabit and from which I have been accumulating evidence on this subject for some years now.

Programming attracts people of considerable intelligence, which is unfortunate because intelligence is exactly the quality most likely to convince you that you should not have to be confused. Smart people expect things to make sense quickly. When they do not, the instinct is to attribute the confusion to a flaw in the material rather than a gap in their own understanding. The framework is badly documented. The tutorial was written by someone who clearly believed punctuation was optional. The language itself is an affront to human dignity.

Sometimes these things are true. But mostly, confusion is just confusion, and it dissolves the same way it always has: through time, repetition, and the willingness to sit inside uncertainty long enough for understanding to form.

The beginner developer who loudly admits they do not understand something and asks for help will, within a year, understand things that their more defensive peers are still pretending they never needed to know. That is not weakness. That is efficient learning wearing socially uncomfortable clothing.

Ego, Embarrassment and Asking for Help

The most common culprit behind the unwillingness to be a beginner is not laziness. It is ego.

Ray Dalio describes the ego barrier as our innate desire to be capable and have others recognise us as such. The ego does not want to be seen learning. It wants to be seen knowing. It wants to arrive at the destination without any record of the journey, which would be very convenient if that were even slightly how any of this worked.

The cruelty is that ego often holds sway most over the people who need to learn the most. The beginner who is most uncomfortable with looking foolish is the one who will remain a beginner the longest. The experienced practitioner, stripped of the need to perform competence, learns faster because they have already accepted that confusion is not an emergency. It is merely the normal entrance fee for difficult work.

Being a beginner in public requires you to ask for things: help, explanations, patience, and occasionally a second attempt at something you should probably have understood the first time. Many people experience this as a form of indignity. We have been trained, with considerable thoroughness, to treat self-sufficiency as a moral virtue and asking for help as its corresponding vice.

This is nonsense, but it is persistent nonsense, and it does a remarkable amount of damage.

The people who learn fastest are almost always the people most willing to be taught. Not the ones who nod along in meetings to avoid revealing that they have no idea what anyone is talking about. Not the ones who Google their way through confusion in private, too proud to admit to another human being that there is a gap in their knowledge. The ones who walk up to the person in the room who knows the most and say plainly, “I do not understand this. Can you explain it again?”

That is not weakness. It is the most efficient learning strategy available to a human being. It is also, unfortunately, the one that requires the most courage.

What Repetition Eventually Gave Me

I applied the same principle to everything.

Writing terrible code every day eventually evolved into building complex debt management and recovery systems. Today, my company, Keridan, has a strong track record servicing major financial institutions like CBZ Holdings and InnBucks. The same work that once looked like unpaid stubbornness slowly became specialised knowledge.

I applied the same principle to the road. I now have close to 15,000 kilometres under my belt and average roughly 60 kilometres every week. Ironically, some of the people who mocked my dreadful running gear now ask me for fitness advice. Life has a twisted sense of humour and occasionally arrives carrying a receipt.

I applied it to the guitar too. Less clicking, more picking. I made sure to play for at least two minutes every day. I now know my way around a fretboard, even though I still have a very long way to go. I am not pretending to be some silent monk who communicates only through shredding. I am simply better than I was, and that is the only scoreboard that matters in the early years.

The content creation journey is still young. I still dread pressing publish. I still feel nervous uploading videos because a part of me expects somebody to point out every flaw I already know exists. But every article, script, edit, thumbnail, and upload teaches me something. The process is awkward, occasionally humiliating, and sometimes makes me want to pull my eyelashes out. It also works.

The Fear Never Leaves

You have to be a fool first before you become a master. That is simply the cost of entry.

You might assume that after years of writing software, running a business, building systems, running thousands of kilometres, and creating content, I have developed some sort of bulletproof ego. Not even close.

I still dread pressing the publish button on articles like this one. I still feel nervous uploading videos because a part of me expects somebody to point out every flaw I already know exists. I still avoid playing guitar in front of people. Old criticism leaves residue. That sensitivity to embarrassment never fully disappears. You simply stop obeying it.

Most ambitious people are not destroyed by failure. They are destroyed by embarrassment. By looking foolish. By being visibly mediocre. By hearing accurate criticism before their skills have had time to mature.

But that phase is not a bug. It is the price of admission.

Every skilled person was once the village idiot of their chosen craft. The difference is that they endured the humiliation long enough for competence to arrive. Greatness rejects all first-time applicants. The people standing on the sidelines rarely understand this because spectators only witness snapshots. They see the struggling beginner. They do not see the compounding effect of thousands of repetitions quietly accumulating beneath the surface.

Many people abandon potentially meaningful lives simply because they cannot emotionally survive looking ridiculous for a few years. That is a very expensive form of impatience.

Sometimes I still wonder what my life would look like if I had simply acted normal. If I had suppressed my strange interests. Stopped running. Stopped coding. Stopped writing. Stopped filming videos. Stopped trying to become somebody unfamiliar.

The thought never lasts very long. I like learning too much.

“Start before you think you’re ready” sounds reckless until you understand what it is actually saying. It is not telling you to be careless. It is telling you that ready is not a destination you arrive at before you begin. It is something that assembles itself, piece by piece, out of the accumulated wreckage of your earlier attempts.

You cannot think yourself into competence. You cannot prepare yourself past the need for practice. At some point, the only remaining option is to walk into the room, accept the role of village idiot with as much dignity as you can muster, and get to work.

The fool who persists will eventually find themselves somewhere quite different. The one who refused to look foolish will still be standing at the entrance, conditions still not quite right, the moment still not quite perfect, the gap between where they are and where they want to be quietly widening with every year that passes.

Embarrassment lasts a moment. Regret rents the spare bedroom and refuses to leave.

Go and be the village idiot. The rent is uncomfortable, but the returns are extraordinary.