The Thrill of Competence

by Amy E. Barr, co-founder & educator at The Lukeion Project

There’s a lot of hand-wringing over why our late teens and young adults now suffer from the highest levels of depression and feelings of crisis since anyone ever started recording such things. Hand-ringing indeed! Troubles are shared with parents, educators, friends, family, and siblings of the ever-growing group of younger people who constantly struggle with feeling way-less-than. 

Books, blogs, and articles grope in the dark for answers for the several generations that should be our primary young decision makers, new parents, and responsible adults. A growing number of them feel so ill-equipped for life’s challenges they decline opportunities to move forward into adulthood until years later than the generations before them. Have humans changed so much?  Why are tasks that were once common for 17 and 18-year-olds now too daunting for 28-year-olds today?

While the situation is extremely complex, I can offer at least one reason our 16 to 30-year-olds are in crisis lately. Unlike any other moment in history, our young people completely lack the thrill of competence. 

If you have ever started a new job in a fairly complex field, If you have ever been a new parent bringing your first tiny infant home for her first night, if you have ever started any major task that involves effort and expense (start a garden, paint a house, build a fence, plant a shrub), you probably lacked competence. Depending on your confidence, a lack of competence either hindered you from moving forward … or it did not.

Competence comes from the same root as “compete.” By the 1630s it was defined as "sufficiency of means for living at ease," from Latin competentia, "meeting together, agreement, symmetry." By 1790, competence meant "adequate range of capacity or ability, sufficiency to deal with what is at hand." Confidence, on the other hand, comes from the combination of the two Latin words cum+fido meaning “to have complete assurance, boldness.”

Many, though not all, of our anxieties, stem from feelings that we lack the “adequate range of sufficiency to deal with what is at hand.” Some, though not all, will graduate from high school and then college (and maybe even graduate school) with the cast-iron certainty that they lack the “adequate range of sufficiency” to handle just plain old daily obligations like taxes and figuring out insurance papers, much less, emergency duties during a real crisis!

In 2013 my family reached our goal of buying a piece of property in the country so we could learn how to be more competent. We will be the first to tell you we were completely incompetent as we assessed our 23 wild acres covered in eye-height grass, scrub, poison ivy, and tangled trees. We set goals of figuring it all out while we scored minor victories (chicken coop and garden first, goats and barn next, etc.). As we checked something off the list, we felt a little more competent. We were hooked on the thrill. Competence, no matter how small, leads to confidence.

Back then we had already run a busy small business for 8 years. We had educated our kids at home since they were born. When we started all the hundreds of tasks associated with those two projects, we were deeply incompetent as well. We made a lot of mistakes. We had to GAIN competence through experience, hard knocks, dumb blunders, recovery from failure, reading, research, and more research. We weren’t experts at those things, but eventually, we had the “sufficiency to deal with what is at hand.” We knew we could keep adding to our experiences and expel the feelings of way-less-than by becoming just enough.

Our generations in crises feel way-less-than. Kindergarten through high school (even college) can be a fiasco of confidence-building (STAR pupil! Perfect attendance! Best athlete!) without a moment’s consideration for competence-building. Awards for attendance are ridiculous to somebody who can't cook a full meal, buy a car, follow instructions to build bookshelves, invest, or apply for a mortgage. A day job in a cubicle followed by a dinner of take-out is often overshadowed by the feeling that everyone else is doing life better (thanks, social media). It is impossible to build genuine CONFIDENCE in people who completely lack COMPETENCE.

How can we help our teens now to avoid this larger crisis later?

Have them do MORE of what’s real now

One day our family decided to build a barn for our spoiled goats. We did not hire craftsmen, nor did we buy a kit. We did the research, we measured twice/cut once, and then we did the work. We made some dumb mistakes and yet we built a barn. Our teen/college aged kids did it all with us. We did what was real. We made real mistakes. Came up with real answers. We have a real barn. 

Not everyone has the luxury of building a barn for a bunch of goats for the sake of competence-building. All of us can grow a little garden, cook a meal entirely from scratch, sew, build, weave, craft, construct. Learn how to do a thing and then do it, but expect mistakes. That’s normal. Each of those things builds competence.

Have them invest educational hours in real challenges

Education, at least the real kind, is on the endangered list. Many parents don’t want to jeopardize their child’s chances at a perfect transcript. They will either pressure educators to keep making things easier for their child or they will avoid anything that might mar that perfect college entry moment.

Fearless parents are the ones who know the thrill of competence is addictive. They will take a chance by putting their students through ever-increasing challenges. Some students with the best grades are far less competent than those who tackled tougher academic challenges head on. Many of our golden graded scholars will be haunted by feelings of less-than because they know better than anyone that they avoided the more difficult stuff to protect transcripts.

Start the pre-launch sequence much earlier than you think you should

The Romans launched their children into adulthood at age 15. They called a person around this age adulescens: one becoming an adult.  When I say this in my Latin class, I always get surprised comments from students of the same age. How? How are they ready? At age 14 or 15, kids should know all the competence basics and they should be ready for supervised solo-flights. Start those first jobs, expect them to volunteer at church, care for animals or loved ones, require them to pull their weight in chores, have them appreciate income, bill-paying, and the real cost of living. 

Set them up to fail and show them how to recover

I don’t mean that you assign a task so impossible that your teen will certainly crash and burn. Do set them up to potentially fail.  Put them in challenges that are slightly above their scale. One of two things will happen when you do: They will learn about recoverable failure (not fatal after all!).  Or they will succeed, and you can celebrate vigorously when they feel competent. Most will have at least a few set-backs. Recovering and learning from failure is the path to competence as well. A sufficiency to deal with what is at hand means failure is an old friend and success is just a matter of getting back up on the horse. Competence alone is the path to confidence.