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How Talent Can Hinder Your Career Progression

Glen Brunke, March 5, 2024

I came across a quote from the very talented poet Sylvia Plath that was so haunting in its truth that it stopped me in my tracks. It's even more amazing to consider the source of the quote— a young woman in her 20s at the time of its writing. The wisdom it contains might be more fitting coming from someone with several more decades of life experience.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The sense we get from the above quote is that the author is ambitious, hopeful, and frustrated at the same time. She sees many possibilities for her future, has talent and ambition, and could accomplish a lot in life. In fact, any number of paths are open to her if only she would reach out and grab onto one.

However, life isn't that easy, and we later learn there are consequences to action. By choosing a path, she forgoes other options, and she hesitates at the crossroads.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

And here we see the harsh reality of life: that we have many things we could do, but we end up doing little or even none of them. This reality is even harsher for those with lots of talent; you see more possibilities in your future because you can do more things. You are talented; you can do nearly anything that you put your mind to doing.
There is the question: What will you put your mind to doing? Before we answer this question, we need to clear up one assumption: that we do indeed need to choose a single path. There are certainly individuals that have excelled at multiple things, sometimes at the same time; Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk come to mind as examples.

If we look closer, Branson and Musk are actually leveraging a higher level meta-skill of entrepreneurship that both have been honing and improving over decades of practice. And even an example like Arnold Schwarzenegger moving from bodybuilder to actor to governor would show an intense, extended period of focus within each career segment.

So, yes, we do need to focus, and I'll explain why:

What We All Want From Our Careers

In his book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport suggests that we adopt a craftsman mindset to obtain what we all really want from our jobs:

Creativity - Can be broadly defined as pushing the limits of your craft, making novel connections of existing ideas, and solving problems in interesting ways.
Impact - Whether it's making a customer happy, improving the lives of others, or making lots of money, we all want to know that our work means something.
Control - Being able to influence with whom, when, where, and on what we work is the pinnacle of a successful career, but only comes by developing the right kind of skills to world-class levels.

Newport goes on to lay out that the currency for acquiring these things in our careers is "career capital," which he defines as the accumulation of skills that are both rare in the workforce and valuable to employers or clients.

How Do We Build Skills In Our Careers?

Typically, individuals build skills by practicing them and improving over time. Every job has a learning curve, some steeper than others, and at some point, most people stop moving up the curve because they've reached an acceptable level of performance. They are comfortable in their jobs; they do their work well, and everyone enjoys doing things well, forgetting that at one point the job was unfamiliar and challenging for them.

This discomfort of challenging work is a signal that you are improving; you are moving up the learning curve. If you stop moving up the curve, the work you do isn't likely to be "rare" and won't be rewarded as such with what we all want from jobs: creativity, impact, and control.

Rare Skills Take Time To Develop

A bodybuilder doesn't build up his or her physique overnight, or even over a few weeks or months. It takes years of work and discipline to build the muscle tone and fitness levels necessary to consider oneself a "bodybuilder." The same goes for rare and valuable skills. The level of skill needed to reach beyond the masses takes years to develop and hence why it is necessary to pick a path on which to focus.

You need time to reach the acceptable level of performance where everyone else stops and then more time to push through to the levels beyond where the bigger rewards are earned. The further you move up the curve, the more rare your skills become, and the more options that become available to you.

You are allowed to change your mind, but every deviation from the path is at least a partial to complete reset of your learning journey. The choice of the path should be well-considered and intentional, but a choice must be made; a talent must be leveraged, which also means some talents will fall by the wayside. This necessary pruning allows you to reach your full potential in a way that few ever get to experience.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

― Seneca