The Competence Tax

There is a peculiar punishment for being good at things.

You are given more things.

Answer emails promptly?

Excellent. You can handle the difficult client.

Organised?

Wonderful. You can arrange the meeting.

Calm in a crisis?

Fantastic. Here are three crises.

Remember everyone’s birthdays, appointments and deadlines?

Congratulations.

You are now the official administrative department for several adults who own calendars.

This is the competence Tax: the additional work, responsibility and expectation placed upon capable

people precisely because they have demonstrated that they can cope.

It happens in workplaces.

Families.

Friendships.

Relationships.

Community groups.

Even holidays.

One person knows where the passports are, when the train leaves, whether the hotel has been paid,

what medication needs packing and why Uncle Brian isn’t speaking to Auntie Margaret.

Everyone else is “just getting ready.”

Competence looks like a privilege from the outside.

From inside, it can feel remarkably like unpaid management.

And the strangest part?

The better you become at carrying things, the less anybody notices you’re carrying them.

Competence Is Rewarded With Work

Most organisations claim to award competence with recognition, progression and money. Sometimes

they do.

But there is another reward available immediately.

More work.A reliable employee completes something ahead of schedule.

Their colleague hasn’t finished.

Who gets the additional task?

Usually not the person already struggling.

Give it to Sarah.

Sarah will sort it.

Sarah always sorts it.

Soon Sarah is doing her own job, rescuing other people’s jobs and receiving increasingly complex

assignments because management “trusts her.”

Trust is lovely.

So is a pay rise.

The problem arises when competence becomes justification for continually increasing someone’s load

without increasing their authority, resources or reward.

Eventually, excellence becomes the baseline.

The exceptional employee stops being thanked for delivering.

Delivery is simply expected.

Meanwhile, when the unreliable person manages one competent afternoon, balloons practically fall

from the ceiling.

Low expectations make ordinary performance look impressive. High expectations can make extraordinary performance invisible.

That is one of the Competence Tax’s cruellest calculations.

“Ask Her. She’ll Know.”

Families are exceptionally good at creating competence hierarchies.

There is often one person who knows everything.

When is Dad’s hospital appointment?

Ask her.

Who has the insurance details?

Ask her.

What’s the council reference number?

She’ll know.

Has anybody bought Mum’s birthday present?

She probably has.Who’s sorting Christmas?

She is.

Who knows why the boiler is making that noise?

Apparently she now works for British Gas too.

Nobody officially appointed this person.

The role emerged because, at some point, she demonstrated an alarming ability to get things done.

Other family members gradually outsourced remembering.

Then planning.

Then organising.

Then worrying.

The competent person doesn’t merely perform tasks.

They carry anticipatory responsibility.

They think about what needs doing before anybody else realises it needs doing.

That’s exhausting because the work isn’t confined to actions.

It occupies mental space.

A task completed disappears from everyone else’s mind.

The competent person is already thinking about the next five.

Learned Helplessness Has a Very Capable Assistant

Here’s where things become uncomfortable.

Sometimes incompetence is genuine.

People have different abilities.

Some struggle with organisation, confidence, literacy, technology, health, executive functioning or

unfamiliar systems.

Help is entirely appropriate.

But occasionally, incompetence becomes extraordinarily convenient.

“I’m useless at that.”

“You do it better.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Can you just do it?”

Translation:

You have demonstrated competence, therefore I have retired mine.

There is even a popular term for deliberately or strategically performing a task badly so somebody else

takes over: weaponized incompetence.

Load the dishwasher badly enough and perhaps you’ll never be asked again.

Forget enough birthdays and somebody else becomes responsible for presents.

Make a disaster of booking the holiday and the competent person will handle every trip until death.

Whether deliberate or habitual, the result is the same.

One person’s lowered capability becomes another person’s increased workload.

Incompetence can become a tax avoidance scheme.

The Reliable Friend

The Competence Tax isn’t always practical.

Sometimes its emotional.

Every friendship group seems to contain someone who can cope.

The sensible one.

The listener.

The person people telephone during divorce, redundancy, family warfare and romantic catastrophe.

They know she’ll answer.

She gives good advice.

She doesn’t panic.

She remembers what happened last time.

People finish conversations feeling lighter.

She finishes them carrying information about six lives.

But who calls the strong friend and asks:

“How are you really doing?”

Sometimes nobody.

Competence creates an illusion of invulnerability.

Because someone manages their difficulties well, others assume they don’t have difficulties.

Because they rarely ask for help, nobody thinks to offer it.

Because they remain functional while struggling, their struggle doesn’t qualify as an emergency.

We often allocate compassion according to visible distress.

The person screaming receives attention.

The person quietly solving the problem receives another problem.

The Emergency You Manufactured

There is another group particularly skilled at taxing competent people.

The last-minute person.

They knew the deadline was Friday.

They did nothing Monday.

Nothing Tuesday.

Wednesday remained surprisingly relaxed.

Thursday involved “thinking about It.”

Then Friday arrives.

Emergency!

Suddenly everyone must mobilise.

The competent person is asked to proofread, telephone, print, drive, edit, rescue, cover or explain.

Their poor planning has become your urgent responsibility.

This deserves resistance.

A genuine emergency is something unexpected.

A predictable deadline neglected until the final moment is not an emergency.

It is a consequence.

The distinction matters because capable people frequently protect others from consequences.

And every successful rescue teaches an unfortunate lesson:

This system works.

Why become organised when Sarah eventually appears with a laptop?

The Price of Making It Look Easy

Competent people contribute to the problem too.

That’s uncomfortable, but important.

They often make difficult things look effortless.

They don’t mention the three hours of preparation.

They quietly correct mistakes.

They work late.

They remember.

They anticipate.

They solve the problem before anyone sees it.Then say:

“It’s fine.”

No.

It took four hours.

You rearranged your day.

You cancelled something.

You used expertise acquired over fifteen years.

Stop calling that “nothing.”

When we repeatedly hide the cost of our competence, people begin believing competence has no

cost.

The magician removes the machinery, so everyone sees magic.

Then they ask for another trick.

Why Competent People Keep Saying Yes

If the tax is so exhausting, why keep paying it?

Because competence can become identity.

Being needed feels valuable.

Being the dependable one earns praise.

Control can feel safer than trusting someone else to do something badly.

Sometimes it’s genuinely quicker to say:

“Give it here.”

But quicker today can become permanent tomorrow.

There can also be fear.

If I stop doing everything, people might think I’m selfish.

Difficult.

Unhelpful.

Changed.

Good.

Perhaps you have changed.

Perhaps you’ve discovered that generosity and unlimited availability are not synonymous.

As Anne Lamott famously wrote:

“No is a complete sentence.”

For competent people, it can also be a financial policy.

Stop Paying Other People’s Tax

The answer isn’t to become incompetent.

Please don’t start deliberately missing trains and burning dinner in pursuit of equality.

The solution is to stop automatically converting ability into obligation.

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Just because you’re better at it doesn’t mean it belongs to you.

Just because somebody will struggle doesn’t mean you must prevent the struggle.

Ask:

Whose responsibility is this?

Not:

Who could do this fastest?

Those questions produce very different answers.

At work, document what you’re carrying.

Ask what should be deprioritised when something new is added.

If you’re repeatedly performing above your role, discuss authority, recognition or compensation.

At home, return tasks to their owners.

“You’ll need to arrange that.”

“The number is online.”

“I can’t do that today.”

“You’ll have to ask them”

These are not acts of cruelty.

They’re small declarations that other adults remain participants in their own lives.

Let People Be Temporarily Bad at Things

This may be the hardest part.

Someone learning will often perform a task worse than you.

Let them.

The dishwasher may resemble an archaeological excavation.

The email may take forty minutes.

The booking process may involve unnecessary phone calls.

The first attempt may fail.Resist the urge to swoop.

Competence develops through doing.

If the competent person always takes over, everyone else’s incompetence becomes permanent.

There is a difference between helping someone learn and becoming the permanent mechanism

through which their life functions.

Support should increase capability, not replace it.

Audit Your Competence Tax

Look at your week.

What do you repeatedly do simply because everybody knows you’ll do it?

What responsibilities arrived without discussion?

Which people only become organised once you refuse to rescue them?

Where has “You’re so good at this” quietly become “Therefore you must always do it?”

And perhaps the most revealing question:

What would happen if you stopped?

Not forever.

Just once.

Would somebody else remember?

Learn?

Make the call?

Read the instructions?

Experience a consequence?

Discover they’re considerably more capable than they’ve been pretending?

Perhaps.

And perhaps you would discover something too.

The world doesn’t collapse every time you stop holding it up.

Competence Should Create Freedom

Being capable is something to be proud of.

Competence creates options.

It builds confidence.

It earns trust.

It opens doors.But competence should eventually create more freedom, not a life sentence of cleaning up after

everybody else.

You do not have to become less capable.

You need to become more selective about where your capability goes.

Give it to people who value it.

To work that deserves it.

To relationships where responsibility travels in both directions.

To ambitions that build your own future rather than continually repairing somebody else’s present.

And next time somebody smiles sweetly and says:

“ You’re so much better at this than I am.”

Accept the compliment.

Then consider replying;

“Probably. But you’re never going to get better if I keep doing it.”

Because competence is valuable.

Time is valuable.

Reliability is valuable.

And if everyone around you keeps benefitting from yours while contributing very little of their own,

perhaps it’s time somebody paid the bill.

Being capable doesn’t mean everything becomes your responsibility.

Sometimes the most competent thing you can do is to hand the problem back to its rightful owner.