Where We Allow Ourselves to Be Capable

Have you ever known someone who’s exceptionally methodical in certain domains? They analyze trade-offs, anticipate problems, ask clarifying questions, follow through on commitments. People go to them when something complex needs figuring out.

But in other parts of life, they struggle. When they’re unhappy with their health habits, they stay stuck. When something feels off, they don’t investigate it the way they would other problems. It looks like incompetence, like they’re just “not good at” certain things.

Except the cognitive tools clearly exist. Pattern recognition, breaking down complexity, weighing evidence , they use these effectively in some contexts. The tools just don’t get deployed everywhere. The capability is there. The willingness to use it isn’t.

I see this pattern in myself too. There are domains where I’m competent, and others where I’m not, despite having transferable skills. This essay is my attempt to understand why that gap exists and whether it’s possible to close it.

Why the fence exists

I’m currently reading The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef, and the book introduced me to Chesterton’s Fence: before removing any barrier, understand why it was erected. Julia uses this to explain motivated reasoning. We distort our thinking not because we’re irrational, but because those distortions serve protective functions. A fence exists because it once solved a problem.

Selective competence works the same way.

We avoid competence in domains where past experience taught us that engaging deeply leads to pain. Someone might be excellent at analyzing trade-offs between technologies at work, systematically weighing pros and cons. But when choosing where to live, they freeze. They can’t apply the same framework, even though the decision-making process is similar. The difference is emotional stakes. One analysis might reveal a fixable problem. The other might reveal they’ve been living somewhere that makes them miserable, which means confronting a costly move or admitting they made a mistake years ago. The mind learns to withhold competence as self-protection.

We mistake unfamiliarity for inability. Someone who diagnoses why a project failed at work by tracing root causes and identifying patterns might be equally capable of diagnosing why their fitness attempts keep failing. They’ve just never practiced it. The brain treats “I haven’t done this before” as “I can’t do this.” A person who meticulously budgets business expenses might never apply the same rigor to personal finances, simply because they’ve categorized one as “work skills” and the other as “not my thing.”

Some domains lack clear feedback structures. At work, you get performance reviews, project outcomes, measurable results. When trying to improve your health or figure out what career path you actually want, there’s no equivalent. Without feedback loops, the mind defaults to passivity. You never get confirmation that figuring it out was worth the effort, so you stop trying.

Often, selective competence is invisible to the person experiencing it. You genuinely believe you’re “just bad” at certain things without recognizing you’ve never given yourself permission to be good at them.

Expanding where competence feels possible

Understanding why the fence exists makes it easier to consider whether it still serves you. Selective competence is often a strategy that made sense at one point but has outlived its usefulness. The domains you avoid might be where growth matters most.

Notice where you withdraw competence and name what you’re protecting yourself from. Does applying your analytical mind to your health mean confronting habits you’re ashamed of? Does getting clear about your career mean admitting you’ve been on the wrong path? Once you name the feared consequence, the ambiguity decreases. You’re dealing with a specific cost you’ve been unwilling to pay. Someone might realize they avoid thinking carefully about their living situation not because they can’t, but because clear thinking would reveal they need to move, which feels overwhelming.

Borrow the cognitive tools you already use in competent domains and apply them experimentally. If at work you ask, “What’s the actual problem here?” try asking that about your personal life. You don’t need new skills. You need permission to use the ones you have. The person who analyzes technical trade-offs at work can use the same framework to analyze whether their daily routine actually supports their goals.

Build feedback loops that make personal competence feel less amorphous. Journal weekly to track patterns. Set small deadlines to revisit decisions. Create check-ins with yourself. These structures don’t need to be elaborate. Someone trying to improve their health might start tracking how they feel after different meals or exercise, creating the kind of data-driven feedback they’d naturally use at work. When you make the domain less vague, competence becomes easier to deploy.

What makes this possible is recognizing that selective competence is often a choice you don’t realize you’re making. Once you see it, you can start making it consciously. The fence was built for a reason, but that reason might no longer apply. You’re not the same person who needed that protection. The skills you’ve developed in some areas can work in others. It won’t happen all at once, and some things genuinely require skills you don’t have or circumstances you can’t control. But the number of domains where you could be competent is probably larger than the number where you currently allow yourself to be. The work is about gently expanding where competence feels possible, until your own abilities become available to you in more of your life.

A note on how this piece came to exist

This essay is part of an experiment: generating creative output from every book I read. I got this from Andrej Karpathy, who described books as “synthetic data generation”, i.e. prompts for your own thinking. For this piece, I used Claude 4.5 Sonnet to reason through and discuss these ideas.