The Art of Strategic Ignorance
Why your competence is a trap (and how to escape it).
You are exhausted. But not because you are failing. You are exhausted because you are succeeding at the wrong things.
There is a dirty secret in the corporate world that nobody says out loud: The reward for being efficient is more work.
If you are the person who always fixes the slide deck, you will always be the person fixing the slide deck. If you are the one who knows how to navigate the bureaucratic maze to get a contract signed, you will do a lot of procurement.
This is the Competence Trap.
The system is designed to extract maximum utility from its resources, and you are one such resource. If you demonstrate that you can process “Job” tasks quickly and reliably, the system will route all that traffic to you.
It doesn’t care if that work drains your soul. It only cares that the ticket is closed.
By being so good at your job, you have weaponized your own competence against yourself. You are too busy to do your real Work.
The Ego Hook
Why do we do this? Why do we say “yes” to work that has nothing to do with our Soulwork?
Because it feels good to be the “go-to” person. It feeds the ego to be the one who saves the day. It validates our “Job” identity.
- “They need me.”
- “I’m the only one who knows how to do this.”
- “It’ll just take me five minutes.”
That is a lie and you know it.
It won’t take five minutes. It’ll take five minutes to execute, plus twenty minutes of context switching, plus the mental RAM required to hold that task in your head.
Plus the next ten similar tasks that are inevitably on their way to your inbox because you just proved how good you are at them.
The “Director” Mindset
Years ago, I mentored a manager who eventually moved on to become a Director in another government department.
When we caught up later, she didn’t thank me for teaching her technical frameworks, how to make great presentations, or how to write a briefing note. She didn’t mention the “Job” skills at all.
She told me: “Tim, the most important thing you taught me was how to ignore the bullshit.”
I was known for being ruthless. I ignored emails and tasks that weren’t mission-critical. People thought it was rude; I knew it was effective. I was there to do a job, not to perform “busyness.”
We worked together to help her develop the backbone to let the unimportant work fall off. She wasn’t used to this. She was used to “working hard” and pleasing everyone.
But she learned the lesson: 80% of the noise coming across her desk was irrelevant to her actual mission.
While her peers were drowning in compliance and “urgent” low-value tasks, she was ruthlessly filtering. She didn’t get promoted because she did more work. She succeeded because she had the bandwidth to focus on the work that actually mattered.
The Fix: Strategic Ignorance
You cannot do your Work if you are drowning in your Job. You need to reclaim your bandwidth.
The only way to break the Competence Trap is to stop being so damn good at everything. You need to practice Strategic Ignorance.
This isn’t about being lazy. It is about being selective. It is a calculated decision to let certain fires burn so you can focus your attention on what matters. So you can work towards your mission, while everyone else is busy doing work that doesn’t really move the needle.
But this isn’t permission to be a jerk. The word “strategic” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Strategic ignorance doesn’t mean ignoring things you don’t feel like doing. Some unpleasant work is mission-critical—you do it anyway. And some enjoyable work is a distraction dressed up as productivity—you cut it and don’t look back.
This requires more discipline than saying yes to everything. You’re making conscious choices about where your excellence goes, based on what actually moves the needle—not what’s easy or what feeds your ego.
What You Do With the Bandwidth
And what do you do with that reclaimed time?
You do your Work.
Not more Job tasks. Not “productive relaxation.” Not scrolling LinkedIn and telling yourself it’s networking.
Your Work—the big contribution only you can make. The thing you keep saying you don’t have time for.
Every hour you claw back from low-value nonsense is an hour you can invest in what you’re actually here to do. This isn’t about working less. It’s about finally working on what matters.
The bandwidth isn’t the goal. The bandwidth is the raw material. Your Soulwork is what you build with it.
How to Install the Patch
Here is how you start:
1. Stop Raising Your Hand When a generic problem is thrown into the room, do not volunteer. Even if you know how to fix it. Sit on your hands. Bite your tongue. Let the silence become uncomfortable. Someone else will fill the void. Let them.
2. Forget How to Do It “I don’t know” is a complete sentence (and a valuable one!). Even if you do know, you don’t need to be the one to execute. By feigning ignorance on low-value tasks, you force the system to find another route. You are not the router anymore.
3. Let the “Job” Fail (A Little) If you are always 100% reliable on administrative nonsense, you are training your boss to dump administrative nonsense on you. If you become slightly unreliable at the stuff that doesn’t matter, people stop asking.
The Trade-Off
This feels dangerous. Your “Job” OS is screaming, “But I have to be helpful! I have to be a team player!”
But what is the cost of your helpfulness?
Every hour you spend optimizing a process that shouldn’t exist is an hour you steal from your own potential.
You are trading your legacy for a pat on the head.
Be excellent at your Work. Be mediocre at your Job. And be strategically ignorant of everything else.
Until next week!!
Work and live well.
Tim
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Let’s fix what your job broke.
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- Book a Free 30-minute Clarity Call. We’ll talk about how this all works, the framework I use, and discuss how I might be able to help you get there. No pressure – just a real conversation about whether working with me is the right next move.
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