What does it mean to be “good” at something?

Erec Hillis

Nov 17, 2020

4 min read

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One of the phrases I often struggle to understand is “I’m really good at [X]”.

That is to say, I understand the meaning of the words, but often struggle with how to quantify the speaker’s meaning.

What does it mean to be “good” at something? What does it mean to be “really good”?

I like to think of an 8-point “Competence Ladder” as a way of describing what it means to be good at something.

The first two levels describe basic competence:

1. Novice: just starting out

2. Competent: able to participate in an activity without having to be told what to do

The next six levels describe tiers of skill level based on how your skill compares to others:

3. Personal: a feeling of personal satisfaction when doing an activity, perhaps overall above-average at something

4. Social: in the top group within your immediate social circles (a pool of ~100–200 people)

5. Local : in the top group within the area in which you live (about 10k people)

6. Regional: in the top group within the extended area in which you live (about 1 million people)

7. National: in the top group within your nation or cluster of nations (about 100 million people)

8. World Class: among the best in the world (almost 8 billion people)

These are rough categories, but you may notice that each tier jumps up in scale by a factor of 100.

The first two levels are easy to relate to. I am complete novice at many things; drawing is a good example because I’ve never learned anything about how to do it well.

Chess might fall at the “competent” level. I know how to play well enough to enjoy a casual game, but would be out of my depth against anyone with any real training.

The most useful levels are probably #3 and #4.

Level 3 (Personal) is what I think most people mean when they say “I’m good at [X]”. I like to think of this as roughly the line where a person is above average at something.

Level 4 (Social) is the first level where people start to stand out at an activity. Not only are you good at something, you’re in the top group of all of the people in your immediate social circles. We might think of someone at this level as being “quite good” or “very good” at something.

Levels 5–8 are achieved when someone really begins to excel at an activity.

For example, I play in a local tennis league where I am not the best player, but I win more matches than I lose. This likely puts me at around Level 5 (Local) for tennis. There are lots of players who are better than I am in my large metro area, but I would probably fare well in a tournament restricted to my zip code.

The Regional, National, and World Class levels are pretty self-explanatory. How would you stack up against the 1 million people who live closest to you? How about your 100 million closest neighbors? The whole world?

As an aside, it’s a fun exercise to try to think of activities for which you fall at different levels of the scale.

Why is this useful?

For starters, the Competence Ladder can help to quantify what someone means when they say “I’m good at [X]”, at least in a rudimentary way. However, this will likely require either asking follow up questions or explaining the system, so may be of limited utility.

The real value, I think, is as a tool for self-improvement when you would like to perform at a higher level in a certain area.

If you can confidently peg yourself at a certain level, it becomes easy to ask “What would I need to do to progress to the next level? What can someone at the next level do that I don’t know how to do yet?”

If my goal is to “get better at tennis”, it might be difficult to know what that means or how to do it. However, if my goal is to progress from local competitiveness to regional competitiveness, I can identify how to do that by looking at what regionally competitive players are able to do.

For example, let’s say that regionally competitive tennis players in my area tend to have serves of at least 100mph and double fault no more than 2 times per set on average.

I can now go work on my serve with a specific goal about how to reach that level. I might even decide that the gap is too great to tackle all at once, and I need an intermediary goal of hitting 90mph serves and double faulting no more than 4 times per set.

While it is common knowledge that good goals must be specific and measurable, something like the Competence Ladder can help us calibrate goals to the level we want to achieve.

It’s worth mentioning that this may also help us set realistic goals, because the the levels are sufficiently separated that it would be unlikely for anyone to skip ahead by more than one level at a time. There would be no sense in me attempting to reach Level 7 (National) in tennis before first charting a course and actually making it to Level 6 (Regional).

Finally, this could be fun even if starting from scratch at a new activity. I would be much more motivated to practice drawing if I were to define what Level 2 (Competent) means and map out a path to get there.

Maybe if the COVID quarantine lasts for much longer I’ll decide to sharpen up my pencils and give it a go.