Rose passed her driving test this morning. I’m incredibly happy both for her and for me, because I will no longer need to drive her to work and TAFE and everywhere else she needs to go – she’ll have independence. But I wasn’t the one who took her for her test, because I wasn’t the right person for the job.
She’s been driving with both Rob Sattler and myself while she chipped away at her 100 hours, but over the last few months she’s been doing more hours with Rob (who’s her step-dad) – partly because he’s somewhat more ‘chill’ than me but also because I hate driving and he loves it. So, when it came time to choose who took her in for her test, she asked Rob if he would.
Now, I like to think that I would be her first choice for everything, but my rational side knows that’s not the case. And this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way – there have been times when I’ve stepped back from a role before because I couldn’t do it justice, or it wasn’t really my place, or I didn’t have capacity, but normally it’s a sort-of gut reaction. Which got me thinking – how do we know when we’re not the right person for a particular job or role?
Hence this edition of Pondering Careers – we’re going to look at why it’s important that we’re not all good at the same thing, then I’ll share seven signs which might indicate you need to step back.
Side Quest: Anyone know 15 people who would like Pondering Careers in their inbox?
We are soooooo close to having 3,000 members in this little community, and I would love to tick over the line before the next edition – so I’m looking for 15 people who would be willing to subscribe.
I normally avoid the whole ‘like & subscribe’ thing but I’ve been hovering just under 3,000 for a while so help me out please 🙂
The place to start when acknowledging that we can’t, and probably shouldn’t try to, do everything is with a little bit of logic. A long, long time ago we all had to handle pretty much everything humans were capable of, and there was no specialisation beyond “I’m taller so I’ll get the fruit from the tree while you hunt for rabbits”. Over time, we developed various technological inventions like agriculture and water capture, building design and road construction, all the way through to the printing press and AI, and each step along the way unlocked a little more time and energy while taking us further away from a place were we could do ‘everything’ that humans are capable of.
The development of pottery vessels is a good example of this in practice. For pottery to develop in a civilisation, it requires a few things; the presence of clay, the ability to make and control a fire to heat the clay, and enough time and skill for someone to shape and prepare the clay into something usable. The earliest examples of pottery vessels that exist are plain and simple, but at some point we had enough surplus time and energy to start decorating them, like this pot from Japan which was decorated with cords and markings.
In order to get the amount of free time required to do this sort of work, you have to rely on other people. Someone else is going to need to find more food than they require for themselves, or to construct the place where you sleep, so that you can focus on doing the thing that you are good at. The ability to develop technology, like the sophisticated firing technology required to make this Deep Pot, required human collaboration. Working with others is a skill; it requires the ability to communicate, to share knowledge and support others in their work, and it requires us to do our part.
Humans working together, but not all on the same thing, is what makes our life possible in 2026, but doing this successfully also requires us to know when a task is not ours to perform.
Now this sounds like something which should be obvious – simply ask ourselves “am I the best person for this task?” and then make a choice. But alas, we humans do not always see clearly, and sometimes it’s hard to make the choice to step back, which is why I’ve put together these signs to give us a bit of guidance.
Seven Signs that you might not be the right person for the job
I should preface this by saying that in all honesty there’s no real way to tell for certain in advance in some cases, and that while often the decision is clear, for example, I know that I’m not the right person for any job involving fixing cars, sometimes the waters can be murky so be prepared to go with your gut.
Sign 1 – You’re simply not very good at it
In theory this should be obvious, but I’m sure we can all think of a time when someone we know attempted to do something they didn’t have the ability to undertake. Being ‘not good’ at something doesn’t always look like failure, though, sometimes it’s more along the lines of:
- Doing a task but not enjoying it, so you don’t put in the effort it requires, or
- You do it, but it takes you a lot longer than it probably should (if you’ve been trained), or
- You’ve been doing it for a while but your results aren’t as good as the results they should be, and
- This isn’t a task that you can be bad at and still do – like washing the dishes or feeding the cat.
The thing to remember is that we don’t all have to be good at everything, and not excelling in one area doesn’t indicate that you don’t excel in others.
Sign 2 – The task requires lived experience that you don’t have
Some roles require you to have first-hand lived experience of the thing that you’re working on or making decisions about.
Young people should be involved in the design and delivery of youth work. People with disability should be involved in developing programs for people with disability. And the people testing a new piece of software or trialling a new program should be the people who are going to use it, not the same people who built it.
An outsider can usually do the work well enough – most of us could probably muddle through running a program we’ve never been on the receiving end of – but it tends to come out better when it’s done by someone who has actually lived the thing, and no amount of research or consultation or good intentions really makes up for that.
This one is worth pausing on though, because there are two things going on here which look pretty much identical from the outside and aren’t:
- The first is putting your hand up for something new because you want to stretch yourself, which is how any of us learn anything; you take on a task you haven’t done before, you feel a bit uncomfortable for a while, and you work it out as you go. I’d never tell anyone not to do that.
- The second is taking a role that should have gone to someone with lived experience of the thing, which isn’t really ‘stretching’ yourself so much as standing where somebody else should be standing. And I know the obvious objection is that you’re perfectly capable of doing the job, and you probably are, but capable isn’t the same as best, and the decisions being made are about their life and not yours.
Which is a long way of saying that if you can’t tell which of the two you’re in, have a look around and work out who the work is actually for, and whether any of them are in the room.
Sign 3 – You don’t have the capacity to take it on
This one goes in two directions, and I think we usually only worry about the first one.
The obvious direction is that you overburden yourself. You say yes, the extra thing lands on top of everything you’re already carrying, and something has to give – and it’s never the thing you’d have picked to drop, it’s your run, or getting to bed on time, or the one bit of work you were actually enjoying.
The less obvious direction, and the one that matters more, is that you probably won’t do a very good job of it. Capacity isn’t just whether the hours technically exist somewhere in your calendar, it’s whether you’ll have any attention left by the time you get to them, and a task done in the gaps between other tasks is rarely a task done well. It reminds me a bit of a kid who wants to eat all the cake even though they’re already full. They don’t actually want more cake, they just don’t want anyone else to have it.
And in all honesty I do get it. It’s nice to believe you’re capable of doing everything (guilty, your honour), and it’s uncomfortable to admit you’re not, especially if you’ve built up a bit of a reputation as the person who copes. But there’s almost always someone out there who’d take a slice off you and enjoy it, and there’d still be plenty of cake left.
Sign 4 – You’re not the most important person on the team
Sometimes you know before you even start that you’re going to rub up against someone who’s already on the team and who matters more to the outcome than you do. Maybe your ways of working just don’t fit together, maybe there’s history, or maybe you can already picture the two of you spending the whole project negotiating with each other instead of doing anything.
This is the one where you have to put your ego down for a minute, which is easy to write and much harder to do, and I say that as someone who admitted about four paragraphs ago that she’d quite like to be first choice for everything.
Stepping back here isn’t a loss, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes what a piece of work needs is simply fewer people in it, and there’s no particular shame in being one of the ones it doesn’t need.
Sign 5 – You want the job because of how it would make you feel
Of all of these, this is the one I find hardest to spot in myself, mostly because it doesn’t turn up looking like ego. It turns up looking like commitment, or loyalty, or being reliable.
Sometimes we hang onto a role because of how we see ourselves rather than anything much to do with the work. We think we ought to be capable of it. We think we should be the person who does that particular thing – because we always have been, or because it’s somehow become part of the story we tell about who we are – and handing it over feels a bit like admitting the story was wrong.
But sometimes we aren’t the best person for something. Sometimes we’re not even particularly good at it. And it’s genuinely fine to notice that and let it go, without it saying anything much about you as a person. Rob taking Rosie for her test doesn’t make me less of a good parent, actually now that I think about it probably makes me a better one.
Sign 6 – The role needs relationships that you don’t have
A lot of jobs are mostly relationship-management with a bit of technical work attached. The technical part is real and it matters, but the thing that actually gets it over the line is trust, and history, and being the person whose call gets returned, and often somebody else already has all of that and you don’t.
If you take the role anyway, the work doesn’t just lose that person. It loses everyone they’d have brought with them, and all the conversations that would have happened simply because of who was asking. Which is a hard one to argue with yourself about, because you never get to see the version where they did it instead. There’s no comparison available. You just have to be honest with yourself about whether the phone would ring.
Sign 7 – You’ve become the bottleneck
Nobody sets out to be the bottleneck, which is probably why this one takes so long to notice. You took the job on, you were the right person for it at the time, and nobody’s thought to question it since, least of all you.
But somewhere along the way the work started stopping at your desk. Other people are ready to go and they can’t, because they’re waiting on you to read it, approve it, reply to it, or finish your bit. The task itself might be perfectly good – it’s the queue behind it that isn’t.
The tell, I think, is when the delays stop being the exception and start being the pattern. A few things worth watching for:
- People have started building your turnaround time into their own planning, or
- They’ve stopped chasing you altogether because they’ve given up, or
- Someone has quietly found a way to route around you, and
- You’re finding out about things after they’ve already been decided.
Being the bottleneck doesn’t mean you’re bad at the job. More often it means you’re doing too many jobs, and this is the one that should move on to somebody else.
This is another way of saying it’s ok to not take on everything yourself
None of this is an argument for doing less, by the way. Stepping back from one thing only counts for anything if it frees you up to do something else properly, and the whole point of us specialising in the first place was so that each of us could go deep on our own thing and trust somebody else to make the pot.
Rose passed her test this morning with Rob in the passenger seat, and part of the reason she passed is that he was the right person to be sitting there. I’d like to think I’d have got her through it too, but I’d have been a lot more nervous than she was and she knew it. Which is fine. It just means the job went to the person who’d do it best, which is sort-of the whole point.
