Business Pundit

CNN makes a spelling mistake. Mine mostly have to do with numbers.

This morning, on an earlier blog post, I mistook $2,100,000 for $2.1 billion.

As far as basic math mistakes go, that one was a winner.

Though I fixed it, the error still felt like a failure. I want to produce perfect material, not stuff with glaring mistakes. My initial self-annihilating suspicion pointed towards a fundamental character flaw.

Then I thought about it more. A character flaw causes death or downfall. What I’m facing here is more of a functional problem. And if Dr. Stephen Diamond is right, I’m one of millions. In a Psychology Today article, Diamond claims Americans in general are in a “crisis of competency.”

Despite the fact that the requirements for being merely competent at something are relatively modest, we appear in this country to be witnessing a marked decline in competence in recent decades. The negative consequences of this rising tide of incompetence on our daily lives is staggering to say the least. More obvious examples include such problems as medical malpractice, the improper manufacturing of tires, inefficiently run corporations and governmental agencies, prosecutors unable to present compelling and convincing arguments to juries, police corruption, and so forth.

Diamond goes on to say that incompetence makes us angry, further degrading our quality of life.

The inept teacher; the careless auto mechanic; the surly, useless sales clerk, postal worker or telephone operator; the inconsiderate or abusive boss, the inept politician, repair person or reporter, etc. These are but a few examples of the insidious crisis of competence in American culture.

99% of individuals aren’t stupid or incompetent at their core. It’s human nature to want to do a good job and produce quality work. Most people are good at something most of the time.

Yet I agree with Diamond. If the source of my earlier mistake indicates something more endemic, then we have a problem. He cites the devaluation of perfectionism as a cause: We as a society have disenfranchised perfectionism as a beneficial quality. I would go on to argue that being good takes focus, and therein lies the root of the issue.

Take my own situation. I consider myself capable of doing my work as a writer well. I possess two college degrees and thirteen years of work experience. I’m a self-employed homeowner who telecommutes. I’m stable in both my relationship and finances. I ask lots of questions that people don’t have answers to.

Not exactly a recipe for incompetence. The problem, I realize, occurs when I don’t focus. I get so caught up in the Internet—sometimes reading two or three stories at once—that I don’t pay enough attention to what I’m actually producing. My cell phone rings, I receive text and chat messages, I have about ten windows of essential stuff open on my desktop. A good half of my windows contain ominous reports about the economy, and my stomach drops when I read them.

I’m trying to produce something competent, even quality, in this hyperstimulated state. I’m even in a rush when I take breaks to clear my mind. After all, a new piece of news might come out. Or someone might have called. Someone could be pinging me on a social network. I may, in other words, have missed something.

Deep in my gut, I fear that if I’m not responsive, I’ll become obsolete—as an employee, a homeowner, a lover, or a human being. As the stress scatters my brain, I desperately seek solutions, which the Internet offers in abundance. How to be a Better Employee! Ten Ways to Improve Your Lovemaking. Why You’re Stressed, and What You Can Do About It (I think I might write that one in a little while).

And there, smack in the middle of the swarming tasks, lies a blog post, a work-in-progress begging for perfection. My energy by this point is so scattered that I output rather than perfect. Like a distracted production line, I overlook essential details. My competence fissures.

I’m not the only one with a distraction attraction. All I have to do is look on any urban freeway, where people text message while steering through traffic, for proof that I’m not alone. The same cycle of distraction and insecurity lurks behind this country’s competency problem. Technology proliferated like rabbits during the past decade or so, but we never learned that the best way to adapt is to step back. Manic multitasking simply doesn’t beget quality.

I learned an important lesson from my oversight: That balance isn’t a passive pursuit. Ironically, when I get lazy, I do too much—at the cost of my competence. On the other hand, being cognizant of the effects of clutter—ranging from too many open windows to too many worries—leads to competent results. It may be more work *not* to compulsively check email, but in the end, competency is worth it.

I won’t even get started on what it takes to be perfect.