The Peter Principle is based on the idea that in the workplace an employee being considered for a promotion is evaluated based on his performance in his current role rather than on his qualifications for the new position. This results in employees being promoted only until they "rise to the level of their incompetence." That is, until they reach a position that is beyond their skills and/or qualifications.
After months of fruitless job-searching, it felt like I've reached my own level of incompetence in life: being stuck as an unemployed university graduate. It's not an entirely unfamiliar feeling, really. Throughout my life, whenever I was about to graduate from one "life stage" into another, a part of me would fear that perhaps I didn't deserve it; that maybe there's been some kind of mistake or oversight and that I've somehow just managed to slip through the cracks and was woefully ill-prepared for the next stage to come. Of course, it wasn't always this way. I remember a time way, waaayy back when I believed myself to be fully capable of facing life's challenges, just like everyone else. In fact, I had even harbored some hope and ambition that not only would I survive life, but I would excel in it. The kid me was ever confident that I could be a shining example of goodness and success for all to follow.
So yeah, I had a pretty positive outlook on life back then, but it didn't last long. Looking back, I think a large part of my optimism was due to a seriously erroneous notion I had when I was a kid: that school, and life in general, would progress at a more or less consistent rate. In other words, I thought that my level of learning and personal development would run parallel with the difficulty of the problems that I will be facing. Take math for example. When I was a child I was under the impression that by the time I began learning algebra, it would be as easy as when I was learning multiplication and division, or addition and subtraction before that. It sounds pretty stupid now, but I really used to think that our minds would be able to simplify the complexities of the world into child-like manageability by becoming more complex themselves. What I didn't realize until later was that life's complexities actually progressed in a more exponential manner, while our own development appears to be stuck on linear growth. The result is that while we may be able to navigate through life after childhood, the effort required to do so becomes increasingly taxing on our minds.
And so it was that I went through life living in fear that I would one day reach a point when the problems of my exponentially growing world would become too great for my linear growing mind to handle; the day that I reach my level of incompetence. With every new stage in life, I felt more and more certain that I wouldn't be able to make it through to the other side. It started to feel that way in high school, grew stronger when I entered university, and after my graduation the feeling became so strong it threatened to leave me paralyzed at an existential level; the feeling that I have no idea what I'm doing here with my life and that I'll never be competent enough to figure it out. We're all familiar with the saying "fake it til you make it," but so far it feels like I've been faking it all my life, like an actor perpetually stuck in rehearsal and never ready for the real thing.
But just as I was beginning to lose hope, a little something happened last month that changed my daily grind of job-searching: I got myself a part-time job at the local movie theatre. It may not sound like much, just a minimum wage position designed to give high schoolers and university students some extra income, but it's definitely better than sitting at home watching my days waste away; plus it does come with some pretty neat perks (free movies for this movie-lover? Yes please!). Of course, I've no intention of making this the final destination of my work life. Instead, it will serve as the first stop in what I hope to be a rich and rewarding journey to finding a career that holds true personal meaning to me. In addition, my brother and I have both been accepted into an accounting program beginning this fall, which we hope would help our prospects in the future. My brother and I have never shared a class together before, so this should prove to be a most interesting and unique experience for us; something I very much look forward to.
Post-graduate life may have started out as underwhelming and depressive, and it may continue to stay that way for a while yet; but now I am no longer trapped in the fear of reaching my level of incompetence, because I know now that it is up to me to define that level. The best is yet to come.
