Every ambitious person eventually runs into a version of the same trap: the better you get at your current job, the harder it becomes to leave it. The medieval Persian polymath Nasir al-Din Tusi wrote about this in his ethical treatise *Akhlaq-i-Nasiri* — he distinguished between two kinds of virtue: the virtue of *perfecting what you are*, and the virtue of *becoming what you are not yet*. These require opposite orientations. Perfecting deploys mastery; becoming requires tolerating incompetence in yourself. The problem is that sustained high performance trains you to hate the feeling of being bad at something — and career growth, past a certain point, always involves being bad at something new. The move that actually advances your trajectory is almost always the one that temporarily makes your performance reviews look worse, not better. Tusi's practical distinction suggests a concrete audit: before your next career decision, ask which virtue is actually guiding it. If 'I'm good at this' is your primary reason to stay, you may be confusing excellence for growth.

When did you last choose something professionally specifically because you were bad at it — and what did you do with that discomfort?

Drawing from Persian Islamic ethical philosophy — Nasir al-Din Tusi