Why High Performers Stop Getting Better

Everyone says growth is uncomfortable. Almost nobody explains why it's specifically hard for people who are already good at things — or why being good at things is, past a certain point, an obstacle to getting better.

The explanation is not motivational. It comes from learning science, and it is more unsettling than the version we usually tell.

Performance is not learning

We treat visible performance as the readout of learning. It isn't. Performance is what you can observe during training. Learning is a durable change in capability, and it has to be inferred later.

These two things can move in opposite directions. In an integrative review of decades of research across verbal and motor learning, Soderstrom and Bjork established that performance during training is an unreliable index of learning — and that certain conditions have opposite effects on the two. Guidance reduces errors while you're practicing and reduces retention afterward. Massed practice looks productive in the session and fails the retention test. Conditions that make training feel effective often produce no lasting learning; conditions that make it feel clumsy often produce a great deal (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015).

Read that carefully, because it inverts the usual advice. The dip in competence is not the price you pay for growth. It is frequently the evidence that growth is occurring. The version of practice that keeps you looking capable is often the version that teaches you nothing.

This is why difficulty, deliberately introduced, improves learning even as it degrades the experience of learning — what Bjork named desirable difficulties (Bjork, 1994). And it's why genuine expertise is built by practicing at the ragged edge of current ability rather than inside it (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993).

The trap

Now put a high performer inside that system.

Their reputation, their self-image, and frequently their livelihood are built on observable competence. They have spent decades being rewarded for performance and never once for a retention test. So when they choose how to practice, how to spend a difficult meeting, which stretch to take — they will select, without deciding to, the conditions under which they look good.

Which are the conditions that don't teach.

Argyris documented this precisely among exactly the people you would expect to be best at learning. Highly successful professionals, he found, have rarely failed at anything — and consequently have never learned how to learn from failure. When they finally encounter it, they become defensive, externalize the cause, and shut down inquiry at the moment it becomes useful. Their brilliance is not the antidote to this. It is the mechanism (Argyris, 1991).

The high performer's problem is not that they lack the will to grow. It is that the thing they are excellent at — performing — is the thing they must temporarily abandon in order to improve, and they have no practice abandoning it.

Why the dip is intolerable

For some people the competence dip is merely unpleasant. For others it is unbearable, and the difference is not grit.

When self-worth has become contingent on performance, a dip in performance is not a signal about a skill. It is a verdict on the person. And a verdict is not something you sit inside for three months while your capability catches up. Contingent self-worth requires constant refueling; every success stops counting almost immediately, and any failure is a live threat (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001).

So the avoidance gets sophisticated. It stops looking like fear and starts looking like judgment. Playing to my strengths. Prioritizing. Focusing where I add the most value. Not the right use of my time. Each of these can be true. Each is also a perfect description of never entering the conditions where learning happens.

The same mechanism disables feedback. Rejection and criticism are performance information, and information can only be used by someone for whom the information isn't a referendum. If a "no" is data, you can act on it. If a "no" is a statement about your worth, you will defend against it, and the defense will be indistinguishable — from the inside — from discernment.

What actually makes it survivable

The fix is not more tolerance for pain. Advice to embrace discomfort is worth almost nothing to a person for whom discomfort means I am not who I thought I was.

What makes the dip survivable is a self-regard that the dip cannot reach. Self-compassion — meeting your own poor performance with the steadiness you'd offer a colleague learning the same thing — predicts wellbeing about as well as self-esteem does, without the defensiveness, the rumination, or the need to be doing well in order to be alright (Neff & Vonk, 2009). It is available precisely at the moment you're bad at something, which is the only moment it matters.

From there the practice is procedural. Choose training conditions by what they teach rather than by how they feel while you're in them. Assume that the meeting you left feeling competent may have taught you less than the one you left replaying. Take the rep at the edge of what you can do, not the center. And treat the dip as an instrument reading rather than a character disclosure.

The distinction worth keeping

The draft version of this argument ends with growth hurts, but staying stuck hurts more. It's a nice line and it's not quite right, because plenty of pain teaches nothing at all. Suffering is not a credential, and there is no shortage of people who are uncomfortable and going nowhere.

The distinction that matters is narrower. Some discomfort is the felt experience of a system reorganizing itself around a capability it didn't have. Some is just the friction of doing the same thing badly, indefinitely, while protecting the belief that you're doing it well.

Only one of those is growth. The difference isn't how much it hurts. It's whether you were willing to be visibly worse for a while — and whether your sense of yourself could survive it.

References

Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99–109.

Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185–205). MIT Press.

Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623.

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.

Neff, K. D., & Vonk, R. (2009). Self-compassion versus global self-esteem: Two different ways of relating to oneself. Journal of Personality, 77(1), 23–50.

Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176–199.