Episode #058
The Curse of Capability
For the first time, I’m sharing a piece of The Multi-Hyphenate Dilemma with you.
My book comes out October 13, and rather than spend an episode telling you what it’s about, I wanted you to actually hear some of it. The Multi-Hyphenate Dilemma is about the messy middle of career change—the period when you know something no longer fits but you don’t yet know what comes next. It’s also about what makes that question particularly complicated for people who are good at a lot of things.
The chapter I chose to read is called “The Curse of Capability.” I chose it because this idea sits at the heart of so much of what I’ve been thinking and writing about for years: being capable can open an enormous number of doors, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you which ones you want to walk through. And when you’ve built an identity around being the person who can figure things out, deciding what deserves your time gets complicated.
This is a little preview of the book before it officially enters the world and a chance for me to read you the words exactly as I wrote them.
The Year I Said Yes to Everything
In 2022, my highest-grossing year in business, I was delivering more than a dozen separate services: copywriting and digital strategy, content marketing and LinkedIn audits, rebrands and creative direction, bios, case studies, photo shoot planning, stakeholder interviews, career coaching, and a women's retreat. I said yes to anything that had a dollar amount attached to it, with no real thought about what it was doing to my reputation, my sanity, or my time.
Underneath the sprawl was something I avoided naming, because naming it meant admitting an upper limit problem. As my price point went up, I felt obligated to keep adding deliverables to the scope.
Years earlier, an executive read one of my proposals and said, "are you kidding me? This is what I pay my attorney." I heard the message beneath it and kept it: being good isn't good enough.
So I sold myself as a turnkey solution. I was, as I put it in the chapter, on a mission to disprove the fast, cheap, good theory by being all 3: faster, cheaper, and somehow better.
When the Most Exciting Part Is Signing the Contract
Nine years into my business, a paid 60-minute consultation with someone in my network turned into a proposal. I scoped the interviews, the pattern recognition, the strategy and positioning. Then I added design referrals, oversight of all communications, feedback, and my presence through launch. She wanted to start that week.
In the chapter I run through the questions I asked myself at the time: whether I had room in my calendar, whether I wanted to project manage, whether I wanted to be tied to something that could run six months. The answer to all three was no. I told myself this would be the last brand project, a culminating one, done right with someone I enjoyed.
It took three weeks for me to recognize I'd emotionally checked out. When the most exciting part about the work is getting the contract signed, there's an obvious issue that needs to be dealt with.
The part that energized me — the messy middle, the questions she hadn't thought to ask — was already behind us while she raced toward launch. So I kept producing. I reached for another tangible piece of evidence that I'd done enough.
Later, she told me: "Kim, I hired you for your brain." She saw the thing I wanted to be enough. I couldn't let it be.
What Being the Capable One Actually Costs
Most people evaluate talent by the result. The capable person absorbs the cost: the hours, the open tabs, the late nights, the work postponed to make room, all of it hidden behind a smiling face. "That's why capable women stay too long," I read, "well after our give-a-damns are depleted."
Later that same year, I was the client. I hired a firm run by someone I'd known for years to design a deeply personal project, and I trusted her taste enough that asking whether she was the right person for the job felt insulting. Deadlines slipped. The exclamation points disappeared from her emails until they were one-line responses.
When I finally brought in a specialist, a review surfaced problems serious enough to require rebuilding portions of the project.
I knew how hard she had worked. I also knew how many times I had accepted responsibility for something on the strength of trusting myself to figure it out.
Capability had given me an enormous number of options. Discernment was yelling at me to leave some of them alone.
When Working Harder Is How You Learned to Earn Love
In the chapter, I describe the whole pattern as a set of reflexes I never had to think about. Knowledge I was missing, I went and got. Systems that didn't exist, I built. Anything that went wrong, I met with more effort until it came out right. If I didn't know something, I'd learn it.
The approach worked often enough to convince me. Every success was more evidence that enough effort could close any gap, which made it very hard to consider the alternative — that the gap itself could be information.
I used the same method on my career and on the people in my life: work harder, explain more clearly, give more, find the solution. "It was how I first learned to earn love," I read. So when the effort stopped producing the result I wanted, stopping was rarely the instinct that arrived first.
There's a kind of comfort in that arrangement, and I name it in the chapter as self-protection. "No one could accuse me of letting them down if I gave and gave and gave."
What 'Less Better' Might Look Like
The alternative I land on at the end of the chapter is a phrase I'm still testing on myself. "Maybe the most powerful thing I could do was less better."
What that would require, in practice, is leaving an engagement smaller than I'm capable of making it. Stopping before I've produced enough tangible proof to justify my presence. "I needed to get clearer about the problems that were mine to solve and trust other people to decide whether that's what they needed."
I can write that sentence. I have a harder time living inside it, partly because some people will look at the smaller version of the work and see less of me in it. I read that possibility into the chapter and let it stand there.
Every chapter in the book closes the same way, with two truths and a lie — two things a traditional career path teaches us, and one thing that falls apart for multi-hyphenates.
The first truth here has to do with seeing a problem clearly and still leaving it to someone else. The second is about the way the same lesson keeps arriving until you're finally willing to learn it.
And the lie is, if you can, then you should.
