I’m a big fan of what I like to call “competency p*rn”. No, it isn’t dirty. It’s the kind of story where a big part of the appeal is watching characters be really good at something. Heist movies are a good example. The audience enjoys watching the tech guy being clever, the con man being charming, and the action hero doing stunts.
This week we watched my husband’s favorite “Christmas movie”, Die Hard. Now, I wouldn’t qualify this movie as competence p*rn – for one thing there is way too much incompetence on display to scratch that itch. It did, however, have some interesting lessons for anyone who aspires to heroic levels of competence in their own lives.
Spoilers ahead for a 37-year-old movie.
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John McClane spends the movie trying to thwart the plans of the bad guys while maneuvering through the infrastructure of an office building that is still under construction. Despite never having been in the building before, he is able to get around via ventilation ducts, elevator shafts, and the general chaos of a construction site, all while avoiding the people hunting for him.
Navigating a new situation, whether literally or metaphorically, is a skill that would serve anyone well. To be competent at quickly assessing the elements at play, understanding how they all fit together, and finding the way through the labyrinth they create is something to aspire to in a fast changing world.
Improvisation
I think most of us have been in the position of trying to make do with the resources at hand. In McClane’s case, he is trying to stop the bad guys with only the detritus he finds around him, and whatever he can steal from the villains as he picks them off. He does a truly amazing job of improvising solutions to help him navigate the aforementioned ducts and shafts as well as taking out opponents.
There’s nothing like the confidence of knowing that you have a good plan, a backup plan, and an endless supply of the resources those plans require. Let’s be honest though – plans rarely survive contact with reality (if you even get a chance to make one), and resources are never endless. Sometimes they aren’t even relevant. All of which means that someone who can competently get results in the heat of the moment with whatever is to hand is someone who is worth their weight in C4. Or, you know, gold.
Impact
Creating chaos may seem like a weird area for competency, but boy is McClane good at it. We just talked about his ability to improvise with bizarre and limited resources. What he manages to do with those resources is to throw a giant, chaotic, exploding monkey wrench into the villains’ plans.
Hopefully this isn’t the form that impact takes for most of us, but the takeaway here really is that McClane gets a lot of bang for his buck in creating impact to the situation he is in. At the end of the day, results matter, and of all of these competencies, none is more important than the ability to create meaningful impact.