Survival of the Stillest: Weaponized Incompetence (or Competence) in the Concrete Jungle

In a jungle full of beasts and heavenly fruit, there’s a huge tree with only one piece of fruit at the very top. A bunch of frogs, who had recently come out of their small, cozy pond, stumble upon it. One frog tries climbing to get the fruit, while the rest immediately warn that it's impossible.

One says they can't climb because they aren't monkeys. Another says there are probably snakes waiting to ambush them somewhere up the trunk. Others call the climbing frog greedy—since there's plenty to eat on the ground—or arrogant for thinking it could actually pull it off, tossing out every delusional excuse they can think of. But that one climbing frog happens to be deaf. It couldn't hear what the others were saying, so it just kept going.

Did the frog actually make it to the top? Well, the chances are never absolute zero, just like everything we try in life doesn't always have a 100% success rate. But the ending doesn't really matter. It’s the setup itself that actually got me thinking hard.

A manager told me that story years ago, right after I got promoted. I had only been at the company for two years, while it usually took three to four for anyone else to get that role. Pride wasn't the first thing I felt. Neither was joy or any real sense of accomplishment. Instead, I felt anxious. I didn't feel experienced enough to properly deliver on the new role—at least not to my own standards—and I felt bad for the senior guys who I knew had been gunning for that exact spot.

At the time, I had no idea why my manager told me that specific story. It took a few weeks for it to click. A friend let it slip that people were talking: some said I was just lucky and sucked up to the bosses, others claimed I only got it because I was often available on weekends for extra field duty—even at the expense of my own personal time—or just because I was single and therefore more flexible than the married employees.

What kept me up at night wasn't the fact that my manager knew I’d hear those rumors. It was that instead of debunking the gossip and telling me exactly why I earned the role, he just handed me a story about a deaf frog. Obviously, he was just telling me to ignore the noise and keep my head down.

Looking back, I get why I looked like a suck-up from the outside. I said yes almost every time a bothersome task came up. I was willing to work on weekends because everyone else was fiercely protecting their "family time," leaving the supervisor begging me to fill in. I even became the go-to guy for my teammates simply because my boss told everyone to route their problems to me while he took a long leave.

But a couple of things still bother me. First, I never asked for all that extra work; it was just dumped on me because the others either wouldn't or couldn't do it, for whatever reasons they came up with. Second, I still don't know if I was promoted because of actual merit, or if I was just a highly convenient employee for my superiors. Being told to act like a deaf frog didn't give me the acknowledgment I needed to feel like I actually deserved it.

It’s been years since then. Back then, I was young, eager, and hungry for validation. Now I realize the promotion itself was the acknowledgment, on top of the pay bump, of course. It doesn't matter what specific chain of decisions led to the upgrade; the fact is, I still got something out of it. The deaf frog didn't climb the tree because it couldn't hear the warnings; it climbed because it thought it could. To me, the point isn't whether it eventually got the fruit; it’s that the frog actually tried.

I was so focused on the "deaf" part that I failed to realize being deaf had nothing to do with the frog's ability to climb. And that’s the thought that actually keeps me staring at the ceiling. The other frogs weren't necessarily malicious, and maybe they weren't even truly incapable. I used to think they were just dodging the heavy lifting, but looking back now, it feels like they were playing a completely different survival game—one I didn't even know I was a part of.

If you lean into your own limitations—if you perform just enough incompetence—the corporate machine eventually stops asking you for more. The work simply follows the path of least resistance, and back then, that path was me. Not that it changed how I work; it's just that I’ve stopped chasing the fruit at the top of the tree. Instead, I’m chasing a better version of myself, trusting that it will bring its own rewards, whether tangible or not.

When I look at the other frogs, I realize that for them, maybe it was just a gritty defense mechanism against a system that rewards hard work with nothing but more work. Maybe they had already decided the fruit wasn't worth the sweat. So, I don't really hold it against them anymore. They just figured out the rules of the pond a lot earlier than I did. We’re all just dealing with the same flawed machine, picking our own specific kind of tired. They found their peace by staying below, and I guess I’m finding mine by keeping my hands moving. I’m still climbing, just not for the prize at the top anymore. I just want to see who I am by the time I run out of branches. I guess we’ll find out eventually if the view was worth it.