The Competence Costume

On control, collaboration, and the myth we inherited

In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Brian is mistaken for a messiah and followed by an increasingly devoted crowd. At one point, exasperated, he turns to face them: You are all individuals. The crowd responds in perfect unison: We are all individuals. And then — one lone voice, from somewhere in the back — I’m not.

That person standing apart, insisting on their distinctness, is doing exactly what everyone else is doing. Just louder. The irony isn’t that they’re wrong. It’s that the act of separating yourself from the crowd is its own kind of crowd behavior. We’ve just decided it’s the admirable version.

Founders are particularly susceptible to this. The mythology we inherit — especially in the US — is almost entirely built around the lone genius. The one who saw what no one else could see. Who pushed through ridicule and self-doubt and emerged, eventually, vindicated. Edison. Jobs. The dramatic pivot that saved the company. The founder who trusted their gut when everyone said no.

There’s truth in that story. Vision is real. So is the particular loneliness of seeing something clearly that others can’t yet imagine.

But the story has a shadow side as well: the way it quietly teaches us that needing other people is a liability. That the purest form of capability is self-sufficiency. If you want something done right, do it yourself isn’t just a phrase — it’s a belief system. And for a lot of founders, it’s running in the background of every decision, every delegation that feels like risk, every collaboration that feels like loss of control.

The need for control is often just fear wearing a competence costume.

In addition to burn out, the need for control can actually cost you the thing you believe in, that you are trying to build. When you’re carrying everything yourself, you’re not just tired. You’re operating at a fraction of what’s possible. You’ve made yourself the bottleneck of your own vision.

In the Energy Equation, we talk about Connection Energy as a business resource — not a nice-to-have, not a personality trait, but actual fuel -- the kind that compounds. Collaboration doesn’t just distribute the load; it generates something that solo effort can’t. Ideas that arrive in conversation. Momentum that comes from being witnessed. The particular clarity of explaining something to someone who asks the question you didn’t think to ask yourself.

When Connection Energy is low — or when we’ve systematically cut off the inputs that would restore it — everything else gets harder. Creative energy stalls. Momentum drops. And we usually diagnose it as a focus problem or a discipline problem, when it’s actually a resource problem.

So back to Brian, and the person in the back.

I think about them differently now than I used to. I used to read that line as the punchline — the absurdist who doesn’t get the joke. But I’ve come to think they might be the most self-aware person in the scene. Not because standing apart is wise, but because at least they’re not pretending.

The crowd chanting we are all individuals is the part that should unsettle us. The performance of uniqueness at scale. The way we’ve all agreed that independence is the aspirational state — and then built entire industries, entire identities, around proving it.

You can be unique in your vision and deeply embedded in a web of people who make that vision possible. Those aren’t opposites. The lone hero myth made them opposites. That was the fiction.

There’s real relief in letting that go.

Not every project needs to bear the full weight of your identity. Not every decision needs to be yours alone. Not every role you’re currently filling is actually yours to fill.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is become blissfully, comfortably, a cog in the wheel. To show up as one capable person in a capable system, doing your part well, and trusting that the whole can hold more than you could carry alone.

What would you stop white-knuckling if you genuinely believed the system could hold it?