Peter's Principle

 I somehow remember reading a book called The Peter Principle, which states something to the effect that one eventually rises to one's level of incompetency in work. This seems to have been a pessimistic book, written by Laurence Peter in 1969, and the drift of it is that a person eventually reaches the point where they no longer can competently perform in a task or a role. But the Peter Principle also suggests something about the cyclic nature of life, and how as soon as a person strives to reach the highest point of themselves, they will find themselves in a completely different place. I seem to recall having read in a book on Taoism the idea that whenever a person tries to go the furthest they possibly can in one direction, they will end up in the opposite.
  Sometimes, the idea of the Peter Principle can sound pessimistic, suggesting that people occupy a humble position in life rather than striving to out-do themselves (literally). But I also think that the process of failing at a task can be an opportunity for learning and even self-transcendence, because it offers a space of exhausting a previously taken-for-granted definition of what success means. If I am striving my best to be person X and it turns out to become harder and harder the closer I get to  that goal, I can then learn to let go of the goal itself and not be so attached to the pleasure I thought I would derive from it when I embarked on the journey in the first place.
   But I think that in order for this process to really work, a person still needs to be sincere in their efforts to prove successful in an endeavor. This is because transcending a goal (or at least renouncing it) seems to require a familiarity with the goal itself and the process of getting there.