I have struggled with impostor syndrome throughout my life - it doesn’t help that my 35 years to date look like a smacked out Mary Sue fantasy. In my previous business I often felt like I was pulling the wool over the eyes of the world - what right did I have to lead these people, to charge those people, to make these decisions?
Well, none, and neither does anyone else.
Through my dealings with other business owners, from small outfits through to the gods of the world of commerce, I have come to realise that everybody in any position of power or responsibility is faking it to some degree or another - or even more interestingly, they believe they are faking it, even when the results are tangible and real. I often find just talking to other people in a similar position really helps, as you rapidly realise that not only is what you’re feeling not unique, it is practically a universal maxim.
Where I ended up was concluding that we are all wittingly or unwittingly impostors, and the only actual question is whether it’s something worth being bothered by.
It’s the unwitting impostors you have to keep an eye on - hubris and incompetence are a dangerous combination.
Being aware of your own limitations brings humility, which is good in that it imbues striving, through which you grow your limits.
In short, we are all impostors. Being aware of and treating this as a law of being is a useful step in understanding both yourself and how to optimally operate the world in which we live.
People will agree to almost anything which makes them feel like less of an impostor.
I think imposter syndrome is an inevitable consequence of a competitive labour environment. People like to call this kind of environment "meritocracy", but since "merit" is not something objective that can be measured effectively, the reality is we compete on our ability to convince others we have "merit".
And since we are forced to compete for work, we feel the need to present the best possible version of ourselves, which is inevitably just slightly beyond the level of "merit" we perceive ourselves as actually having. I believe this disconnect is the main cause of imposter syndrome.
I think it's also the cause of so much bullshit in business environments. Since labour relations are fundamentally antagonistic, people feel unable to communicate problems or inefficiencies for fear that it will reflect badly on them. Especially when that problem is "I am not good at doing this task". Workplaces try to introduce blame free cultures to avoid this, but they will always struggle, because a business relationship is necessarily judgemental.
And I don't think there's an easy way to fix this without challenging the idea, entrenched in so much of our economic and political discussion, that competition will always produce the best results.
@aninhumer, thank you, this was a very insightful post. I often ponder the "perception of value" effect in my workplace and how much influence it has. In addition, for me, it was a realization that accountability requires recorded decision making outcomes and that accountability must be applied consistently across 100% of an organization including the CEO and directors. Because of this realization (and that implementation is highly unlikely to occur due to the requirement that top level decision makers adhere) it was a clarification in why "perception of value" is often more important than evaluating actual value to an organization. Even though an organization may think it's evaluating actual value.
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree, and as far as I’m concerned, the reality is unsettling. In business, as I said, I found the leaders of mighty businesses to be often dangerously clueless - the larger the org the easier systemic inertia and process make it to hide at the top - in politics, the dunces of my year at school now sit in parliament.
Yes, this is purely my observation, but I’ve had a broad and global sample pool - and I inhabit a world in which almost everything is smoke and mirrors - yet I find these precepts serve me well, and the decisions and actions I make and take within this worldview produce expected results against the hypothesis.
Part of me just wants to hide under a rock - but we’ve muddled along this far, so on it goes.
That's also one hypothesis of why people are prone to believe in conspiracy theories: the alternative to believing in some malevolent force controlling everything towards some ultimate end goal is that no one is really in control and stuff just kind of happens. Some people find the latter more disturbing.
I’ve always wondered ir airplane pilots feel the same. I mean, they are tested through and through, this should give them some confidence, I believe. But never spoke to one about it to confirm this assumption.
This, a thousandfold.
I have struggled with impostor syndrome throughout my life - it doesn’t help that my 35 years to date look like a smacked out Mary Sue fantasy. In my previous business I often felt like I was pulling the wool over the eyes of the world - what right did I have to lead these people, to charge those people, to make these decisions?
Well, none, and neither does anyone else.
Through my dealings with other business owners, from small outfits through to the gods of the world of commerce, I have come to realise that everybody in any position of power or responsibility is faking it to some degree or another - or even more interestingly, they believe they are faking it, even when the results are tangible and real. I often find just talking to other people in a similar position really helps, as you rapidly realise that not only is what you’re feeling not unique, it is practically a universal maxim.
Where I ended up was concluding that we are all wittingly or unwittingly impostors, and the only actual question is whether it’s something worth being bothered by.
It’s the unwitting impostors you have to keep an eye on - hubris and incompetence are a dangerous combination.
Being aware of your own limitations brings humility, which is good in that it imbues striving, through which you grow your limits.
In short, we are all impostors. Being aware of and treating this as a law of being is a useful step in understanding both yourself and how to optimally operate the world in which we live.
People will agree to almost anything which makes them feel like less of an impostor.