"But..." he stared at me in disbelief, "I mean, look, you're doing it now, quietly oozing self-confidence."
We were studying together and apparently my body language did not express what was going on in my head. I felt I was barely holding it together, so much about what we were trying to learn just didn’t make sense. I was surviving by diverting attention, I was guessing, I was parroting back passages of text without understanding them, any trick I could find to delay the inevitable day when the tutors figured out that I was a bit thick and that I didn’t deserve to be on the course.
I’d Exceeded My Limitations?
I felt like that because I was experiencing imposter syndrome. The idea that you’ve somehow lucked into the situation you’re in and that you don’t deserve to be there.
For me, at that point, I really felt like I had exceeded my limitations. Higher Education wasn’t really a thing in my family. There’d been a few college courses but, as far as we knew, nobody had ever got a degree. It felt like I knew why.
I passed the course (and I got a degree).
In the world of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM), Imposter Syndrome is common. If it’s not something you’re personally familiar with, that might sound like a big problem for us to deal with. For a very small number, it can be. For most of us it’s a kind of hidden super-power.
STEM subjects need precision and expertise. They crave certainty but the reality is that it’s never there and believing that you have it is a problem. Our field is built on the acknowledgement that we don’t have all the answers yet. Science, by definition, is an ongoing argument with what we thought we knew.
How do we make progress if we don’t constantly question ourselves, our ability, our beliefs? So why would we view imposter syndrome as a problem?
The researchers, engineers, and mathematicians who have moved their fields forward weren’t the ones who felt they’d arrived, they were the ones who felt they hadn’t. They were the ones who weren’t comfortable.
When you feel you’re not fully up to speed you pay closer attention. You check your working. You ask the question, “I might have missed something, but…”. You don’t assume, you verify, revisit and refine. You naturally create the rigour that STEM demands.
The Dunning-Kruger Counterpoint
Let’s look at it from the opposite perspective and bring in the infamous Dunning-Kruger curve. How do you get past Mount Stupid?
You barrel into a new subject and you’re immediately conscious that you have a lot to learn. Then you start to get the hang of the basics and it doesn’t seem all that bad, actually. You’re starting to feel like you know what you’re talking about, your confidence grows.
What Dunning-Kruger observed was that people in those early phases tend to vastly overestimate the extent to which they understand the subject.
There are developers, scientists, engineers who are overconfident. They can do very well, but sooner or later they make that mistake and it all comes crashing down. Annoyingly, not always for them.
One of the problems with overconfidence in these fields is that it tends to sound good.
We once got a development leader who’d been freed up when a competitor went through a rough patch. He was interviewed by two managers, neither of whom were technical. We were told he was brilliant and would transform the company.
He did appear, at first, to be very impressive. He was all across all current fads in the industry. He produced an impressive design for a project and was able to bat away questions from the team with very plausible, well informed answers. Then someone asked him about performance and he, very confidently, stated that it wouldn’t be problem because, “as every developer should know, these days it’s more cost effective to increase hardware than waste effort performance-tuning software”.
I was pretty sure I’d spotted an exponential performance problem in his design, but I wasn’t certain. It might have been linear, so I merely questioned it. Later, I put it to the head of engineering (non-technical) and he, essentially, ignored me because the other guy was very confident in his design and I wasn’t so confident that I’d seen a fatal flaw. Basically, the other guy sounded better.
About 3 months later the project was behind schedule and was taking about 20 minutes to do a simple calculation with only a day’s worth of data. It was supposed to hold a year’s.
Imposter syndrome keeps that door firmly shut. Even if it’s you, standing there presenting your design and the annoying junior developer raises the awkward question you look at it, you say “I think it’s linear and a risk worth taking considering the relative cost of hardware, but thanks, I’ll check that one out”.
It was not linear. Extremely not linear.
Years later I found out that the competitor got into in trouble because they’d invested heavily in redesigning their flagship product and when they got into testing they realised that the design, basically, didn’t work. I’ll let you guess how they got there.
What Drives You?
It’s an interesting question. I know plenty of people who have, effectively, zero drive. They have no desire to achieve anything. They might be quite happy, I think some of them are, but I’m not like that. I’m constantly seeing new skills I could learn, new ways I could get better at the skills I have because nothing I ever do is, in my mind, good enough. I know I can do better.
In business, of course, you have to understand when something is good enough to fulfil the purpose, but that doesn’t stop you believing that you can make it faster, more efficiently, to a higher quality (because faults are expensive to fix).
That drive, which leads to innovation, which leads to increased efficiencies, better products, better business is just imposter syndrome rebadged.
The goal isn’t to eliminate imposter syndrome, the goal is to reframe the energy from something negative into something positive.
I know, it’s easy to say, “hey, when you find imposter syndrome biting, just remember these three simple points”. I’m sure there are other articles telling you this, because I asked Claude and it gave me these:
- “I don’t know enough about this” becomes “I have a clear direction for what to learn next.”
- “Everyone here is more qualified” becomes “I am surrounded by people I can learn from.”
- “I’m going to be found out” becomes “I care enough about this to hold myself to a high standard.”
It’s not that simple. You can’t just logic away an emotion, but what you can do is to take another step forward. Even just a tiny one. The feeling of discomfort doesn’t ever go away, but you get accustomed to it.
Imagine you’re a stunt performer in a movie. Almost every stunt has never been done before, not quite the same way. They’re scared and they’ll tell you that not being scared would be a serious cause for concern, because it’s being scared that makes them double-check, triple-check, do the extra dry run, do the dry run yet again because something didn’t go right.
In a similar way fear almost becomes a friend, you get to know that you do your best work when you’re a bit unsure about whether you’re actually capable of doing it at all.
If you’re me it flips round and you find that you actually need to feel like you’re on the edge for a certain amount of time, because if you don’t then you don’t even feel alive.
Imposter syndrome isn’t a negative thing, it’s a power to be harnessed and used.