11 min
“Am I a Fraud?” The Plague of Impostor Syndrome, and What to Do About It A Slice of App Pie
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- Business
In the middle of trying to get five projects done, I’ve been hearing a lot about Imposter Syndrome. A week or two ago came an article on LinkedIn about Impostor Syndrome in programming. Ever since I’ve seen an article pop up here or there. I’ve known this all too well for so much of my life it resonated with me.
For those who want the shortest version of a definition, I defer to Musician Amanda Palmer. When I read her book The Art of Asking, I found wasn’t alone in this anxiety, though she called it the Fraud Police:
The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of “real” grown-ups who you believe—at some subconscious level—are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying: We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.(1)
If you’ve ever been successful at something and then look around you and think that your coworkers are so much smarter and better than you and you don’t deserve your success, you’ve been hit with Impostor Syndrome. When you get into a panic when you are afraid someone will find out you don’t know everything about your topic, you’ve been hit with impostor syndrome.
I think, on an everyday basis, I do feel like every one of those in some way or another. I’ve felt that way for much of my life. But somehow I got control over it. I’d like to explore what I do and think.
Before I do, I want to point out a few things. The most critical is you can’t know everything. In any discipline, there always more to know that is knowable. What compounds our ignorance is what I’ve called the Red Queen Dilemma, referring to Lewis Carrol’s Character in Through the Looking Glass.
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Technology does this to all of us. Standing still is falling behind. Moore’s law makes it impossible to learn enough. By the time you learn one thing, the world changes on you. A year ago, my Book Practical Autolayout for Xcode 8 went obsolete three days after publication. One critical menu selection, the resolver, moved to a toolbar button, making the entire book’s tutorial obsolete and indeed confusing to use.
Secondly, there is a paradox of huge social pressure to appear super competent and successful. When your colleagues and friends post only their successes online, it becomes too easy to measure yourself only by their successes. In those you aspire to be, you don’t see all the pain and failure in getting where they are. All evidence is to the instant success, and everyone posts success when you are feeling the failure and pain of working towards success.
Thirdly, imposter syndrome is a pandemic among successful people. If you have great or small success, you’re probably going to feel at least one you didn’t deserve it, because you don’t know what you are doing. While Amanda Palmer might be famous in the world of music, her Husband, fantasy author Neil Gaiman is arguably a Literary rock star. Yet he tells a story about one time he really felt Impostor syndrome:
Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realize that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.
On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened,
In the middle of trying to get five projects done, I’ve been hearing a lot about Imposter Syndrome. A week or two ago came an article on LinkedIn about Impostor Syndrome in programming. Ever since I’ve seen an article pop up here or there. I’ve known this all too well for so much of my life it resonated with me.
For those who want the shortest version of a definition, I defer to Musician Amanda Palmer. When I read her book The Art of Asking, I found wasn’t alone in this anxiety, though she called it the Fraud Police:
The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of “real” grown-ups who you believe—at some subconscious level—are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying: We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.(1)
If you’ve ever been successful at something and then look around you and think that your coworkers are so much smarter and better than you and you don’t deserve your success, you’ve been hit with Impostor Syndrome. When you get into a panic when you are afraid someone will find out you don’t know everything about your topic, you’ve been hit with impostor syndrome.
I think, on an everyday basis, I do feel like every one of those in some way or another. I’ve felt that way for much of my life. But somehow I got control over it. I’d like to explore what I do and think.
Before I do, I want to point out a few things. The most critical is you can’t know everything. In any discipline, there always more to know that is knowable. What compounds our ignorance is what I’ve called the Red Queen Dilemma, referring to Lewis Carrol’s Character in Through the Looking Glass.
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Technology does this to all of us. Standing still is falling behind. Moore’s law makes it impossible to learn enough. By the time you learn one thing, the world changes on you. A year ago, my Book Practical Autolayout for Xcode 8 went obsolete three days after publication. One critical menu selection, the resolver, moved to a toolbar button, making the entire book’s tutorial obsolete and indeed confusing to use.
Secondly, there is a paradox of huge social pressure to appear super competent and successful. When your colleagues and friends post only their successes online, it becomes too easy to measure yourself only by their successes. In those you aspire to be, you don’t see all the pain and failure in getting where they are. All evidence is to the instant success, and everyone posts success when you are feeling the failure and pain of working towards success.
Thirdly, imposter syndrome is a pandemic among successful people. If you have great or small success, you’re probably going to feel at least one you didn’t deserve it, because you don’t know what you are doing. While Amanda Palmer might be famous in the world of music, her Husband, fantasy author Neil Gaiman is arguably a Literary rock star. Yet he tells a story about one time he really felt Impostor syndrome:
Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realize that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.
On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened,
11 min