Remember, everyone else is an imposter, too

And how not to care

Albert Einstein, everyone’s reliable exemplar of a genius, is quoted as having said, shortly before he died, that “the exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.”

In the run-ups to court hearings, when I was working as a barrister (English trial lawyer), I’d have a fist of anxiety in my chest. If I got this wrong, my client might be deported, might not be released from prison, won’t get the healthcare they need—and it would be because of me. I’d frantically over-prepare, worried that I’d miss some key fact, some important point of law, some tactical maneuver that everyone else knew—often shifting myself to the ineffective right side of the effort/results curve (last week’s email) and, as a result, performing less well than I’d have done had I taken it easier. I’d come to the legal profession later in life than most, was largely self-taught, and had a lingering suspicion that I’d made it not because I was any good at the law but because recruiters were curious about my medical background. I wasn’t sure I was up to the job.

Objectively, these self-doubts made no sense. I’ll spare you the details, but there were several things that should have reassured me I was doing fine. This evidence, though, I explained away: I had the gift of the gab. I was a good bluffer.

The grinding self-doubt exhausted me for years.

The term ‘imposter phenomenon’ was coined in a psychology journal in 1978. People started calling it imposter syndrome later, but that’s not quite right: syndromes are groups of symptoms, while the imposter phenomenon’s a lonely feeling we almost all experience at some point.¹ (If this isn’t familiar, you almost certainly have colleagues for whom it’s stock reality.) Women are affected more often than men.² It’s humility—a good quality. But it’s harmful. Work’s no fun when you feel a fraud.

We assume that those with important-sounding jobs know what they are doing and do it well. That’s an assumption that doesn’t survive a toe dipped into their worlds. Poke around for a while in public administration or politics or medicine or law or education or the military or the criminal justice system, or make friends with candid people from those worlds or any other walk of life and you realize that everyone is projecting an air of competence while nervously making it up as they go along. That’s not to say that some things aren’t done well: you normally can trust the system if you’re having surgery or getting on a commercial flight, partly because of the numerous safety-mechanisms that have evolved because human endeavor is more amateur than we like to think. But, when it feels as though everyone else got there on merit but you’re a fraud, reassure yourself: we’re all frauds. As writer Oliver Burkeman put it, “Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.” And perhaps we’re better at making it up as we go along than we think we are. Psychologist Adam Grant has pointed out the paradox of the imposter phenomenon: if you doubt yourself while others believe in you, you should doubt your own doubts and trust others’ respect for your abilities.³ (Grant and Burkeman have their own newsletters, here and here, both highly recommended.)

I fixed my own imposter phenomenon only when I finally rolled up my sleeves, bought a book on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and did what it told me. It worked. (Work CBT is something we’ll come back to in a future email.)

The imposter phenomenon involves a suspicion that we’re a fake, and two more beliefs—beliefs underlying much stress and anxiety. The first is that we’re not up to handling something. The second is that something awful will happen as a result. But, seen clearheadedly, you almost certainly are up to it. You’re probably doing whatever you do because you’ve been trained to do it, because you have experience, because you’re smart enough to work out what to do, because someone’s measured you up and concluded you’re up to it. You’ve likely faced situations like this one before, more stretching ones, even, and things have worked out fine. Your selectively-remembered screw-ups are probably no worse than your colleagues’ own quietly filed-away mistakes. Whatever the challenge is, it probably isn’t as hard or as serious as it first seems. And if you’re not up to it? Blessedly, things usually work out ok anyway. Our anxious minds mushroom imagined bad outcomes, sometimes as trivial as someone briefly thinking badly of us, into calamities.

Am I up to this? Have I handled things this hard before? Can I figure this out? The answers to those questions are almost certainly yes, yes, and yes (and, to the extent that you’re faking it, so is everyone else ). But you need to tell yourself that. Have that firm but kind conversation with yourself and you may not need to get onto step two—fixing the faulty thinking about what’ll happen if you were to get something wrong. If you do get there, it may go something along the lines of: it’s unlikely anything bad will happen. If it does, how bad will it really be? It’s highly unlikely to be a catastrophe. I’ll do what I can, as I always do, and will ask for help if I need it. And if something awful should happen, I’ll be able to deal with that too. I can’t prevent all awfulness: all I can do is my best. It’s the highest standard anyone can set themself.

Your self-doubts are no evidence that you’re not up to it. On the contrary: as the philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell pointed out, “The stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

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Next week: time and tasks.

1. See here and Sheryl Sandberg, Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, First edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).

2. See here (again) and here.

3. Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things (New York, NY: Viking, 2023), 232.