[uzero]

The best explanation I’ve heard comes from Dan Sullivan. He doesn’t specifically use the name impostor syndrome but is talking about the gap talented and intelligent people feel when other people are praising them and they don’t see themselves that way. It’s caused by people having two stages, front and backstage. Social and traditional media portrays only the frontstage and you never get to see the backstage. So because of this you are constantly compairing your backstage with all the shortcomings and failures to people’s frontstage where there’s only success and perfection. The thing that has helped me is to understand that there was a huge amount of work that got those people at that point and I can do the same, it will just take time. Also believe other people. If they say you are awesome at X and you have spend A LOT of time to learn it, there’s a good chance you actually are awesome at it by the common standards. It’s just that like I said, you see all the things you don’t still know and they don’t. Unless you are in competitive sports, don’t bother being the best, it’s usually not worth it because the gain ratio against the effort don’t make sense. Instead focus on getting really, really good and then expand to related fields so you can start doing stuff nobody else can by combining those fields.