Translator: Mohand Habchi Reviewer: Ellie Green
I make my living working at a company that has a reputation for hiring geniuses.
We've all seen pieces like this;
they talk about all the ways you can hack to get a job at Google,
and there are these elaborate pieces
that sort of portray an image of being a job candidate that doesn't really exist.
So when I went in for my interview,
I was really intimidated, like you would be.
I didn't know
if I would stack up to this image that I had painted for myself.
But of course, fast forward some time,
and I've now worked there for a bit of time,
and it's a good job,
and it became my turn to interview people.
And I remember my first interview.
I walked into it thinking, "How would I know how to evaluate this person?"
What if midway through the interview,
they were going to find out that I didn't really get design,
and that I should not be interviewing them?
So reflecting on all of this,
I wanted to understand why that's happened.
Why, in the position of being the interviewer, had I felt intimidated?
And when I was the job candidate, I felt that same level of intimidation.
So luckily there's a whole field of study about this.
And that sensation
of feeling like you don't deserve to be in the position you're in,
is called imposter syndrome.
In 1985, Dr. Pauline Clance published a study called the Imposter Phenomenon.
In this study, she detailed that really high performing people,
people that all of us would consider aspirational,
don't always feel like they've earned the praise they've been given.
And so she goes on to show that this causes maladaptive behavior
and stress and overworking yourself and other toxic work-life-balance habits.
You see, a lot of really famous and successful people have exhibited this.
Maya Angelou once said, "I've written 11 books
and I think each time, 'I've done it, they're going to find me out.
I've run a game on everyone.'"
But the thing is you don't have to be a beloved American figure
to have this experience.
It's been shown that at least seventy-five percent of people
experience at least one episode of imposter syndrome,
and it's not just limited to men or women.
Mothers experience this, students experience this,
PhD candidates, designers, performers,
and really any social situation that involves some kind of a ranking.
You see, it doesn't take a lot of research
to know that our culture has painted a really interesting image
of what succes is.
Social media is bombarding us every single day.
We see posts all the time about what we could be and where we are.
You have to paint this image of being the best version of yourself,
you need to be authentic, but you've got to be more.
And so, a San Diego study found that the average person today
is bombarded with at least a hundred thousand words of content
and around 12 hours of content and media every single day.
And all those words are just telling you
that you can be doing something better with your life.
There's lists top 30 under 30. There's lists top 20 under 20.
And there's these infinite ways
that you can be better than who you are today.
You see, it kind of makes this gap in our minds, right?
There's this version of ourselves that is achieving classic success,
and then there's what we are accomplishing today.
And even if you do something that feels like it is where you could be glowing,
the problem is it's your accomplishment.
You see all the moments it took for you to get there.
You know all the moments of self-doubt, all the times you second-guessed yourself.
So when you get that award or that job, it doesn't feel like anything special,
because it didn't just come to you, you had to really work at it.
You see, the human mind is a funny thing.
When we're born, we're completely blank slates.
We have to set up how we're going to see the world throughout our lives.
So as a baby, your DNA encodes in you certain survival skills.
And everything else is up to your social situations to teach you.
Psychologists call these models schema.
And we set up schema over really basic things,
like furniture or cars, toys and food.
We know that if we're hungry, we might take an apple;
it'll look a certain way, it'll taste a certain way.
When we eat, we will be full. Well, it depends -
(Laughter)
But the thing is that you're going to be setting up
more complex models over emotional situations.
We're being sold these ideas of success over and over,
so you're going to start setting up your model, your schema
around the concept of success.
So it might look something like this,
"Okay, success is good. That's the goal. I need to do that."
All the while, our culture is promoting this idea of the genius.
And this is pretty heavily saturated in today's world,
this concept of these people who are on this planet, and they just get it.
We've got Steve Jobs. We've got Elon Musk.
These people who just accomplish things and don't have to second-guess themselves.
They deserve the positions they're in.
So we set up this schema, and we're not the genius.
So even if we accomplish something that we might have thought was successful,
it doesn't feel like anything special.
And so the thing is a lot of people will experience this -
people who have gotten their PhDs,
people who have gotten incredible leadership roles.
So this is pretty bleak.
It seems like we're all here,
and no one really feels like they deserve to be where they are,
and they second-guess themselves.
But this is a TEDx Talk, and so I'm here to tell you about a brighter future.
(Laughter)
If this is such a collective experience,
if I can look around this room and see so many people who feel this way,
it's the human condition,
we can adapt to it, we can take charge of that
and make it something that pushes us all forwards.
To recap, imposter syndrome feels like you're in a room with people
and everyone has this set field of knowledge,
and you only have a slight piece of that knowledge.
And every time you get an award or an accolade,
or somebody gives you a job,
you feel like you're one step closer to being found out.
All those things you've earned,
they just feel like they are getting you closer to the place
where people are going to know you shouldn't have earned them at all.
But the reality is, the world doesn't look like this.
The genius is kind of a myth. Everyone's trying stuff.
The reality is that our whole lives,
everyone's been developing the way that they'll see the world.
So it's equal sets of knowledge.
Sure it might overlap some places,
and some people are always going to know more than you in some areas;
some people might know less.
To somebody else, you might seem like you have it completely figured out.
You see, it's not what you can do about impostor syndrome,
it's the human condition.
Odds are you're going to experience it over some event in your life.
It's what you can do with it to motivate yourself forwards.
When I wake up every day for work,
I've been put on teams at Google
to launch big products that launch to millions of people.
And I work with people who I look up to.
I've worked with people who when I was young in my career,
I really looked up to them.
And now I work alongside them.
And the thing is it was scary.
I felt like maybe I shouldn't contribute all my ideas
because they wouldn't be at the caliber
that was expected of someone in my position.
But by really embracing this,
by embracing the fact that we're all just figuring it out,
I was able to push through those feelings of "I'm not good enough"
and find out that I actually was good enough.
People chose me to be on their teams. They wanted to work with me.
And so that's where the power lies.
If you embrace your own imposter syndrome,
you will find that it will give you the strength to really move forward.
So here's three reasons for that.
Number one.
If you have imposter syndrome, it means you have intellectual humility.
That means that you are aware of the limits of your own knowledge.
And that's not a weak point.
If you're aware of the limits of your knowledge,
you'll learn to lean on people around you
and understand the models that they have set up for the world
and learn from those models.
You see, you're not an imposter if something you try fails,
the world is full of people who try things and they fail,
and they try things and they fail.
And we hear those few success stories along the way.
And number two, it means that you look at situations like an amateur.
An amateur asks questions.
They're trying to learn. They're trying to catch up.
If you keep this attitude with you throughout your life,
you'll never stop learning, and you'll never stop growing.
You see, the difference between imposter syndrome becoming toxic
and becoming an asset in your life
is how you view the external gratification.
As an amateur, a lot of the reward is in the process.
You get to learn things and experience things
that you wouldn't have experienced before.
If you rely on what it looks like on the outside,
you'll end up on a treadmill of overworking yourself
and being stressed and not accomplish what you want to accomplish in your life.
And the last point, which is the most important one,
is that having imposter syndrome pushes you to action.
Toxic imposter syndrome,
the kind that makes you second-guess yourself in an unhealthy way,
lives in your mind.
All these schemas and all this complex thing with our mind
is a pattern of thinking.
It's emotional and thinking, but it's this endless battle.
The thing is that's all abstraction.
Once you're putting in the work and taking the action,
all those second-guessing-yourself doubts, there's no room for them.
When I decided to do this talk,
I thought, "Oh,
how would I have something to share with a room full of people
who all are successful in their own right?"
And I felt worried about it.
But that was all in my mind.
Once I said yes and began doing the work,
I realized I did have something that I wanted to share with the world.
And everyone here has that.
So, next time you feel like an imposter, next time you feel like you don't belong,
next time you feel like you're not good enough
for the position you've been placed in,
take a deep breath,
remind yourself that the people around you are probably experiencing that same thing,
and then go do something amazing.
Thank you.
(Applause)