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So the second misattribution error that I want to talk about is another very common one, which is imposter syndrome.

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And interestingly, there's not a whole lot of research and literature around imposter syndrome, which I find very fascinating, especially given like in our industry, like it is becoming a pretty hot topic.

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I mean, there's so many prominent examples of imposter syndrome.

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You see this all the time of just like insanely successful, prestigious, award-winning people who are like...

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I got lucky.

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I don't understand how this is happening.

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One of them that I've written about before is Maya Angelou.

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She published 11 books.

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She won the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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She has three Grammys, a poem read at Bill Clinton's inauguration.

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She wrote a feature film screenplay, directed another.

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She collaborated with Martin Luther King Jr. on the Civil Rights Movement.

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She was nominated for multiple Pulitzer Prizes.

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By any neutral measure, she's one of the most accomplished American writers of the 20th century.

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But it's interesting because apparently before publishing each book, she tells people, she says, each time I send a book to the publisher, I think to myself, oh, they're finally going to find out.

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They're going to find me out.

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Every book.

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Yeah.

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This was all luck.

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Yeah.

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I had nothing to do with it.

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So imposter syndrome, I think, is really interesting because in a lot of ways, it's kind of the inverse of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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With the Dunning-Kruger, you're so ignorant about the domain that you're in that you kind of just naively adopt some beliefs that overestimate yourself in that domain.

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You don't understand what goes into it.

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So it seems simple to you.

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So you just assume you're going to be good at it.

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Whereas the imposter syndrome is kind of the reverse, where you are so thoroughly educated in your domain and you are so unbelievably aware of all of the variables and factors and different luck and chance that goes into a thing that you can't help but look at it and say, how did this happen?

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like, why me?

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Right.

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You know, we talked about building confidence through accumulating evidence and that evidence is accumulated by breaking things down in the small task and then slowly building up the process that you go through when you do that is this process of like starting out like, okay, I only know a little, so I'm going to get a little bit better.

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And then I'm going to get a little bit better.

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It's kind of like compound interest, right?

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Like you just slowly over the

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and our brains are calibrated in such a way that that learning curve kind of happens at like a steady rate over a period of time.

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I think what happens with imposter syndrome is when the results start to vastly outstrip the effort.

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Like, I went through this when Subtle Art Not Giving a Fuck took off.

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I went through a period of pretty intense imposter syndrome because it's like...

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I was just, I mean, you were there.

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I was just a fucking dude with a blog and like posting a bunch of shit on Facebook.

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And next thing I know, I'm like number one in 12 different countries.

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I'm being invited to speak in front of thousands of people.

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I'm being invited to like Fortune 500 companies to speak to executive teams.

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And I'm like,

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What am I doing here?

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This is an accident.

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You're like 32, 33.

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Yeah, I was 32 years old.

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Yeah.

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And it, again, it's another miscalibration, right?

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Of like, I assumed my, my improvement and my progress in terms of competence was like pretty steady over a number of years.

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And the real world results that I received reflected that steady, inconsistent improvement.

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And then all of a sudden you get this like,

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10x or 100x jump and it's like well i didn't get 100 times better but my results just got 100 times better so something's wrong either i got lucky or somebody made a mistake around here and i think in essence that is what imposter syndrome is it's like it's this feeling of like okay i'm good but i'm not that good i'm sure maya angelou like was like why am i getting invited to the president's inauguration why am i being like handed all these awards and

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It's a mismatch, I think, in proportion.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, the results outstripped your perceived competence there.

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That makes sense to me.

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You know what I mean?

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Because like, yeah, your results, like you said, your results are 100x, but your abilities were like, you were still the same guy.

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Right.

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Right?

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Yeah.

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What happened in my case, and I think this is kind of

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maybe how I got over imposter syndrome, is I eventually just recognized that the industry or the area that I'm in, that curve is extremely exponential.

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When you're kind of far down on the curve, a 5% improvement results in a 5% increased result.

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But once you get...

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up towards the top of the curve, once you go from like 98th percentile to 99th percentile, that's not a 1% jump, that's like a 500% jump.

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And then when you go from 99th percentile to 99.5 percentile, that's another 500% jump, right?

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So ironically, I think it is just...

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having an accurate understanding of the domain that I'm in reoriented me appropriately to be like, oh, okay, no, this actually makes sense.

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I'm not this crazy imposter who like randomly the nature of the industry.

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It is.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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You don't necessarily have to experience these huge results to experience imposter syndrome either.

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A lot of times people even see it as a sign of progress because you probably are pushing yourself just a little bit even too.

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And you're in a new situation where you're like, ooh, I don't know if I belong here.

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That's maybe a good sign.

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Some people see it as a good sign.

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I would see it as a good sign too.

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If you think you're an imposter in a situation, it's probably a good sign that you're at least paying attention.

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You're paying attention to what's going on around you.

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You're like, I'm pushing myself maybe into a new territory or something like that.

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And it's probably good to have a little bit of that.

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It's definitely better than Dunning-Kruger.

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Oh, absolutely.

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Absolutely.

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I've been in rooms with like a lot of extremely successful people.

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And my experience generally is that most of them feel this way.

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It is interesting that at the top of the pyramid, there's,

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most of the people are like, how did I get up here?

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I'm just a guy with a blog, or I just went where they told me to.

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Whereas when you go to the bottom of the pyramid, you run into Dunning-Kruger.

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You run into people who think they're the next big thing.

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John Steinbeck had this amazing quote about Americans.

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He said, the problem with America is that everyone who's poor thinks that they were just an unlucky millionaire.

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Anecdotally, I've seen this quite a bit.

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When I lived in New York City, I had a neighbor who was one of the...

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top researchers at McKinsey McKinsey.

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I mean, you know, they work with all of the biggest companies and corporations in the world.

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And I remember I had dinner with him once and he told like the most fascinating thing.

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He said that he was actually, when he was there, he was in charge of like one of the larger research projects, um, across all their client companies of really trying to identify top performers.

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Yeah.

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Very early on.

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How can you correctly identify maybe a future CEO or a future C-suite executive or a future like brilliant researcher straight out of college?

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And so they ran like tons of studies and experiments and tracked people for, I think, like a decade across lots of different companies.

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And he said that the conclusion that came back is that there are two ingredients that generally have to go together.

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All of the superstars had both of these ingredients at the same time.

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And he said the first one was they were obsessive overachievers and perfectionists.

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The second trait was they chronically underestimated themselves.

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He described it to me as, he said, like, overachievers with crippling insecurities.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Just a neurotic ball of net mess.

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It's basically people who are, like, excellent at what they, like, obsessively pursue excellence, and they always think everything they do sucks.

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He's like, they're miserable people, but, like...

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They will make a great CEO one day.

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Corporate America.

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The little research they have done on imposter syndrome.

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They do find that it's not that these imposters actually underperform.

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They just expect to underperform.

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And generally speaking, they're no different than anybody else on any measure that they give or that they've been tested on.

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The real attribute is that the bad outcomes, they attribute those to their ability.

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And then the good outcomes, they usually attribute to luck or circumstance.

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There's a couple of good things too.

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They cheat less.

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Impostors cheat less.

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Yeah.

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People who feel like they're imposters cheat less because they're trying to prove themselves all the time, right?

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There's two different types of imposter syndrome.

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You have the true imposters who really just, they really do think that.

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It's probably these people at McKenzie.

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They really think they are imposters.

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They really do have a negative self-evaluation.

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kind of like this.

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Oh, they like downplay themselves.

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They downplay it because it's more of a social saving face type of thing.

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Interesting.

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They actually are accurate in their assessments.

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Yeah.

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But they just downplay as kind of a socially acceptable way.

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Kind of a humility performative type thing.

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Showing how humble I am.

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Yeah.

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Right.

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You mentioned something a few minutes ago that I want to double click on because I do think it's important.

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I don't want to let it just pass because it is actually really important.

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You pointed out, you said like anytime you are put in a situation that maybe stretches you beyond your current level of competence, you know,

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it is natural and expected that you should feel a little bit imposter-ish, right?

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I mean, you see this a lot, you know, people who get maybe a big raise or a big promotion or start in a new career or a new company or whatever.

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I've seen this with friends with, like, when they become parents for the first time.

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They're like...

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I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.

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Like, why is anybody trusting me to like take care of this thing?

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It's a very natural response.

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There's that old quadrant thing, right?

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Where you start at unconscious incompetence, then you go to conscious incompetence, then conscious, conscious competence, then unconscious competence.

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You are being thrust back into the quadrant of conscious incompetence.

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You are, you are suddenly very aware of all the things you don't understand and you, all the skills you have not yet adopted.

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Yeah.

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But that discomfort and that feeling is what forces you to adopt those skills.

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That's a healthy place to be.

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Right.

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That's where growth happens.

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The closest thing we have to like a mechanism for it, it's called the spotlight effect, right?

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We overestimate how much we think people are paying attention to us, right?

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And they've done various different studies on this.

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Basically, that's kind of the underlying mechanism is that we overestimate, oh, everybody's looking at me.

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I got this new job.

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You know, I got this promotion.

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Now everybody's looking at me when it's like, everybody's kind of like, oh yeah, he's there.

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Cool.

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Yeah.

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Moving on.

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People tend to overestimate this one.

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There's this kind of like cool study they did where it was back in the 2000s where they had people put on a Barry Manilow shirt, which for college kids back then, it was like that was embarrassing.

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Fuck yeah.

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Right?

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Let's go.

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Barry Manilow.

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That was embarrassing for them.

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And they predicted about half of the people who put this on thought, oh, yeah, everybody's looking at me and making fun of me.

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It was only about a quarter of the people, not half.

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So it's just a simple example of how we overestimate it.

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You probably remember this.

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I did a video a few years ago about the spotlight effect.

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I went down the Venice boardwalk in a chicken suit.

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I delivered the entire video in the chicken suit.

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Nobody stopped me.

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Nobody said anything.

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Nobody cared.

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The whole video is about how like nobody fucking cares.

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Nobody's nobody's paying attention.

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Everybody's going to forget the spotlight effect thing is important because, again, a lot of our understanding of what is reality, right?

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what is evidence, is socially based, you know?

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So if we assume everybody's looking at us and expecting certain things from us falsely, then we can draw the wrong conclusions about our own competence.

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I've seen a handful of people in our industry who have, like, very publicly said that imposter syndrome is, like,

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not a thing and you should never feel it.

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And I just think that's like the most fucked up.

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That's a really good point.

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Unrealistic.

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Because if you were the type of person who never feels imposter syndrome, never feels like you need to learn more and grow to earn the spot that you're in, there's another name for that.

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And that is our next miscalibration, which is narcissism.

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Congratulations.

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You made it to the end of this clip.

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This is actually part of a larger podcast episode and you can get access to the full episode right here.