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Ask HN: What ways have worked for you to overcome 'imposter syndrome'?

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11–20 of 159 posts

Re: Ask HN: What ways have worked for you to overcome 'imposter syndrome'?

#11

Ship product. Ship as much as you can as often as you can. Finish a project by yourself, finish one with a team. And then do another. Any feeling of inadequacy can disappear if you sit back and think about stuff you've finished. Because it's finished. All the HN comments and soap boxing in the world can't match a finished work.

This is a great answer. I still think I am clueless, but if I look back at the list of things I have done I am happy enough with myself.

I may be clueless, but at least I have tried many things. Some even worked!

Re: Ask HN: What ways have worked for you to overcome 'imposter syndrome'?

#13
post #9

IMHO imposter syndrome isn't a "thing" or if it is, it's a few things: 1) You just got your first job and you are right out of school. They call you a "programmer" or "analyst" etc, but you don't know the profession or business and don't know what you're capable of. You'll outgrow it by hard work and learning. 2) The feeling many experts have after a long career that "any smart person could do this if they had the ti…

> I have to think that what we call "imposter syndrome" is, in at least 25% of cases, and extremely useful internal guide that you need to step up your output. The solution is to do work where the direct output is something useful.

I think you're onto something here. Some cases, at least, are less a feeling that you don't belong there, and more a feeling that you're not performing as well as you know you can.

Re: Ask HN: What ways have worked for you to overcome 'imposter syndrome'?

#15
post #9

IMHO imposter syndrome isn't a "thing" or if it is, it's a few things: 1) You just got your first job and you are right out of school. They call you a "programmer" or "analyst" etc, but you don't know the profession or business and don't know what you're capable of. You'll outgrow it by hard work and learning. 2) The feeling many experts have after a long career that "any smart person could do this if they had the ti…

While I respect your opinion, I think that there are a large number of people who struggle with the feeling of not having accomplished anything / not being "good enough" even in be face of what most would consider career success.

Psychology has some terminology for this: cognitive distortions, and in particular, minimization and magnification. Whether it's due to upbringing, environment, what have you, some large number of people tend to discount their successes and zero in on whatever they see as their flaws or failures.

The field of CBT is one way to work with this. I particularly like the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, which talks about how the stories we tell ourselves about success and failure lead to happiness / optimism or depression / pessimism. He also talks about some of the research that's been done to help change peoples' explanatory style.

This + meditation has been helpful to me, as well as trying to take other peoples' positive feedback to heart more, rather than discounting it as politeness.

Also, although I think it can be helpful to produce things, I feel like your advice can feed into the story of "not doing enough," even if they are. There probably are some people who feel this way because they're actually not doing much, but I feel like a lot of the people on this site are more likely to be the types with unrealistically high standards whose problems are not their output, but their perception of their output.

On that note, spending less time on HN and more time with friends / family / doing other things you enjoy can also be helpful, as it helps to diversify your identity.

Re: Ask HN: What ways have worked for you to overcome 'imposter syndrome'?

#16
Conducting interviews really helps put things in perspective. Or, once someone is hired, attempting to delegate some of your work to them.

Alternatively, try picturing what you would do to train people for the work you do. Think about people you know (even marginally) that are in the same field as you, and then try to figure out who could do as good of a job as you, or identify what they would have to learn. It's in scenarios like this, you realize just how much you know - not just about your particular job, but about your field in general.

On the flip side, you really don't want to be irreplaceable, and if you find yourself doing a lot of work because you think it will take longer to explain the task than to do it yourself, then you've got other problems to work on.

Re: Ask HN: What ways have worked for you to overcome 'imposter syndrome'?

#17

Ship product. Ship as much as you can as often as you can. Finish a project by yourself, finish one with a team. And then do another. Any feeling of inadequacy can disappear if you sit back and think about stuff you've finished. Because it's finished. All the HN comments and soap boxing in the world can't match a finished work.

This is a great answer. I still think I am clueless, but if I look back at the list of things I have done I am happy enough with myself. I may be clueless, but at least I have tried many things. Some even worked!

> if I look back at the list of things I have done I am happy enough with myself.

This is so true, and can be extrapolated on a micro-level, by tracking what you learn and accomplish on a daily (or whatever) basis.

I've found training your attention this way a great hack for building confidence and momentum. It's kind of like watching a plant grow. You normally don't notice all the little things, until it adds up to magic.

Shameless plug, but one thing I'm proud of building was a micro-notes app for tracking these micro-accomplishments. https://www.bicycl.com

Re: Ask HN: What ways have worked for you to overcome 'imposter syndrome'?

#18
post #7

Learn Haskell. The long version of this is "acquire any non-mainstream skill to a degree most will never match." Once you know something well that most people think is impossible, incomprehensible, or just too much work, your viewpoint changes. "I picked up this skill people say is hard, but it's really not. It's just another thing to learn," is an amazing antidote to imposter syndrome. It shows you that you can lear…

Assembler would be more valuable I would think. You get a better understanding of how the machine works.

Re: Ask HN: What ways have worked for you to overcome 'imposter syndrome'?

#19
Focus on learning a little bit more everyday. Spend more time in your specific developer community, those are the peers you should judge your progress against. Articles on the front page of HN often go deep into a topic, you can't be expected to understand everything on that level.

Re: Ask HN: What ways have worked for you to overcome 'imposter syndrome'?

#20

Ship product. Ship as much as you can as often as you can. Finish a project by yourself, finish one with a team. And then do another. Any feeling of inadequacy can disappear if you sit back and think about stuff you've finished. Because it's finished. All the HN comments and soap boxing in the world can't match a finished work.

To add onto this: narrow scope if you're still struggling to ship product. I know I've been guilty of biting off more than I can chew, then feeling inadequate when I fail to deliver (or deliver much less than hoped).
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