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

Someone who's experienced and whom you trust to tell you "everybody is cooking with water".

What's really scary is when you realize that almost nobody, no matter how successful, knows what they are doing. We're all just making it up as we go.

I've experienced imposter syndrome. For me it was the result of being too dependant on being good at tech to give me self esteem.

A more robust way to get self esteem is to get it from multiple sources. E.g. Volunteering has helped me a lot. Coaching others some coding skills reminds me that I actually do know a lot.

Also I think the thing that will help the most is to be less tech focused. Meet up with family and friends more. Exercise with others.

- To build confidence: work on personal projects. Set achievable milestones and meet them. There are a lot of new posts on hacker news, but most of them won't apply to your projects and you'll be able to ignore them.

- Concentrate on problems and how to solve them. Ask questions. Do research.

- Think of yourself as a professional providing a professional service to the best of your knowledge and abilities. Sometimes you don't have all the answers.

Remember: your job as a professional is to not worry about yourself or what others think of you.

Lifelong sufferer of impostor syndrome here (after having failed university), now Cofounder & CTO of a pretty successful Series B startup:

1. Work together with awesome people who can reflect you. Now that I'm working together with world class founders that I fully trust and we're doing regular feedback sessions with each other, I can take confirmation of my abilities much more serious from them than from anyone else.

2. Practice self-love and compassion. No, really. I'm serious, there's a ton of studies about this. Get a therapist. Best thing I've ever done for myself.

3. If you compare yourself all the time with others, that's okay - but do so fairly. People like us love choosing the best ones worldwide for comparison and that does nothing but inflict useless pain. Instead, take the next 10 of [insert your job title here] that you can think of and compare yourself with them. If you compare favorably with at least half, you're average already (which means you're not an impostor).

4. Keep this diagram in mind: https://twitter.com/rundavidrun/status/587671657193455616 Big part of impostor syndrome is devaluing the stuff you already know (but others don't) since it's "common knowledge". If someone else appears to know more than you, they're probably just as smart as you are. If they know as much as you do, they're certainly less able.

5. Fake it 'till you make it. Citing http://www.defmacro.org/2014/10/03/engman.html here: "Believe in yourself. You can’t lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse."

6. Ask yourself better questions. Tony Robbins once quipped: "Your brain is a computer and it will try to answer any question you give it. You may not like the answer though." So instead of asking yourself

7. Success definitely helps, but it doesn't cure. It's also the hardest to come by as there's some luck, good timing and great people involved along the way, so work mostly on the other things instead.

8. If you still think you're an impostor, rest assured you're in good company. We impostors are pretty smart people. Frank Abignale passed his bar exam without cheating and Ferdinand Waldo Demara successfully operated on people as an untrained surgeon. :)

I think by now I'm 50% done with that topic, and as `hajak` wonderfully put it - don't worry too much about it, it's not just a curse, there's good sides about it too.

EDIT: Slightly amended the list and copyediting