Imposter syndrome

It’s rampant.

The big reason is that we’re all impostors.

You’re not imagining that you’re an impostor, it’s likely that you are one.

Everyone who is doing important work is working on something that might not work. And it’s extremely likely that they’re also not the very best qualified person on the planet to be doing that work.

How could it be any other way?

The odds that a pure meritocracy chose you and you alone to inhabit your spot on the ladder is worthy of Dunning-Kruger status. You’ve been getting lucky breaks for a long time. We all have.

Yes, you’re an imposter. So am I and so is everyone else.

Superman still lives on Krypton and the rest of us are just doing our best.

Isn’t doing your best all you can do? Dropping the narrative of the impostor isn’t arrogant, it’s merely a useful way to get your work done without giving into Resistance.

Time spent fretting about our status as impostors is time away from dancing with our fear, from leading and from doing work that matters.

Can you discriminate among Impossible, Unlikely or Difficult? Machine readable work?

Difficult tasks have a road map.

With effort, you realize that difficult is easy once you have the resources and commitment. Paving a road is difficult, so is customer service and fixing software bugs.

But impossible and unlikely are where we get hung up.

On Tuesday, Apple launched a thousand dollar phone. The engineers and designers had unlimited time (ten years since the first one), unlimited resources, unlimited market power.

It’s possible that there hasn’t been that much unlimited in one place in our entire lives. And, yet, all they could build was an animated emoji machine. A slightly better phone. A series of difficult tasks, mostly achieved.

It’s not that another breakthrough is impossible. It’s not that we’ve explored all the edges of human connectivity, of alternative currencies, of education, of personal transformation or generosity.

It’s not that we’ve already performed all the leaps in safety, in technology, in identity. Or even productivity.

Of course not. It’s not impossible to leap again with the magic computer we all have in our pocket.

What tripped up Apple, as it trips up many successful organizations or careers, is that the next leap isn’t impossible… it’s merely unlikely.

It was unlikely that the original iPhone would have actually been transformative, but Steve took a huge leap and got lucky on the other side. It could easily have gone sideways. He tried for something that was unlikely to work, but it did.

That same sort of leap, the one into the unlikely, is available to all of us, at different scales. It’s unlikely that our next brave novel, our next breakthrough speech, our next scary but generous project will succeed.

Unlikely but worth it.

Unlikely never feels quite the same as difficult, and sometimes it appears impossible. It’s neither. It’s something risky, and something without a map or a guarantee. We hesitate to do it precisely because it might not work, precisely because it’s more than difficult.

Working on an unlikely project takes guts and hubris. It requires us to have the insight to distinguish it from the impossible, and the desire to not merely do the difficult.

What percentage of your time are you spending on the unlikely?