I’ve seen various posts detail advice for dealing with impostor syndrome. I know that I have impostor syndrome, but what I struggle with most is knowing when it’s merited. In EA, it’s really hard to know if you’re doing enough, especially when you could almost certainly be doing something better at any given time.
One way that I try to check impostor syndrome with myself is by asking “Do I feel like I fully tried to achieve this goal and failed? Or did I mostly shy away from it due to fear of failure and, because I didn’t fully try, failed?” But, this leaves ambiguous cases. Sometimes I’ve kind of tried things multiple times, but without full conviction, and am unsure if I’ll ever be able to get over my fear enough actually fully try. In this case, I find it hard to differentiate between being an impostor and being a bad fit because I have too big of a mental block.
I think it would be useful to hear people’s general advice on figuring out when something is impostor syndrome vs when you have evidence that you aren’t skilled/a good enough fit for a task. I’d be especially interested in hearing from people who have either:
- felt like they weren’t achieving enough in a role, quit that role, and in retrospect still agree that quitting let someone more capable take on their initial role
- felt like they had a large mental block that didn’t let them approach some type of work they found important, but were able to get over that block and now see their earlier block as impostor syndrome
This post was from over a year ago (sorry to comment so late) but came across it via the imposter syndrome tag, and just wanted to highlight that a recent 80k after hours podcast discussed this somewhat; especially segment from 16:42.
Hi Aris,
I’m new here but have done unstructured altruistic pursuits in the past. Unfortunately, the nature of EA is quite difficult to parse for what we are tackling collectively here are high level, highly technical problems in the future which is probably as worst as anyone can get to tackle with impostor syndrome mechanic.
However, having done multiple projects that work and do not work, I have found that you over deliver always in anything you do in life so that you do not end up feeling lost when sudden mishaps or walls popping out of nowhere.
Some that got faster to goal had luck with them in favor. Most of us will not have that right situation and timing and have to do the grind.
All the best,
Miguel