I am entirely in favor of this article's exhortation to resilience. But this post seems to confuse feeling inadequate (or feeling like an impostor) with <i>impostor syndrome</i> [1], an inability to properly recognize one's accomplishments.<p>The author describes feeling like an impostor when they were, by objective measure, behind their peers. People experiencing impostor syndrome, on the other hand, are by objective standards doing just fine, but still have strong feelings that they are a fraud.<p>It's an important distinction to me because the way you help people who are behind is different than the way you help people with impostor syndrome. Encouraging grit in those who are behind can be very helpful. But I don't think telling people with impostor syndrome to be tougher is a good idea; it just gives them another way to perceive themselves as not good enough.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome</a>
I'll just post this quick note about resilience that the article talks about: often, the picture that we see is of a lonely scientist with long white hair thinking endlessly about a problem and the solution showing up after intense mental effort. While this might be true for some gifted individuals, for the rest of us mortals, perseverance comes more by just trying everyday to understand something, and trying different approaches and stuff. In short, not one burst of effort, but little attacks over a period of time, which slowly whittle away at the problem. The ability to maintain you enthusiasm through this process...that is what I personally think of as resilience. And a great way to maintain that enthusiasm is simply...to enjoy the process of attacking the problem as much as finding the solution :).
I have a hunch that impostor syndrome is also a symptom of poor / unempathetic* management - while the implication that there might be something 'wrong' with the individual may or may not be true, I would not be surprised if impostor syndrome could be partially accounted for by a difference in how people process and express prosocial cues.<p>*unempathetic in the scientific sense; of not being able to fully comprehend how and why a person is thinking and feeling the way they do.<p>Also, it is probably more important to tell people that personality is malleable and can change - this seems to be one of the root causes of resiliency (C. Dweck et al., 2014).
An interesting stat to keep in mind about imposter syndrome: about 2/3 of people accepted at Stanford Business School feel they don't really deserve to be here.
Source: "The Charisma Myth", Olivia Fox Cabane.
I think this is something we need to work on at the cultural level, not just the individual level. I gave up a national merit scholarship and quit college to walk away from the really toxic shit that bright kids are drowning in. I am tempted to start a blog post about that, in response to this.