The Pleasure of Practicing: A Musician’s Account of Overcoming Impostor Syndrome

But isn't the thing about imposter syndrome that it's not about whether YOU think the musician is good, but whether THEY think they are. As an amateur musician I can totally understand feeling like I'm really not that good, even if other people tell me I am - I just assume they didn't hear that sour note in the 3rd lick I played, or that they didn't notice I should've played a certain phrase more staccato. Especially when I hear recordings of myself, all I hear is the bum notes or the missed opportunities to do something better than I actually did. Even if I put on a performance that people say they enjoy, I often feel like it was just dreadful and I shouldn't have been on stage in the first place. To me, that's exactly what imposter syndrome describes.

(Not trying to throw a pity party...I love music and will happily keep playing anywhere that will let me for the rest of my life.)

My opinion, based on my own circumstances and knowing others who feel the same way, is that some people in general have 'imposters syndrome' for whatever they do. Due to lack of self-confidence, I personally often feel like a 'fake' developer, 'fake' bass player, 'fake' husband, 'fake' son, 'fake' father, but over the years I've come to realise what I feel and experience isn't how other people perceive me. I've also tried to look at my capabilities and achievements through the eyes of others, and most of the time I came off as 'better' than I feel myself to be.

TL;DR - imposters syndrome is more a function of a person's general character rather than a specific thing they do (or so I postulate).

The article doesn't mention Carnegie Hall (or Lollapalooza, or Coachella, or any of representatives of their equivalence class). And in any case, that doesn't seem to have been the author's point, from my reading. If anything, it was the exact opposite of his point.

It became evident at an early age that I was not the next Jimmy Page.

Just as it must have been, at a certain point, manifestly evident to both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant that neither of them were the next Skip James. Not even a million, trillion miles from it. And yet... they just kept doing what they were doing.

Do you see where this is getting at?

The phenomenon is highly common among high-achievers which is why Popova references it.

I was among the best in my year on my instrument in the country. I went to one of the top music schools in the world, and then I moved to New York to keep studying and start working as a musician. Some time in the middle of the financial crisis, I got tired of being broke all the time, and of constantly battling injuries (that's thing you've probably never had to worry about, as an amateur musician. Your arm is sore? You get to take a few days off!), and teaching music to the spoiled children of the masters of the universe. I learned to code and started working as a programmer.

Everyone who has ever been among the best, but didn't quite make it, has to, at some point, decide they didn't make it, and quit. Once I quit, I barely touched my instrument for two years. Playing when you're out of practice can be pretty painful to someone who is highly trained. You've worked for years toward perfection and then you just have to start accepting... less than that.

Here's another thing that happens when you quit: you have a constant voice in the back of your mind wondering whether you gave up too easily. You were there with the best people in the world, and now you watch them take their place among the leading lights of the art, and you can't stop picturing yourself among them. It's not whining, it's the painful experience of giving up your lifelong image of yourself. Being a musician, a top level, professional musician, dominates your whole identity. Try to imagine this: rather than finding out at an early age that you're not the next Jimmy Page, you get very good very quickly at a young age, and people start telling you, hey, you could be the next Jimmy Page. You work for decades to get good enough, sacrificing your personal relationships, your childhood, choosing over and over again to stay in and work instead of doing whatever else you could be doing, and then at age 30 after years of near misses and barely scraping by, you realize you're just not the next Jimmy Page. It's not an early realization, it's a gradual defeat. And it's devastating.

Regarding imposter syndrome, there have been studies of musicians using the standard "sandwich method" of delivering criticism, in which the criticism is sandwiched between two compliments. Trained musicians often don't hear or register the compliments at all. I had this experience with my girlfriend recently. She played some excerpts for me, I said, "wow you sound great, I liked X and Y. Here are a few things you should work on." She asked me later if I thought she was complete shit. I said, "I said you sounded great," and she said "You did?" She literally had not even heard me say I thought she sounded great.

Here's another fact about the music world. People are often loath to tell you that you don't sound good (or don't sound great). Musicians know this, and so every time someone tells you that performance was great, there's a little part of you that wonders if you're being lied to. Often you'll get hired by a contractor to play a gig, and then never get called by them again. Sometimes that's because they have their regular people and you were just a stand in, or because they died or moved or whatever. Other times it's because they didn't like your playing. But they never tell you which one it is. So every time you don't get called back for a gig, regardless of what the actual reason is, there's a chance it's because you weren't good enough. Feedback is not consistent and it is not reliable.

So given those two facts, is it a wonder musicians can suffer from imposter syndrome? It's not a question of, "people will realize I can't play guitar," it's the very fine line between being very very good, and being great. Regardless of which side of the line you're on, you're always wondering.

Does that clear things up?