Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

IMHO imposter syndrome isn't a "thing" or if it is, it's a few things:

1) You just got your first job and you are right out of school. They call you a "programmer" or "analyst" etc, but you don't know the profession or business and don't know what you're capable of. You'll outgrow it by hard work and learning.

2) The feeling many experts have after a long career that "any smart person could do this if they had the time and inclination". It's usually not true (because they overestimate capabilities of others, assuming they are like them), but I think it feeds into the humility you often see among the truly capable.

3) People who have remunerative yet non-productive jobs where you can get paid lots of money but your production is very abstract or secondary or even tertiary (or worse) to your direct output. This is the kind of person who talks about imposter syndrome at TED talks.

I have to think that what we call "imposter syndrome" is, in at least 25% of cases, and extremely useful internal guide that you need to step up your output. The solution is to do work where the direct output is something useful.

While I respect your opinion, I think that there are a large number of people who struggle with the feeling of not having accomplished anything / not being "good enough" even in be face of what most would consider career success.

Psychology has some terminology for this: cognitive distortions, and in particular, minimization and magnification. Whether it's due to upbringing, environment, what have you, some large number of people tend to discount their successes and zero in on whatever they see as their flaws or failures.

The field of CBT is one way to work with this. I particularly like the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, which talks about how the stories we tell ourselves about success and failure lead to happiness / optimism or depression / pessimism. He also talks about some of the research that's been done to help change peoples' explanatory style.

This + meditation has been helpful to me, as well as trying to take other peoples' positive feedback to heart more, rather than discounting it as politeness.

Also, although I think it can be helpful to produce things, I feel like your advice can feed into the story of "not doing enough," even if they are. There probably are some people who feel this way because they're actually not doing much, but I feel like a lot of the people on this site are more likely to be the types with unrealistically high standards whose problems are not their output, but their perception of their output.

On that note, spending less time on HN and more time with friends / family / doing other things you enjoy can also be helpful, as it helps to diversify your identity.

This is rather good advice. To add to that I would recommend reading Feeling good by David burns. It has a lot of exercises, especially the Vertical Arrow technique that can really help OP.

Will read it after I finish 'Reinventing Your Life', another book that was recommended to me.

> I have to think that what we call "imposter syndrome" is, in at least 25% of cases, and extremely useful internal guide that you need to step up your output. The solution is to do work where the direct output is something useful.

I think you're onto something here. Some cases, at least, are less a feeling that you don't belong there, and more a feeling that you're not performing as well as you know you can.

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