You are better than you think
The honest dishonesty of impostor syndrome
We brought in a candidate for the UX designer position. I knew their skills and abilities, but from the backchannel it was clear that they weren’t getting that through to everyone in the interview loop.
When I sat in front of them at the end, having seen their portfolio and their ability to get things done, and their insecurity about both those things, I ended our conversation this way:
“If there’s one thing I’d like you to take away from this experience, it’s that you are better than you think. Don’t ever forget that.”
In an industry full of highly intelligent people like tech, impostor syndrome is going to run rampant. We will never measure up to our Stanford/MIT/CalTech degreed co-workers. One day, everyone else will figure it out, and we’ll be found out as the frauds we are.
I feel that all the time. My degree is from the University of Colorado, not Carnegie Mellon, or Savannah College of Art and Design. Worse still, it was a BA in Environmental Studies, not Fine Arts, not Human Computer Interaction, not even Computer Science. I could qualify for Mensa (if I cared about such things), but I still feel like someone is going to call me out on not knowing enough, insisting that I do not belong with these people.
And so, I struggle with being able to take credit for what I do. I don’t want an ego. I don’t want people to make too much of me. But in doing so, I’m denying myself the acceptance that, perhaps, I’m actually good at what I do. Perhaps even great. But better that than getting puffed up, becoming an even bigger target for that straight pin someone will stick in me once they know what I fraud I really am. I’m left feeling as jittery as someone in Tornado Alley just waiting for the big storm to come and blow me away.
I tell myself “you’re better than you think” all the time. I’m not a failure. I have accomplished a ton in my last 15 years of working on the web. I’ve shipped websites, software. I’ve written, spoken, evangelized. I sat on (perhaps too many) committees. I have a portfolio that shows I’ve executed, over and over again, with better quality every time.
As I’ve gone out on these “coffee dates” with recruiters and future employers, I bring along the artifacts of the last years of web and UX design, telling them the story, to see how they react. I’m bracing for the “it’s clear you are a fraud” speech, but instead it’s almost always, “this is great work,” followed by a civil discussion about how I can make the story better.
There’s no reason I should feel like a fraud. And yet, 15 years in, I still live in fear of being found out. Undoing that feeling takes time. It starts with “you are better than you think,” but I’m still not sure how to get all the way out of this place. So I keep executing. I keep telling the stories. And I keep moving between giving good advice to good designers, and trying to remember to heed that advice myself.
