Conquering Imposter Syndrome
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Questions
Since becoming an investor last year when I joined Prime Movers Lab, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with hundreds of entrepreneurs. One of the things that’s jumped out at me is where people fall on the spectrum of external confidence. On one end, you have extreme humility that can cross over to meekness. On the other end, you have extreme external confidence, that can come off as brash and arrogant. Our partner and executive coach Decker uses a surfing analogy to describe this dynamic. The first group collapses, the wave passes them by before they even have a chance to paddle or get up. The second group is posturing, they’re overzealous and get too far in front of the wave and get knocked off. Ideally you can find yourself at the center — finding the balance between humility and dignity.
While we’ve all found ourselves on different parts of this spectrum, what I’m most interested in for this post are the situations where one displays external confidence but internally is experiencing strong doubt. This post is for the first-time founder hyping themselves up to make a big presentation to her team about why they need to shift strategy but is worried that she won’t be able to pull it off. The CEO who is about to go pitch a giant customer that would double their sales and wondering if he’s way over his head. It’s for the college graduate starting his first job and asking if he has what it takes. This is the information I wish I had when I went through those situations. Dealing with Imposter Syndrome: feelings of self-doubt and worry about being exposed as a fraud. It’s when you’re trying to “fake it till you make it” but are worried that you won’t make it.
The road to self-doubt is paved with external comparisons. Prior to joining Prime Movers Lab, I cofounded and was the CEO of Asseta, a B2B marketplace for manufacturing equipment. In the second year of the company we were accepted into Y-Combinator, the world’s premier startup accelerator. I was 24 at the time and still very much trying to find my footing as a CEO. We were one of about 50 companies in the batch and we would all get together a few times a week for presentations, coaching and meals together. The founders ran the gamut from other first-time founders like ourselves, to much more experienced teams with prior exits. Being an extremely competitive person, I couldn’t help but compare myself to my peers. Frankly it was partially encouraged — one day we all voted on which companies we thought would be most successful and shared the results! I was confident that we were going to be the most successful but at the same time these pesky questions kept coming up. Should I be more like founder X? Am I as inspiring as founder Y? Do I have what it takes to be in this role? Am I the right person to be in charge?
Imposter Syndrome is often driven by these types of external comparisons. They’re a misleading way to self-evaluate because they offer a very limited snapshot of reality. You might feel inadequate because of your perception of someone who seems more successful than you but you don’t know the journey they took to get there. Also, unless you’re close with them, you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes — looks can be deceiving. The solution is what the stoics figured out a few thousand years ago — focus on what’s in your control. In this case, your own self-development. The surest way to answer those questions is to keep improving over time and keep the comparisons to yourself. How do I compare to myself from one month ago, one year ago, etc.
Realizing that everyone, even our heroes, more or less start in the same place and shifting your focus on your own growth is incredibly empowering. This Steve Jobs quote puts it perfectly,
When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
The second part of the solution, and what took me much longer to figure out, is to embrace these questions! Humility can be a superpower and if you’re someone that experiences a lot of this self-talk you have a massive opportunity. Self-awareness and self-questioning is how you identify the blind spots where you need to grow. The fact is a lot of those other YC founders really were further along than I was. Acknowledging that allowed me to figure out what I needed to work on. The goal isn’t to stop the questions, it’s to use them.
Imposter Syndrome is a problem when those questions get stuck on repeat in your head and leads to paralysis. The idea is to instead acknowledge the feeling of doubt, quickly determine if there’s truth to it, adjust accordingly and then let the feeling pass. The last part is the trickiest but like any practice, it becomes more reflexive the more you do it. It’s also helpful to identify your own personal signals for when the questions cross-over to being unproductive: spending more than a few minutes thinking about it, tightness in your chest, hands become sweaty, etc. And while you can figure all this out on your own, leaning on a peer, spouse, coach, etc. can be extremely effective. It’s often much easier for someone who knows you well to give you a reality check than yourself, i.e. yes, you’re right to be worrying about this or no, you’re overthinking it.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and computing
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