The Impostor Syndrome By Angela Mugo

I have met  a lot of brilliant people in my day. At events, walking...


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I have met  a lot of brilliant people in my day. At events, walking down the streets and every now and then, I will look at someone and my mind will be blown away by how amazing they are.
Recently, I watched someone solve a Rubix cube in under 5 minutes. This was just so mind blowing, the elegance in which he did it was simply amazing. The most common factor among them is that they struggle with feelings of insufficiency. Even at your workplace, if you observe the best worker, they are always anxious that they are not good enough. They spend their life watching over their backs so that someone does not realise they are not as good as they seem. Look at your life too, what is it that you do really well? Do you find yourself plagued by the fear that someone better will come along and obliterate your whole existence? This is called  the impostor syndrome.
I recently listened to a talk by one of the most  brilliant software developers of our time. His name is Kent Beck, the father of test driven development. In his talk, he speaks about how his first days at Facebook were darkened by his constant fear of not measuring up. Here was an amazing developer who has written books yet he still feels inadequate. This just blew my mind. He went on to say that due to him entertaining these thoughts,  he had trouble delivering during his first few months there.

This talk hit so close to home because recently I have been struggling with this. I am at a place where everyone is brilliant. I mean water cooler banter revolves around the black hole, is it a possibility to replicate the sun and such cool things. as we all do, when you find yourself missing one thing, we tend to capitalise it and hate ourselves based on that one thing. We diminish ourselves and believe that just because  we did not know that one time, we are dumber than a bag of rocks.

I will share some really good advise I got from a friend today. He told me that the upside of being green is that it is easy to learn new things. he asserted that as long as I was willing to put in work, the outcome would be tenfold. he told me to focus on what I learn each day as opposed to what I am yet to learn. This way I am assured I will get this monkey called impostor syndrome off my back.

 
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