# A credible fraud

> Impostor syndrome is defined as self-doubt among high achievers. Idiots don't get it. That is the comforting part.

URL: https://onetotem.com/blog/a-credible-fraud/
Lang: en

Impostor syndrome is a self-perception: the sense that we are not as good at what we do as people believe, and that sooner or later they will find out. It generates anxiety, stress and other creatures of the night. There is no solid clinical consensus about it, so take what follows as a position, not a diagnosis.

Here is the position. That small voice that occasionally whispers that the thing in your hands is too big for you is real, and in practice it is irrelevant unless you choose to make it relevant. It is irrelevant even when it is right.

The Argentine writer and radio host [Alejandro Dolina](https://venganzasdelpasado.com.ar/) used to tell the story of a young man who, trying to impress a girl, blurts out that he is halfway through medical school. The romance prospers. The family starts calling for advice: a headache, the kid's arm, grandma's hip. He buys a general medicine handbook and flips through it, desperate, before every answer. Time passes; he keeps answering, gets engaged, gets married. All while attending night classes to actually become a doctor.

If people perceive you as exceptional and you perceive yourself as a mess, what decides is the impact on the people in front of you. Fake it till you make it is not a lie when it comes with the night classes attached.

The comforting footnote comes from the literature. The US National Institutes of Health describe impostor syndrome as self-doubt of intellect, skills, or accomplishments among high-achieving individuals. High. Achieving. Individuals. Idiots don't get impostor syndrome; they get the opposite. Dunning and Kruger showed in 1999 that the less you know about a subject, the more you overestimate your ability, because the skill you lack is the same skill you would need to notice what is missing.

Why we talk about this at work: we sell expertise, and you cannot sell or produce expertise while convinced you are not worth it. Confidence in the work is part of the deliverable. Teams like ours, high intelligence and low ego, grow well as a group precisely because nobody defends territory, and the price of that is self-esteem that needs deliberate building. So we treat the impostor's shadow like weather: it will show up, and the escape route is the one the Dunning-Kruger curve draws on the map. Work at getting better, practice the new skill, say it out loud, ask peers for feedback. The voice does not argue back against evidence.

_First published in our internal knowledgebase in August 2024. Adapted for the blog._