Impostor Syndrome and The Anatomy Of Perfection
Initially published in the June 2021 issue of “Epistle”, the newsletter of Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore.
Over the last 28 days, whenever I sat down to write this piece, the voice in my head crippled the attempt : “You think you’re qualified to put out advice? What could you possibly write that’ll be any good?”. I never had an authentic answer and put the task aside. Until this morning.
Often, when one can’t think of an answer, posing a different question can help. This morning I asked that voice a question that silenced it. For half a day, the words just flowed and I lost all sense of time and self. I was just here and now. As soon as I finished this draft, however, the voice was back, stronger than ever : This is horrible! Makes no sense. Reads like a stream of consciousness. The ideas are all over the place. Nobody will get it. Not. Good. Enough.
Does this seem familiar? Perfection. Expertise. Genius. Flawlessness. Ideas planted so deep in our subconscious that we can’t even tell that they’re not our own. We act accordingly - our days and decisions but an illusion of free will.
I’m somewhat an expert on self doubt. Or maybe I’m not? Actually, I don't think I am. Wait, do I need to be an expert on something to talk about it? What is an expert, anyway? Do you stop growing when you’re an expert; when you’re finally perfect? What do you do then? How dreadfully boring! What a waste of these precious few years of being. I’ll have all the time in the world to be perfect when I’m dead.
Has the voice in your head convinced you that you’re an impostor, a hack or a fraud? Are you afraid of being discovered for the clueless bundle of ideas you really are? Being caught?
Caught. Bowled. This reminds me of a picture I once took. A little over a decade ago, a bunch of us happened to be engaged in a game of cricket. A college match between KMC Mangalore’s MBBS batch of 2007 and 2008. There are two stories in this picture and only one of them happened in front of the camera.
Vasu (’07) to Siddharth (’08). A thick edge off of Siddharth’s bat sends the ball flying above Vasu’s head. Not the tallest of our lot but in tune with the moment, Vasu’s instincts take over and he leaps up to grab it. A fraction of a second and it’s all over. Caught and bowled. The sophomores bring the title home. The team gathers around and smothers him in hugs as the crowd erupts into endless applause. He just has a gentle smile on his face - nothing out of the ordinary.
Beyond the boundary line, I work my first DSLR and the only lens I could afford - an old repurposed super-telephoto with fried electronics that crashes the camera after each click. A battery remove-reinstall routine is the only way to keep shooting and most images are horrible misses. I’m not thinking about any of that. The battery routine is on muscle memory and I’m satisfied with one shot per ball. I’m not what they call a “photographer” yet and there are no expectations. Then comes this beauty of catch - and I get it on camera. The decisive moment, if you will. A quick glimpse at the screen and a transient smile - I flick the battery out, reinstall it and keep shooting.
What’s missing from these two stories is any trace of self awareness and hence, self-doubt. Transient Hypofrontality or the flow state - when your brain has so little to think about that everything else it does is hyper efficient. “Lose yourself in the moment” and the mind and body communicate without friction. Outcomes don’t matter, only the task at hand. In hindsight, you could attribute these flow states to my love for photography or Vasu’s love for cricket - but in the moment, there is no love. There is no “I” either. The idea of self dissolves and gives way to pure action. The Buddhists call this detachment but you don’t need to spend years meditating under a tree to experience it. In fact, I bet you already do - many times each day.
On the other hand, however, is post-modern society’s demand for perfection. A concept inherently unattainable, yet human nature often responds to it paradoxically by crippling itself in a cluster of self disqualifying thoughts commonly referred to as Impostor Syndrome. Shorthand for the doubt that creeps in whenever we try to go beyond what we know we are capable of, regardless of how capable we actually might become. When we’re quick to credit any success to chance and every failure to personal inability. It’s more common than you might think and fighting it off is often a solitary pursuit.
Over the last few years, I've tried to silence this inner critic and do everything I want to. Some of these things seem downright ridiculous to the world inside and outside my head but I’m getting used to not caring about the opinion of either. I’m learning to value chance and effort over natural ability. To prefer process over outcome. To be wary of giving in to social validation over a calm and clear mind.
A lot of this goes against what we’ve been taught by society, media, family and school - but then again, common ideas lead to common results. Here are a few realisations and axioms that I keep going back to whenever the monkey brain and its chatter becomes too loud. To keep the impostor at bay and choose action over perfection. It’s been challenging but these have helped me along the way and maybe they’ll help you as well.
There is no inherent meaning to life and humans don’t value outcomes
These few years of consciousness are essentially a game : we're dealt a hand to start off with and a certain amount of time. Our experience of this time depends on the choices we make and random events that happen to us that are beyond our control. We can control our choices but not the random events. Doing what you can about the things you can change and accepting the things you can’t is your best shot at maximising your life experience.
If you attach too much meaning to a certain goal or milestone, not only do you realise how meaningless it was when you get there but the time it took you to reach that outcome will also be filled with agony. Humans haven’t evolved to value outcomes. There’s always the next thing to look forward to.
What happens after you bring that dream car home or have that big destination wedding? Life does - and it’s still exactly the same as yesterday - and you can’t help but wonder why.
The meaning of life is whatever you want it to be. How I see it is essentially : Think hard about what it is you truly desire to do with your time - find a way to live off of it - do it until what you truly desire changes - repeat.
It doesn’t matter if this makes you super wealthy or not : as long as you’re content with the present and pragmatic about the broader aspects of a possible future, you’re doing fine. Don’t cripple yourselves by trading your time for a possible answer to “what is the meaning of life?”. There is no answer. There is only here and now.
Here & Now IS The Only Truth
The present moment is all that is real. If you spend it thinking about the past or scheming for the future, the moment will have been irretrievably lost. Use your moments with frugality, there’s only a few of them and you can’t earn more.
There’s always something more to aspire to, someone/somewhere else you could be, a few extra millions you could’ve made. Any semblance of “happiness” thus lasts only in the present moment and is thus attainable not by holding onto it but by letting go of the need to hold on and be present.
Don’t replace the search for meaning with a socially validated proxy of meaning.
Validation by proxy doesn’t cut it. Social media aided dopamine release is essentially you replacing actual engagement and taking steps into the unknown by the mere perception of having done so. To the monkey brain it’s the same thing but the subconscious/consciousness/aatma/soul/life-force/whatever-you-call-it inside us knows we're fighting feelings of our perceived inadequacy with a dopa-rush.
Approval seeking doesn't work either. If you're doing something just for social validation, you'll only do the things that you know you won't fail at and things you think people want you to do. Moving past this will set you free to create and do what you want with your life.
The only real validation is the exchange between your soul and your monkey brain. When your head hits the pillow, you know who won that day.
Judgement and criticism tend to come around
The more you criticise the world, the more self-doubt you generate. Your mind holds you to the unattainable standards you set for the people you interact with. This is essentially you feeding future feelings of being an impostor.
In the same way, people’s opinion of you is often a reflection of how they see themselves. It pays to be able to distinguish between helpful advice and misery offload.
If you stop judging the world, your desire to seek approval from it also vanishes. Everyone’s better off that way. I try to keep fear of judgement at bay by reminding myself that over a long enough period of time, the only inevitable outcome is death. Might as well do what you want to do anyway.
I tried my best to avoid typos and grammatical errors in this article but the buggers tend to slip through. Doesn’t matter a terrible deal, but did you notice them? Did that detract from your experience of reading it? How is that going to play out the next time you decide to write something?
The Anatomy of Perfection
Wanting to be “perfect” is essentially a trap since the desire for perfection holds within it a fear of outcome.
This often leads you in one of three places : You either stop trying altogether. You don’t try to do things that seem difficult/impossible. Or you try so hard to make it perfect that the process becomes miserable and the outcome, even if favourable, doesn’t matter.
One valuable metric here is to ask yourself if you had a good time while you were at it? If not, what is it going to be next? Another set of goals and perfection seeking until the day you die? (Certain Linkin Park lyrics come to mind)
Perfection is sterile, static and unreal. Life is tumultuous, unpredictable and intangible. Desire perfection and you lose out on living.
A fear of failure signals attachment to outcome or an adopted desire
Failure isn’t doing and not reaching a preordained outcome. Failure is either sitting on the sidelines and not participating or participating and not enjoying the process - regardless of the outcome.
If you notice this fear of failure too often, it helps to examine why you’re doing what you’re doing. Maybe your reasons aren’t really yours. Find the right reasons or find a different path.
Countless lifetimes have been lost to a fear of failure when the only way ahead is through. Through the things you think you can never do. If you deeply desire it, it’s always worth a shot : if not for the outcome, at least for the experience of it.
If you fail your monkey mind will tell you “I told you so”. But imagine what the soul says if you don’t even try?
If you can’t handle the winners, you’ll probably be sore at the losers
Every positive emotion holds within it a seed of a negative emotion.
The world will applaud your wins, not your attempts at doing what you love every single day. When something you do is perceived by the world as “winning”, they’ll put you on a pedestal. Since you want to continue to do the unthinkable, you’re bound to have a few failures from time to time. The world will ridicule those just as harshly as it celebrates the wins.
I find that the wider the grins are at the top of the pedestal, the harder the frowns get at the bottom.
Flow States, Selflessness and MinDLESSNess
Any activity can turn into a flow state (Read : “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Consciously understanding how to do that makes everything a little less mindful.
Yes, mindfulness is a multi-billion dollar business that is designed to keep you hooked to itself. If you’re full of your mind, how do you do what you really want to be doing? Mindlessness is when you forget everything but the task at hand. It’s essentially meditation for every activity, all the time. The dissolution of time, reason, consequence and the impostor.
On the other hand, be wary of artificially induced flow states - endlessly scrollable feeds, unlimited internet access, addiction etc. The people who get you hooked know exactly what they’re doing.
Being an impostor is to be hyper self-aware. It means that one is living in the past or the future : never in the present. All such doubt can be eradicated if one eliminates self awareness. (This is especially tricky when society teaches you the opposite : to be extremely self aware, at all times.) When there is no self, there is no doubt or regret. There is only this moment and what you do with it. The rest doesn’t exist until it happens to you or you happen to it.
Take big risks
This will sound like blasphemy in today’s world where security and risk-aversion is all the rage, but we forget that historically - humans have been a really risky bunch. We’ve failed hard and we’ve succeeded harder : each generation a step up from the previous one.
With increased life-spans came this idea of putting off to tomorrow what you can do today. But guess what, the real risk is not in the doing-of but in the not-doing-of. Ask anyone who is approaching a near definite end of life about their regrets and most answers are about things they didn’t do rather than things they did.
We might be settled and cocooned in our comfort zones but the fact remains that if you don’t do anything, nothing will happen. Except death. That’ll still come, sooner in this moment than the previous one. That’s the real risk and nobody can avoid it. Tell that to your fear of judgement and watch it recede back into a corner where it belongs.
Say what you MEAN without a fear of offending
Now more than any time in history, anyone can get offended about anything you say or do. If you change your actions out of a fear of offending someone, you’ll never be authentic because there will always be someone who is offended. Say it like you really mean to say it and accept the consequences.
That said, it helps to know and accept that you don’t know much and to keeps your eyes open and mind free of judgement so that you can learn from the world. Which brings us to -
Strong opinions, loosely held
If you were singing praises of Hitler and someone got offended, they were probably right and you weren’t listening to the voice of reason. You are not your mind, your family, group of friends or society. Be afraid to be static. Evolve continuously. Hold an opinion but don’t hold it with your identity - change it when the facts or your knowledge of them changes. There are few absolute truths.
Think hard about what you want to do
Thinking about what to do is often harder than figuring out how to do it. When what you’re doing aligns with your deepest desire, two magical things happen : You don’t work a day in your life and you stop caring about competition. It’s probably the most important thing you’ll do, followed perhaps by the people you choose to do it with.
I learned this the hard way. Maybe if you’re reading this early on in your life, you won’t spend half a decade realising society’s ideal version of your life and just go live yours right away. Don’t try to play out someone else’s fantasy of you, including your parents. Especially your parents. Parents tend to want to live vicariously through their children. It’s human nature, they’re not to blame - but it’s still a trap.
Nobody knows why they do what they do, which is why it pays to think about it. You probably still won’t arrive at it immediately, which is why -
Cut your losses short and let your winners run
Originally from Wall Street, this line applies to almost everything. In hope for things to turn around, we tend to hold on to decisions, people and paths far beyond our deep seated realisation of their futility. Often, for life.
On the other hand, when things are going well and we’re happy with how we’re expending our days - we might miss the discomfort of struggle and tend to invite some. (A bunch of things contribute to this - fear of success, addiction to pain etc. - but that’s beyond the scope of this article.) Such is the nature of our conditioned monkey mind and the illusion of free will that we live with.
Flip this metric. It’s okay to let go of something that is giving you pain. You’re not an impostor until you decide to hold on to that career, business or idea that probably wasn’t your own desire to begin with - and that’s okay. You’re winging it, just like everyone else.
Nobody else knows what they’re doing either - play along
Stories you hear about happy and successful people are designed to make them look good and give off a sense that they had life charted out all along. They’re fables, essentially. Nobody really knows the exact reasons or circumstances by which they got to where they were. What they all have in common, however, is that they didn’t stop to worry about the reasons : they just kept going - doing what it was they loved. None of them would be any less satisfied if they were poorer or less publicly successful.
Businesses, films, companies, banks, economies, countries and civilisations : nobody really understands how they function. They just do. Because people have faith in them and keep creating value by doing the things they love doing. Play long term positive sum games with long term people and you’ll probably land on the right side of history. Even if you don’t, at least you won’t be unoriginal.
This is your only shot
“Every human being has two lives and the second one starts when they realise they have just one.“ - Confucius
Once you realise that this is your only shot - what are you going to do? Listen to a voice in your head that binds you to inaction and doubt or listen to your deepest desire that is thirsting to leap forth into the wilderness and explore everything life might have to offer?
That’s what silenced the voice that didn’t let me write these words for weeks. A simple question. The words then flowed as they wished :
“What happens if you don’t even try?”
