{"id":53,"date":"2012-05-21T06:37:53","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T06:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/?p=53"},"modified":"2012-05-21T06:38:10","modified_gmt":"2012-05-21T06:38:10","slug":"impostor-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/impostor-syndrome\/","title":{"rendered":"Impostor Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Someday, if you achieve great things, a man will show up at the door with a clipboard, ask you some questions and take away the life you&#8217;ve built and love, to replace it with the one you dreaded. If you&#8217;ve achieved any modicum of success or happiness in your professional life, you almost certainly fear this already.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s Neil Gaiman (one of the world&#8217;s great fiction writers) explaining the terror of being &#8220;an impostor&#8221;:<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/42372767?color=ffffff\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"650\" height=\"488\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The whole video&#8217;s worth watching, but it&#8217;s at 7:00, when Neil starts talking about the &#8220;problems of success&#8221; that he explores this fear so eloquently.<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, impostor syndrome is why the attacks of detractors can be so effective. Outsiders might scoff at critics of a Bill Gates, a Pablo Picasso or an Oprah Winfrey, but if they&#8217;re anything like Neil, they likely experienced this same fear (and maybe still do), and it&#8217;s when their critics gave voice to these fears that they were at their most effective. As every psychologist knows, it&#8217;s those attacks that we suspect to be true that cut the deepest.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m nowhere near over my own impostor syndrome (if it really is a syndrome and not the real thing &#8211; a truly false and undeserved set of accomplishments), but I have found that it&#8217;s A) a great motivator and B) that \u00a0knowing, not just fearing, but really understanding and embracing my weaknesses and my strengths have made me a little less vulnerable.<\/p>\n<p>p.s. Read Neil&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neilgaiman.com\/works\/Books\/The+Graveyard+Book\/\">The Graveyard Book<\/a> immediately. It&#8217;s one of those rare page-turners that manages to be more than it seems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Someday, if you achieve great things, a man will show up at the door with a clipboard, ask you some questions and take away the life you&#8217;ve built and love, to replace it with the one you dreaded. If you&#8217;ve achieved any modicum of success or happiness in your professional life, you almost certainly fear<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-startups"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Impostor Syndrome - SparkToro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Someday, if you achieve great things, a man will show up at the door with a clipboard, ask you some questions and take away the life you&#039;ve built and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/impostor-syndrome\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Impostor Syndrome - 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