Have a of kind of ‘fake it till you make it’ attitude that even if you feel like you’re an imposter you’re really not, and even people who are successful, sometimes feel like they’re imposters; so even if you’re imposter a little bit, once you careers gears start turning that by definition can no longer be true.
It just feels like something out of a corporation, like a joke from The Boys. I don’t think imposter syndrome is some kind of personal attribution error and I’d like to offer a counterargument.
So there’s a butterfly called the Viceroy, and it looks like a Monarch butterfly. The Monarch butterfly, as with many bright colored creatures, are incredibly poisonous. So if a bird eats a monarch, it will get horribly sick, and thinks ‘I never want to eat one of those again’. Nice, all the other monarchs are a little more safe, because the birds know not to eat them. Other butterflies adopt that style, so they have can have an equally low chance of being eaten. But they’re diluting the value of the style, because they are not poisonous, and if eaten, would not give the birds belly aches, and devalue the style. So the risk with imposters is they’re going to dilute the quality of the reputation.
But they don’t dilute it enough nullify their existence, the system is wide enough to encompass both, if there was a deficit in this strategy the Viceroy would go extinct. From the Cuckoo, to the Cuddle Fish, to the Viceroy, being an imposter is a valid form of survival seen across every species.
I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that the Viceroy doesn’t fly around telling itself ‘if I fly around along for a long enough time I’ll be a real a Monarch’ like some Pinocchio with wings or that the Viceroy is some sort of inferior life form to the Monarch. Nature shows that there’s a space for both the Viceroy, and the Monarch. And it would be silly advice to keep telling Viceroys, that they’re Monarchs, and just need to believe.
Allow me a diversion for a moment-
The Peter Principle states that ‘a person who is competent at their job will earn promotion to a position which requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, they will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again.’ So to advance anywhere in the job market one has to keep in mind that flexibility is the key component to success. Those who can not adapt will be left behind. The Viceroy is just as much of an adapter as the Monarch is and its that they can adapt that matters not how.