Impostor Syndrome
The anxiety of feeling that your success is luck and fraud, not skill. Emma Watson, Natalie Portman, and why even accomplished people feel like they're faking it.
When I was assigned to interview Joseph Nye — author of Soft Power, Harvard professor — I was extraordinarily nervous. More than just the excitement of meeting someone I admired in college, there was something else: a quiet dread that my inadequacy was about to be exposed.
Later I learned there was a name for this.
Impostor syndrome is the psychological pattern where a person believes their success is entirely the result of luck and deception, and fears being "found out." People with high self-expectations are most susceptible — the gap between their internal sense of mediocrity and the world's assessment of them becomes a source of constant anxiety.
The term dates to 1978. When I first heard it, I thought it was an interesting concept. Then I looked around and realized that most of the people I knew — and I myself — were living with some version of it.
Famous Impostors
Emma Watson, in an interview with The Telegraph: "The more I accomplish, the more I feel incompetent. I feel like eventually people will figure out how incapable I am."
Natalie Portman, in her Harvard commencement speech: "When I arrived at Harvard as a freshman, I was sure there had been some mistake. I thought I wasn't smart enough to be here, and I would struggle to prove I was not just a dumb actress every time I opened my mouth."
These are not modest performances. They describe a structural feature of high achievement: the closer you get to the edge of your competence, the more exposed you feel.
The Mechanism
The syndrome works like this: external success creates higher expectations, which require performing beyond your current capability, which increases the gap between how you appear and how you feel — which reinforces the sense that you're pretending.
The problem intensifies when the anxiety stops driving effort and starts generating paralysis. Hwang Woo-suk (the Korean stem cell fraud) is an extreme case — someone who needed external validation so badly they invented it.
Most of us aren't frauds. We're just at the edge of what we can do. That's the only place growth happens.
How to Work With It
- Let go of some excess self-importance.
- Accept that you had some role in your successes.
- Focus on providing value.
- Remember: being wrong doesn't make you a fake.
- Realize that nobody knows what they're doing.
- Nobody belongs here more than you.