Long viewed as a disability, new research suggests Impostor Syndrome can be a key to success.

I have a confession to make. I am an impostor. For years I have been masquerading as a competent and successful professional, but the truth is that deep inside, I know that I am a fraud.

Other people would tell me how good I am at my job. They compliment me on my success. This does not make me feel better; instead, it makes me more uncomfortable. I know that I have just gotten lucky for the past twenty-five years and that any day my luck will run out, and expose me for the fraud I really am.

Impostor Syndrome

Like many Americans, I have suffered from Impostor Syndrome. This syndrome is a pattern of thinking where individuals doubt their skills, talents, and successes and see themselves as inept and at risk of being exposed for the fraud they are.

I always assumed that Impostor Syndrome held me back, but recent research suggests that Impostor Syndrome may have been a key to the very success I discounted.

Impostor syndrome is a widespread phenomenon, with more than half of all people surveyed reporting feeling it at one time. It is especially common among high achievers and professionals.

The More Skilled and Educated are Most at Risk

Ironically, those who are the most educated and skilled are often the least confident in their ability. But it does make sense. All that education makes people aware of how much they don’t know.

The more skillful a person becomes, the more able they are to detect subtle flaws in their performance. And the higher in education one goes, the more they find themselves surrounded by a comparison group of the best and brightest.

That was my experience. As I trained to be a surgeon, I found myself constantly compared to a more elite cohort. Everyone in college came from the upper part of their high school. Medical school was composed solely of those from the top few percent of college, and surgical residency was composed only of doctors who graduated in the top half of their medical school class. Each time I ascended to a new level, the competition got stiffer, and I felt more inadequate.

For years I have felt this anxiety that I am not good enough. When I got to medical school and met my classmates, who all seemed more intelligent and better prepared than myself, I honestly believed that they admitted me by mistake. I spent my first semester expecting the administration to recognize the error and boot me from the class.

Impostor Syndrome May Lead to Success

I have always thought that impostor syndrome held me back, even before knowing it had a name. I was afraid it made me play small and kept me from developing my ability. Research suggests that impostor syndrome may have been a key to my success rather than a disability.

The Opposite of Impostor Syndrome

If impostor syndrome is a lack of confidence in your skills and knowledge, then its opposite is the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This phenomenon, first described by its namesakes in 1999, is the cognitive bias whereby people with little knowledge or skill in a domain greatly overestimate their ability. Think of your favorite armchair quarterback who believes they could do better than the coach or players of a professional sports team.

These people can be dangerous as they confidently apply their limited skills and knowledge to problems they can’t handle. Their failure to recognize their limitations can put themselves and others at risk of serious harm, whether that is financial harm from investing money in things they don’t understand or physical injury from attempting skills outside their ability.

It is the Dunning-Kruger effect that is the real danger.

A Second Look at Impostor Syndrome

When researchers started to study impostor syndrome in light of more recent thinking, they realized that the syndrome may not be all bad. In the book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, Adam Grant reports on a graduate student’s research that looked at medical students doing mock patient evaluations with actors simulating people with medical illnesses. A week earlier, the students took a test to score them on their degree of Impostor Syndrome. The researchers found that the medical students who self-identified with impostor syndrome did not do worse than their peers as expected. Instead, they did significantly better and were rated as more respectful, empathetic, professional, and better at asking questions and sharing information than those who did not identify with impostor syndrome.

Subsequent studies replicated those results with other professionals, including investment bankers where self-reported impostors were rated higher on performance reviews by their supervisors after four months on the job. It appears that the people who feel most inferior may be the highest performers in their field. Why should that be?

Is Impostor Syndrome an Advantage?

Impostor syndrome may not be holding people back as had been assumed. It looks like it may be stimulating people to higher levels of performance. Rather than overcome impostor syndrome, perhaps we should be looking to see how it can work to our advantage.

It Motivates Us to Work Harder

The feeling of competence can lead to complacency. Ironically, if you are not worried about letting others down, you are more likely to do so. Impostors feel they have something to prove to themselves. Thus they work harder and more conscientiously. They also stick with problems longer than their more confident peers. The result is that they often achieve better results. Perhaps Albert Einstein was channeling this very idea when he said,

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

— Albert Einstein

It Motivates us to Work Smarter

Being convinced that you will not succeed takes a lot of the pressure off of you. When you have a “nothing to lose attitude,” it allows you to step back and see the problem from a new perspective. While others are pounding away at the usual means of addressing the issue, the impostor is free to look for new approaches. The removal of the expectation of success puts the impostor in a beginner’s mindset. That mindset allows them to question old assumptions and ways of doing things and allows them to see new possibilities. The result can be “out the blue” success.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few”

― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

It Makes Us Better Learners

The first step in learning is admitting to yourself what you don’t know. Entertaining doubts about your knowledge and skills encourages you to seek more information and training. Which allows impostors to know more and do more than their peers.

In the medical setting, health care providers with impostor syndrome are more likely to seek a second opinion, which allows them to learn from the experience of their peers. As the psychologist Elizabeth Krumrei writes in her research on humility and learning,

“Learning requires the humility to realize one has something to learn.”

— Elizabeth Krumrei

Confident Humility

Too much confidence without humility leads to hubris. Too little faith can lead to shying away from trying new things and developing skills. What you want to aim for is a combination of the two; you want confident humility.

Confident humility means having faith in your abilities while simultaneously remaining humble enough to recognize that you might not always have the best solution. It is enough confidence to push your boundaries while retaining enough doubt to question your assumptions.

How to Develop Confident Humility

Confidence is the result of experience. To build confidence, you need to expose yourself to more challenges. And not just the ones you know you can handle. You need to push back the edges of your comfort zone by trying things you think are just outside your ability. Don’t wait until you feel comfortable starting. Get started, and the confidence will come with your achievement.

The danger here is that confidence rises faster than competence. As we rack up a little success, confidence in our ability grows faster than our actual ability. We take pride in making progress, which is good. But, we risk developing a false sense of mastery, which is bad. That is why we need to maintain our humility.

Humility keeps us from jumping into overconfidence. Humility reminds us to question our assumptions and reevaluate our abilities. It returns us to the beginner mind, where we are open to more possibilities. Most importantly, humility insulated us from becoming ignorant of our ignorance.

Humility is often mistaken for low self-esteem, but that is not true. The word “humility” comes from the Latin root which means “from the earth.” To be humble is to be grounded. It is the recognition that we are not perfect and can make mistakes. It is not a judgment about ourselves based on the mistakes we have made.

Too much confidence makes us arrogant, which blinds us to our weaknesses. Humility is a mirror we use to see ourselves more clearly, warts and faults and all. Confident humility is a corrective lens that enables us to recognize and overcome our weaknesses.

Conclusion

Impostor syndrome has been seen as a disability since first described. However, recent research suggests that, rather than keeping people from succeeding, Impostor Syndrome may be a key to achievement.

Being mindful of our limitations makes us more aware of what we don’t know and more likely to seek out new information and second opinions. It also allows us to question our assumptions and gain new insights. And it encourages us to work harder and stick with problems longer. These traits make people who self-identify with Impostor Syndrome more successful, not less so.

Pursuing confident humility allows us to take advantage of the best of both worlds. Don’t wait until you are comfortable starting. Take action to build your confidence. Push yourself outside of your comfort zone. But beware that confidence tends to rise faster than competence. So stay humble, remain grounded, realistically appraise your ability and question your assumptions.

Be aware that the quest for mastery is never complete. Confident humility may be the best way to go forward while recognizing where we need to improve.

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