Marc Reid, Author of You Are (Not) a Fraud: A Scientist's Guide to the Imposter Phenomenon

The transcript below is unedited output from OpenAI Whisper.

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Hi, I’m Len Epp from Leanpub and in this episode of the Front Matter podcast, I’ll be interviewing Mark Read. Based in Glasgow, Mark is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow currently based in the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde. You can follow him on Twitter at read underscore indeed and check out his website at dr-mark-read.com and that’s Mark with a C. You can also check out the Read Indeed podcast and check out his channel on YouTube. Mark is the author of the Leanpub book, You Are Not a Fraud, A Scientist’s Guide to the Imposter Phenomenon. In the book, Mark dives into the stories and hidden data behind the phenomenon so wrongly dubbed a syndrome. In this interview, we’re going to talk about Mark’s background and career, professional interest, his book, and at the end, we’ll talk about his experience as an author and a self-published author to boot. So thank you very much, Mark, for being on the Leanpub Front Matter podcast. Cheers, Len. It’s a joy for many reasons. I’m looking forward to getting into. I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin story, which is a part of your book as well. So we’re melding two parts of the interview together. But yeah, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you grew up and how you grew up and how you found your way into a life as an academic and a chemist. Sure. Well, you’ve picked up off mic and people will hear immediately that this accent is from Glasgow originally. So I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. And as an academic, many a road has traveled out from there, but all roads have returned. So I live there now. I’m in my home at the moment, I live there with my wife and two very young children. So as I said off mic, we’re many hours apart, and I have just escaped the chaos of the day from the beautiful family side of life. Growing up, I had always been curious, never knew I was going to be a scientist, but knew some sort of research or investigative work might feature in what I do, just didn’t know what it was. When I went to university, there was no real plan for it. I chose a short list of four or five completely different subjects that I might major in. That long part of the story short, that became chemistry. Chemistry has then been the front runner, the main theme of my career going forward. So I did my undergraduate degree and my PhD in chemistry at Strathclyde. And then for this part of my career, if you read it on a piece of paper, it would look like a very tracked academic path. So I did my degree, I did my PhD, I went to do a postdoc research position in another university. And then after that, that’s when I started to take bigger strides and more leaps towards independent research. So to move out of other people’s research teams and start to build my own. So I did that in a few different places and both at home and abroad. And at this point, I’ve circled back, as you’ve said in your kind introduction to Strathclyde again, I’ve been like a glorified yo-yo in and out of my home institution my entire career. So that’s a very short version of how I got into the academic side of work. It is in the process of other stuff we’ll probably talk about. The edge that I’ve scratched only later in my career is trying a lot of the other non-traditional stuff, a lot of the non-academic stuff that I knew that I really wanted to do, but spent a large part of my early career focusing on the scripted path, the right way to do things, moving from one part of the career ladder to the next in academia. And those other things are quite obviously things like writing a book, but more broadly than that, thinking about ways of working outside the academic bubble, looking at what it is to be a scientist in industry rather than academia. And more personally to me, looking at what it means to be an entrepreneur rather than or as well as an academic, these were things that once scared me to my core. And it’s only in this part of my career in the past few years or so that I’ve reached out. But in doing so, then that’s triggered a lot of these thoughts that I started to secretly write about a few years ago. So I remain an academic, but it’s only in these past few years that I’ve allowed myself to add more strings to the bow, so to speak. One thing you mentioned there that I wanted to sort of dive into a little bit is the scripted kind of career for an academic you talked about. There are scripts, but not everyone knows them. And in particular, if you come from a family background where no one’s been to university before, you could be very unaware of what that script is. And it can be a very peculiar form of alienation to be around people who know it. You know they know it, but you don’t know it. And I gather you’re very straightforward about this in your book. I believe one of your grandfathers sort of went to university later in life, but you were the first person in your sort of immediate family to go to university right after school, and you made it all the way to PhD and stuff like that. Do you recall how you learned the script? That’s a great question. You know, the profound nature of being the first generation is something that only struck me later when I was reflecting on all of that more deeply. Part of the seed for it was the inspiration for my grandfather. He was a card-carrying laborer all of his days, the stereotypical archetypal jack-of-all-trades even. He did every job under the sun, each more labor-intensive than the last, little pockets of careers throughout his life growing up and as a family person. And it was, as you say, it was only I think maybe in his late 40s, if I remember correctly, that he then had the opportunity to go back and study for a formal degree. So it was alien to him, and as you say, alien to me in a different respect. I had that seedling from two generations up, but no one else had gone straight out of school and to university. So as much as anything else, I think I’ve learned to understand this through the eyes of folks like Malcolm Gladwell, where learning that script I think is about as much about your place and time as actually formally learning it from others. I’m part of a generation where there’s perhaps more of an expectation or more of a sense that the place and time is right, that we are part of, roughly speaking, I’m in my mid-30s, so part of a generation where it’s quite typical to have parents and grandparents who didn’t have further or higher education and I’ve worked hard to provide for a point where our generation have more of a privilege to choose, and that’s where I found myself, and that became part of the culture, more of the conversations, more of what you learned at the end of high school. But for our generation, it’s perhaps in some cases expected that you can and perhaps should go to university. It’s not for everyone. There are many people who go down a different path and go into a trade for their career. I think the other perhaps geographical piece of important information here is that in Scotland, university education is more or less free, which when I talk to anyone from across the pond, that’s the alien point of view. I would never have gone to university had I not had the privilege of falling out into the world in Scotland. Things could have been very, very different. I happened to grow up in a place where the government openly and freely supports education in that manner. Had I even been one country further south in England, paying four figures per year, year out of my own pocket or my parents’ pocket for my degree, I probably wouldn’t have one degree, let alone several. So that’s the bit that makes me perhaps most grateful, is the potluck of landing in a place where I could go to university and for the barrier to do so to be very, very low. And is it still relatively free in Scotland? Yeah. Okay. I don’t speak for everyone, but a more common… If you’re thinking about the opposite case where it’s very common, let’s say in the States, to go into large amounts of debt to go to university, then the parallel case is much smaller, probably several orders of magnitude smaller in Scotland where the debt might be to take out a small student loan for living costs, for example. That’s certainly what I did. And so now that I’m in a stable career, I pay back part of that loan out of my salary. So that’s a very common case, but as I said, it’s not at the scary levels that you hear, more broadly speaking, for North American education. Yeah. It’s interesting. I have a personal experience of encountering that other side of the pond thing. I’m a little bit older than you, but I moved to London in 1999 and I was working in a place right off the strand, right near the… It was an office and it was a private company but it was nestled in the London School of Economics kind of campus. And there were protests happening, students marching. And I remember asking my colleagues, what are they protesting about? And they said, tuition. They’re going to be forced to pay tuition. And I was like, they’re not paying it already? And I talked to a colleague of mine who was like, I said, do you have student loans? And he said, he got a very serious look on his face and he said, yes, 5,000 pounds. And Canada is not nearly the troubling situation and terrible situation I would venture to say that you have in the States, but the idea that one would protest having to pay tuition and that one would be devastated at having 5,000 pounds of debt after getting an undergraduate education was alien to this Canadian. And but of course, it got me thinking, and of course, I’m a big advocate of university education. I personally wish it would… I think it should be free, well, free, I mean, it should be free for the student. And there should be sort of… Australia has a great system where you basically kind of pay what you can as you go throughout your life and your career. But it can be very daunting and particularly if you go on, so do you remember when you decided that you wanted to go on to graduate school? Were you encouraged by professors or anything like that? Yeah, quite deeply. And from… so the undergraduate degree is a five-year degree in Scotland. So you have, at least in the STEM subjects, so chemistry for me, you do three years undergraduate, then if you’re doing a master’s, your fourth of the five years will be on an industrial placement. So you’ll interview to work with a chemistry company, go away and be an employee for a year and then come back and do your final master’s project here. So in that five-year course, it was from the second of those five that I had my first taste of a research laboratory. So as a chemist, when you go through labs, when you’re first getting exposed to it from a teaching side, it’s very recipe-based. You will follow things that are going to work, you’ll do so in a step-by-step guide. It’s far rarer that you would get the exposure to the real world of research where most of what you do fails and everything is more exotic and unknown than what it is at the teaching level but it’s quite common again here where students will look for internships, paid summer placements during their degree and that’s exactly what I did in my second year. So that took me into a particular type of chemistry lab where most of what you make, if it touches the air, it will explode or if you send it shooting out a syringe like a water gun, you’ll see an arc of fire. These things are very exotic and don’t play well with moisture or oxygen. So that was a very sharp, very intense exposure to the cool stuff to do with chemistry. I had another taste of that the year later and a completely different area of chemistry with someone that had a different sort of leadership style. So I’d started to see dimensions not only of research but of the people within research. When I went away on that fourth of five years that was in a company, there was an unexpected crossroads where there was an offer to go back and work for that company. So I didn’t actually know if I was going to, although the seed had been planted early, when this offer was put on the table the question came up quite early, industry or academia. We spoke earlier about how it always seemed to be part of that academic script for me but that was a wrestling point and it was one of those earlier professors who had given me the summer opportunity who encouraged me to stay or at least to experiment more with the academic world through the form of a PhD. And that’s what really tipped me over the edge. When I then stayed for a PhD that’s when I got let loose a little bit more to, yes, I was working in someone else’s lab on their research themes but as a PhD student you’re let loose, right? You’ve got more scope to be creative, to make the research work on your own terms and explore the unknown, not for several weeks over the summer but for several years. And I took the bull by the horns at that point, I really loved most of what I was doing. I’m the sort of person who works well with deadlines and quite an intense environment so I felt very much at home doing that sort of thing. I’ve certainly heard from others near and far that, you know, there’s different types of academic environment. Again I’m very careful to speak on particular terms rather than overgeneralizing things. My case is not every case but I would say that after that crossroads well I actually just go to industry now and forget academia. Once I had passed that and stayed with academia a bit longer it was the creativity, the exploration at the PhD level that then made me stay the course for much longer than that. And one thing I actually was looking forward to asking you about is what was your day-to-day life like as a sort of PhD student in chemistry? And I just say this because you know I have a background, I have a doctorate in English literature, and I remember I had lots of sort of friends and as it were colleagues who were in chemistry and physics and engineering and stuff like that and their day-to-day life was very different from mine, I would say. Okay, this is very interesting, I’m very tempted to actually answer your question with the same question back so maybe we could go toe-to-toe here a little bit and compare and contrast. So our, again because this is particular and not overgeneralizing, we were in quite an intense lab, everyone liked to put in their hours so, you know, we started easily eight o’clock onwards, many people would work quite long hours. The context of that is that in the organic chemistry environment I found myself working in as a very labor-intensive part of the chemical sciences, you’re mixing the pills and the potions using lots of different types of glassware, having to put in preparative work to design experiments first and then repeating those several times over. So three different experiments repeated three times, that’s nine experiments already and that just grows and grows and grows and that could be for one project then another. So the amount of work that you do, number of different reactions you do gets larger and larger and then it becomes sort of par for the course that long working hours featured in that. Not necessarily because a finger was pointed to do so but that’s just the way that everyone fared off of each other at least while I was doing my PhD. So intense, quite long hours, quite often. And I’m just, one very specific question I have about that is like, so the experiments you were doing, so you’re doing a PhD, so you have a sort of thesis that you’re going to have to write and publish in the end, and the science is often sort of, you know, papers along the way, so these experiments you’re describing, were those like your experiments for your thesis that you were working on? They were? Okay. Yes. Okay. For the majority of the time, you might have, you know, interesting tangents where you’ll collaborate with other members of the team and have joint projects to deliver something that’s a little bit bigger. Yeah, but in a nutshell, most of my time was designing experiments for my project. So I worked in an area of chemistry where you are trying to take a drug type molecule and treat it as if it was a whale in the ocean to be tagged by a biologist. So if someone’s tracking schools of sharks or pods of whales, you’ll put a tag onto them and follow them by GPS or some such technology, find out where they go, what becomes of them. And the microscopic scale, you can do the same thing with chemicals. You can swap out some of the atoms inside the molecule and exchange them for radioactive variants of the same atom. And then you can track the energy and the particles that’s emitted from the radioactive version of the drug. So like tagging a whale, you can tag a molecule and instead of following them across the ocean, you can follow them around the body and find out what becomes of them. So most of my working day was trying to figure out ways of doing that and essentially designing the catalyst, which was the middleman, the thing that would make the radioactive thing, the label and the drug molecule come together seamlessly to leave the tag on the drug molecule. So that’s my story. My colleagues would have their own story of different projects. Each of us essentially had to create a book, the thesis at the end of that, describing what the state of the art in that field was and how our experiments, our research had contributed and tried to push the state of the art forward. So how does that compare to your very different world, being a PhD? Yeah, that’s super interesting. My world was very different. I did my doctorate at the University of Oxford and it’s sort of like I’m just saying that most of our listeners are probably North American, so they’re familiar. Insofar as they’re aware of sort of PhDs and stuff like that, which they all are, a PhD is kind of like four to six years. You do two years of classes, you do comprehensive exams and then you sort of focus on your thesis and that might take four years or something like that. In Oxford it’s very different and you’ll be teaching along the way and you’ll have a committee and stuff like that. And in Oxford it’s very different. My joke there is that basically they say hello and then they roll you out like a kite and tie it to a rock and come back in three years and they’re like, so have you done anything? This isn’t the humanities. So the only kind of like, I had a course I had to take, like a sort of like just attend it kind of orientation course I had to take in the first year, and the first year was a probationary research scholar you’re called or at least you used to be. Basically you had to submit what I thought at the end of the first year you had to submit sort of like an outline of your thesis and a 10,000 word essay, which I did in advance of applying because I thought that’s what you needed to get in. But anyway, so that’s always saying my days were like a lot of this, you know, from noon to midnight, wherever I happened to be, there was no, and I remember like my colleagues who were in the sciences who would be like talking about their labs and their like supervisor and they’d be like, you know, they’d be at the lab at eight in the morning until, you know, whenever they left at night and it was sort of like a, it was like a job and then in the non pejorative sense when they loved and when they would take out a long-term sort of like things that they were up to and things like that, but you know, yeah, mine was very much more of the Bohemian kind of romantic, like, you know, I just had a brilliant thought, you know, I’m going to go write something down, but it was all very, I guess in a sense like all very, probably the biggest distinction I would say between that kind of humanities work and sciences work. And again, in the particular context I was in is very alone as opposed to together with other people with respect to the work part of things, which I absolutely love, like completely just open to you. Like the most productive month I had was when I went and lived in a sort of garret in Paris in a like low rent apartment owned by some nuns so I could just kind of write for a month and you know, so it’s very different from, from, you know, having other, there was no bit, basically there was nobody watching what I was doing, it was all completely sort of self, unless I asked for it or what, or what have you. So yeah, my days were very, very different. You sound like something out of a, you know, documentary for a turn of the century, French painter. Like you say, it’s very much Bohemian cigar in hand. Yeah. I mean, there was, there was lots, there was lots of other stuff going on, but it was well with cigarettes in my case, but, but you know, so I guess that just goes more towards the old 19th century French stereotype, but, but yeah, no, no, it’s, but it, but it is interesting because when we talk about PhDs, you know, those of us who’ve done them are, you know, it’s a very different experience depending on what subject you’re in, where you are, what country you’re in, what your goals are, which is something we can maybe talk about later, we might touch on because not everybody who does a PhD is necessarily interested in pursuing academia as a career. And at the same time, a lot of people who get PhDs, that’s exactly what they’re interested in and unfortunately they don’t move on into academic careers or, you know, and this is something you write about sort of very passionately at the beginning of your book. Sometimes you can end up in a situation where you’ve got no permanent job. You’ve got these one year LTAs, limited term agreements, I think they’re called that we have in Canada. And this is a big problem in actually contemporary university life where, I mean, and this is sort of a, I’m outside of it, but like, you know, a sort of passion as well as what I call admin capture basically, and my apologies to any university administrators listening, but like, you know, the statistics are there, right? Like there’s been an explosion in the administrative layer of universities, particularly I think in North America and a winnowing out of actually tenured professors there. So you mentioned that you had this opportunity to sort of basically go into industry or to stay in academia and you decided to sort of stay in academia. And I was wondering if you could then talk about, just before we go on to talk about your book, because I’m sort of deliberately leaving that to make a big splash at a certain point. But so you got this really great fellowship a couple of years ago and I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit of the proselytize for your fellowship, the sort of funders and things like that. Tell us what it is and what you do. Well, there’s perhaps a really nice opportunity to build even a rickety bridge between what I’m doing now and, I dare say, the larger part of your Lean Pub audience who are in the software space. So I have spoken a lot about my career as a chemist. Two things, firstly, this fellowship that I’m on now, when I got it, my first feeling was not of happiness or excitement or celebration, it was relief. When I opened the email, I read the result in my mind and the first thought that crossed my path was, I don’t need to look for another job for a while. It’s the first time I’d had a fellowship that is essentially, it’s like five or seven years, but it slowly bleeds into what you would call in North America, a more tenure-like position. So it’s tenure track with a smooth transition into a tenured position for the longer term. But one step at a time, my first thought was relief, because before that, it had been smaller fellowships, postdoctoral positions, one, two-year contracts, all of that bite-sized stuff with unknowns along the way. The stress builds. I got married during one of those posts thinking, well, when can we buy a house? Can we ever settle down and do those sorts of things? Many more plates are spinning when you’re in those short-term contracts. So getting the fellowship now, it was all about relief. The bridge to the lane-pub world, if I can dare put it that way, is that up until that point, I’d been slowly transitioning out of being a pure chemist to one who can write a little bit of code, nowhere near the level of many of your authors, but it was during my postdoc that I wrote Hello World in Python for the first time. And I’m so glad I did. I’m so glad I did. It didn’t just open my eyes to a world that I knew was there and didn’t dare look at before. But had I never done that, some of the ideas that have since become part of the fellowship you mentioned would never have existed. I needed the knowledge of not an expert, but a competent programmer and one who could see how to automate certain tasks or do certain types of chemical analysis in a new way. That would never have existed had I not spent several years playing around with Python before that. And then the position before the fellowship you mentioned, I got a Raspberry Pi kit from my wife for my birthday one year. I had just started my first academic lab. I did not have two pennies to rub together to buy all of the fancy equipment that I had learned to use during my PhD and postdoc from Better Funded Labs. But I happened to have this $50 camera module, and by that point, I knew how to write a few lines of code. I put about 10 lines of code together using the Raspberry Pi to point the camera at a chemical reaction and record what happens. And the Python magic was then to strip out all of the numerical information from the video footage. And that, even that, if you had to see my code, or if any of your lean pub software authors had seen my code, they would probably do a small spew in their mouth. It was horribly written code. It wasn’t modular in any way, but it did stuff. It did the job, and it proved the concept, which then later became my fellowship. So everything that my team are doing now is all very much in the realms of chemistry, but it’s chemistry facilitated by certain types of computer vision magic. So we point cameras at chemical reactions and write different algorithms to understand what is happening in real time based on what is captured in the video recording. Yeah, that’s super fascinating. I mean, I think I had someone on the podcast not too long ago named Philip Kompo who talked about that. He’s a professor at the University of the United States and works on similar kinds of things. And it’s super interesting when you talk about extracting the kind of data from the video and the just magic that scientists like you can do now with that data about sort of things at the very microscopic level. But especially I think what he was talking about was like he was in biological computation or something like that and applying machine learning to that kind of data means that you can actually like take a picture of a cell and in a sense kind of guess what’s going on inside based on visual imagery because you’ve run millions of images against data from what’s actually going on inside actual cells and experiments. But I imagine like something like that in chemistry as well. It’s just incredible. And we could probably talk about that forever. But it’s one thing I really loved about the story that you just told is that I was recalling, I mean, I remember like in grad school, like if I got in student residence, if I had like an apartment for a year, I was like, wow, a whole year of certainty. Or I remember getting scholarships and funding and it’s like three whole years. I know, wow. This is incredible. And then I’ve never had that experience myself, but particularly that experience of getting the sort of like, okay, I’m on the 10-year track now. I know where I’m going to be. I can build a life for myself and with my family and I can tell them where I’m going to be probably in five years. I mean, these are huge developments and it is quite interesting how again, no one can sort of think of this sort of like Bohemian smoking kind of grad student and stuff like that. But like there is an incredible amount of intensity to that life, an incredible amount of year-to-year uncertainty. And you can be in your early thirties and like have no idea what’s going to happen to you in your life. Quite easily. Yeah. And on the flip side, you would have, sorry to interrupt you, and I’m just thinking at the same time, that sort of life is, you have to be built in a certain way to enjoy that or to thrive on that uncertainty and you imagine or hear similar stories even from, I’ve spoke a lot about the academic world, but the entrepreneurial space as well, I think there’s quite a common misconception that there’s an extravagance or exotic life that comes with being an entrepreneur. But I’ve actually found that there’s a lot more parallels between these apparently separate bubbles than meets the eye. You know, there’s a lot of short-term uncertainty. Many times where you’re looking for grant funding, you would just call it different types of rounds, right? If you were going to investors, they just call it different things, but there’s a lot of the same short-term uncertainty, high stress, constant searching for money. It’s different games that are being played, but a lot of the rules overlap, I think. Oh, I completely agree in that there’s sort of ramen noodle kind of life that you might be living when your friends your own age aren’t, that can be an element of it as well. But yes, no, the parallels between, you know, that’s like between grad student life and kind of entrepreneurial life are, as you say, that’s a very well-made point and in particular one that like I haven’t actually like myself quite made that connection that you just made so well before between like getting a scholarship and getting funding and getting investment. Because I mean, I think often when you sort of put on the hat of imagining a grad student life, it’s sort of a life of supplication, right? You know, you’re kind of applying for things and hoping committees will give you a place or give you some money. Welcome to entrepreneurship, you know. We don’t have Shark Tank TV shows for grad school, but if we did, people would be on those shows pitching their research projects and stuff like that. And maybe we should. I don’t know. But yeah, the parallels, including risk, including the hope for the big payoff, including doing what you love, including sort of dropping everything to sort of, you know, go off in a new direction and scaring your family, things like that. So those are things. But anyway, just in the interest of sort of actually the last thing I guess maybe we’ll talk about with respect to sort of career path stuff before moving on to talk about your book is you did Seth Godin’s Alt MBA and you brought up entrepreneurship and sort of in addition to your academic and sort of, you know, chemistry world, you’ve got this entrepreneurial world that your dimension that you’re keeping alive in your life and sort of moving down that path as well. So I was wondering if you could actually just talk a little bit about that. Who’s Seth Godin, for those who don’t know, and what’s the Alt MBA? Seth Godin, to say very little of his biography, is the marketing goat. He is, at this point, more than multi-time best-selling author, marketer, early adopter and entrepreneur in the internet space and, you know, the core of what he has done for many years outside of his larger scale entrepreneurial projects is to be a writer and an educator with a focus on marketing. And later years through the advent of his own podcast, he has become increasingly impassioned about alternative forms of education and through that passion came the Alt MBA. And more than that, through a talk that he gave called What Is School For?, where it was questioning why does school look much the same now as it did in the Victorian era? Why are we as obsessed with the gatekeeping mechanism of exams now as we were back then when we were looking for people to fill factories? So the Alt MBA was a program to find other ways of educating yourself that didn’t involve exams, didn’t involve you learning things by rote, but involved you showing up all the time working to deliver more projects in a short time than you ever thought was possible, to give more feedback to people than you would ever care to do before and realize that that’s where most of your learning gets done. So that whole process was a month long and I delivered more in that month than I had in several years of academic work before that. Tying the stories together, I was able to fund, I knew because I was exploring entrepreneurship, I knew of Seth, I’d read his books and listened to the podcast and heard the Alt MBA adverts such that when I was trying to fund my academic fellowship, one of the things I put in my line items of the funding was for the Alt MBA and I wanted to do that as part of my personal training. Fast forward a few years, the stuff that I learned in that short burst of time is now coming full circle such that I’m creating those Alt MBA intense project delivery type exercises for my own research team to help them see that there are other ways to get stuff done and to realize that done is far better than perfect. My eyes were opened in the Alt MBA and it’s just, you know, it’s a joy now to be able to try to do that same sort of stuff for a lot of people. Yeah, thanks very much for sharing that. That’s interesting. I’m preparing for this interview. I listened to the first couple dozen or so of your podcast episodes from years ago, which are very charming. You know, you say like, you know, I’m going to do one every day and then there’s a 140 day gap because you have a second child and you’re like, Oh my God, I had no idea. The game changes with two kids, so I didn’t realize how easy one kid was. Yeah, there’s a multiplicative factor, you know, they’re a team, you said. But anyway, you talk there about how actually, yeah, sort of funding this Alt MBA was actually part of your academic kind of package, which I found super interesting that you could actually pull that off. So congratulations to you for doing that, because those kinds of things can be hard to convince. But then that’s very interesting that you would take something from the kind of like, you know, entrepreneurial world and bring it into the academic world to sort of improve productivity and kind of the excitement and just give people a different model for what they’re doing. Yeah, but it does then link to, you know, other stuff you’re wanting to talk about. Back when I did the Alt MBA, I didn’t have any book to speak of. I was the master procrastinator for many years, and it was, for lack of more poetic phrasing, the rock up my ass to get stuff finished. So you know, that was one line item in the whole list of things I wanted the Alt MBA to be a catalyst for. And speaking of your book, so just moving on to the next part of the interview, where you talk about the author’s book and their work and things like that. So one thing that we’ve sort of left out of this whole conversation about all the things that you’ve done and your path through life is that a lot of this time you felt like you were an imposter, to some extent, and you write about this very, very movingly in your book. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the imposter phenomenon, your experience of it, and why it’s not a syndrome. So, thanks in large part to you. A lot of what we’ve discussed already helps create the thread that ties it all together. So I’ll come back to explaining what it actually is, but summarizing things we’ve said already. Looking at an academic path whilst being essentially the first in family to go from that school environment into a higher education environment, having, even within academia, many short-term contracts where there are necessities to move from working with one group of people in one institution to a completely unknown group of people in another lab in another institution moving from job to job to job. All of those things together created in me what I didn’t know there was a name for during my postdoc. When I moved from my PhD lab to my postdoc lab, that was the first such big career move for me in terms of working essentially in one company, then another, one uni, then another. One group of people who, as we’ve shared with our own PhD experiences, whether you’re working alone or as a team, there’ll be a group of people you know for several years. That move for me to another team was the first time I’d known no one. But what I wasn’t prepared for was, at that time, it’s the first that I’d found myself Google stalking people and finding out what did their Google Scholar profile look like and how many papers did they have and what’s the metrics of the journals that they were publishing and essentially, how much more do they know than I do? When are these people going to find me out? When is the boss going to realize they hired the wrong postdoc and rip up my contract and give it to the next person in line? I had no idea what that was, that all came under this banner of what most people would call the imposter syndrome. It was only during that two-year postdoc period that I, again, through exploring entrepreneurship on the side at the time and listening to Seth Godin and Tim Ferriss and others in that space on podcasts, that in the entrepreneurial world, I think one distinction is they’re a lot better at exploring and openly talking about mind management techniques more so than in academia. So at that time, when I was struggling with these comparisons I was making, I had happened to come across and listen to some stuff from entrepreneurs about journaling and meditation. So I knew this stuff was going on and I knew that it was starting to impact how much time I could spend in a day thinking about the research I actually wanted to do. I was spending all this time worrying about what I was thinking of myself relative to others, not a lot of time thinking about the cool science I was there to do. So I went home every day and cracked open a Word file and just chipped away on the keys for two years in secret because I’d just been learning about other people who were journaling daily and getting a lot from it. So that was my way of getting it all out of my head onto paper. And then that first year, I still didn’t really know what the name for it was, the first year was really just me pouring all of that out. As year one of the post-doc turned into year two, more of that secret writing became reflections on, I found this article today or I listened to this podcast, I found this book. And this little nugget, this tool sort of helped me see this thing I was struggling with in a different way. Eventually, I came across terms like imposter syndrome and the imposter phenomenon to realize that the things I was experiencing were not just known, but common. And not just common, but very well reported among many, very well known people. And that many decades before I had ever felt like this, that had been coined not as the imposter syndrome, but the imposter phenomenon. And that was the thing that confused me and I write about that, that I was confused to see the different term. And now eventually coming to the crux of your question about why it was important to hang on to that distinction, why was it ever coined imposter phenomenon and how has it come to be that we all call it this more ominous imposter syndrome now? And it was, in short terms, a happy accident. There was an article published in the early 80s, a few years after the imposter phenomenon had been coined by the original researchers that wrote phenomenon and syndrome in the same article. I think quite innocently, syndrome is much easier to say than phenomenon. Syndrome carries more weight, more dark connotations, will certainly sell more books, and is easier to get attention with. Thinking in analytical terms, much like many members of your audience will, it was when I started to look at those trends that you could see more clearly that there is nowadays no contest between the terms. Yes, in academia, psychologists are more aware and will use phenomenon and syndrome by the same cord, but look at Google Trends, web scrape some data from Twitter and other places and you’ll see that syndrome is the runaway winner. And I think for many of those innocent reasons seeded back in the early 80s, why it matters though is that one of the connotations coming out from using the word syndrome is to think that it’s something pathological, to think that that experience means there’s something wrong with you, that it is at this point in time an ethereal collection of symptoms that might one day be diagnosed as a disease, but that’s the point, there is no such thing. That feeling of being an imposter is rooted in many elements that are just common parts of the human experience and using the word syndrome just wraps up in the wrong sort of Christmas paper if you like, it gives it this sense of being something that it isn’t, it adds more weight to it when it shouldn’t and that’s why when you hear many people talking about how to quote unquote overcome it, which is another thing I don’t like, you can come to that later if you want, but they will quite rightly say things like the large numbers of percentage of people who feel that way and it’s sort of left at that subtle point where yes a lot of people feel it, but we should go further and say a lot of people feel it because it’s not a syndrome, it’s a very very normal part of you trying to make the next move in your life, next move in your career, move from the comfortable to the more challenging unknown. I would tie all of that in a bow by saying that if you don’t feel like an imposter during these moves in your career, you’re probably doing it wrong because feeling like an imposter is the natural position to have, you’re not the expert and you’re aware of it. Does that make sense? Yeah it does, thanks very much for that. There’s so much, I mean I could respond to that with myself. One thing I wanted to sort of drill down into though is that I sort of like, probably if I’d been asked the question I would have given the right answer, but I didn’t really understand until I sort of read your book and listened to like your podcast and stuff like that, was that imposter syndrome is, in addition to sort of like feeling like maybe you don’t merit the position you have, there is a preoccupation, and again I’m asking this to confirm what I think I understood from this, but a preoccupation, basically all of us have probably had the experience of feeling like we’re in a new job, we’re in a new situation, maybe you don’t fit in, maybe we’re not as good as the people around us yet or stuff like that, but a preoccupation with the idea that you’re going to be found out and that you’re going to lose the position that you have. Is that correct? That hits the nail on the head. The undercurrent of that, the qualifier is that it’s not just that you think you’re going to be found out, not just that you either think you’re not good enough or that you don’t know enough. If you stop there, you come to one of the most common mistakes of interpreting what this experience is, and that is to think that it’s all about low self-esteem, and that’s not the case. The thing that all of those thoughts are partnered with is that it happens in high achievers, people who have ambition or are striving for something, and to have and can print on a piece of paper hard evidence of their graft, their accolades, their successes, things that have gone before, which leads to other things like not stopping to accept praise, feeling like an imposter even though the evidence says otherwise. If you like a contradiction in terms and one that specifically affects most people who want to progress and to try new things and to get to the next stage of their career or to try a new career. It’s not as simple as having low self-esteem. That’s something altogether different. There is overlap, but it’s very distinct at the same time. Thanks very much for bringing that up. I didn’t say it myself, you did so well, but one of the mistakes people make is they think that it’s just about feeling like you’re not good enough or whatever. It’s actually the fear of being found out. But also, as you say, it’s not a matter of low self-esteem. In fact, built into it is the idea that you want to be better than you are, which is a high achiever’s necessary condition. You’re looking to climb the next hill, constantly self-questioning and things like that. This is another thing I learned from you is that in addition to that fear of being found out that is a common feature of this phenomenon or experience, the other thing is comparisons. Comparing yourself to other people, as you said, looking them up on Google Scholar and things like that. As I gather, being unable to help yourself from thinking about that other person’s experience and comparing yourself to them. I’m just curious, is part of that thinking about what they’re thinking about you? Or is it all you thinking about them and comparing yourself to them? That is a fascinating question. I’ve never heard a comparison quite pitched like that before. But I guess everything that we’ve spoken about up until now is one side of that same coin, where all of the anxiety around the imposter experience is you worrying about what others think of you, the boss that might find you out, the person who might realize that you don’t know enough or don’t know as much as them. That’s you worrying about what they think of you. What you’re asking about now, and I hadn’t thought about it in this way until you asked the question in that way, is that it’s the flip side of the same coin. All that other stuff is you worrying about what they think of you. But the comparisons is all of the misconstrued ways that you think of them, you compare yourself to the person who is more successful in some dimension that you think or some metric that you think is exalted or on the pedestal, be that general metrics or whatever. It doesn’t need to be just the academic metrics. Whatever metric it is that others are held to in the same job as you, or whatever comes up at an annual development review or CPD or something along those lines, you’ll find those nuggets where you can compare you, A, to them, B. The thing that gets missed out is the context. How did they get to where they are? What is their story to get to now versus your story? The other way I have heard this is like, well, is there anything good about this whole so-called imposter syndrome? And counter-intuitively comparison can be a good thing. If you’re comparing to someone who is tantalizingly close to where you are, and you can see the tangible steps to get to where they are, that can provide upward lift, upward momentum, motivation for you to get there. But a lot of these comparisons that take the darker turn and become these imposter-type thoughts are, you just throw out the window all of that backstory. You never consider all the crap that that person might have waded through to get to where they are, or how their starting point might be different to yours. It’s just in the moment, the instantaneous comparison without context that leads to the dark side of this, which is why you can speak about these things in the same breath as social media, and the way that social media has provided a mechanism to exaggerate all of that poor type of comparison. You see the highlight reel, you see someone in the moment showing the best of themselves. You don’t see the backstory. All you get is a continuous stream of opportunity to instantly compare yourself now to what you perceive of them on that little square on social media. Yeah, it’s interesting. That reminds me of something you talk about. There’s a talk that I’ll link to in the transcript when we eventually get it out for this episode. There’s a talk you gave on YouTube, I don’t think too long ago, where you talk about three ways of dealing with the imposter phenomenon. The last one is compare carefully, which is what you’re talking about right now. Don’t compare yourself to, I don’t know, Ryan Reynolds on his best day, unless you’re Ryan Gosling on your best day, and you’re like, how do we compare? If you find yourself, one of the ways of dealing with this kind of ideation, or if I’m using that word correctly, is like, it’s okay to compare yourself to other people, but compare to other people in your same context. I love what you brought up earlier. There’s an element of ambition to this. It’s not a lack of self-esteem that brings you into this mindset. It’s self-esteem and wanting to be better and wanting to be that way, but being careful of not picking a target that’s completely out of your reach now. It might be within your reach someday, but if you’re going to be thinking this way, if you’re going to go into that loop, bring in something that’s nearer to you, and that can be a way of turning it into something more productive rather than destructive. Using mirror is a really cool way of putting it. I like that because it also, in not so many words, gives you the idea that the mirror has to be quite close. These comparisons are social ones. They are local comparisons. They’re not global. Again, linking to your audience, it’s not like the ideal situation might be to all of the data of all possible comparisons in a searchable database, but our human existence is not like that. These social comparisons, it’s not just that they happen. These are the most energy-efficient ways for humans to go about figuring out where is my place relative to others in this tribe that I either know well or don’t know well. It’s not just about skill, actually. The same social comparison-type phenomena are about figuring out where your opinion sits in the crowd as well. You can go down a whole other rabbit hole about groupthink versus thinking on individual terms, but it’s all about those close comparisons, having the mirror close to be able to see those reflections because it’s the easiest way to figure out where you’re at now and where you can be later. What I try to eventually argue is that these things are unavoidable. They’re part of the human condition, but consider the game of comparison where it’s comparing yourself today versus yourself yesterday or yourself today versus where you want to be tomorrow. Those are two different people. It’s just a slightly more abstract sort of comparison, but that’s really the only game that I realized that you can win and I think others have echoed that sentiment. It took me a long time to think that way because back at the beginning of that story, when you asked about it in those postdoc days, that penny had not dropped. I had no way to think in those terms. It was just us all consuming in the moment comparison between me now and others who I later realized were just a few steps ahead of me. In a productive way, they were a few steps ahead of me. Yeah. Comparing yourself to yourself is a lot more productive than comparing yourself to other people, it seems, is a very important lesson to try and learn. For some reason, that reminds me of this great story. I think it was Umberto Eco, the novelist who had an amazing library, like 30,000 books, a private library, 30,000 books or something like that. He would let people in from the public, as it were, he would let them in. At one point, there’s this couple, I think, that came in and one of them looked around and frowned and said, you couldn’t possibly have read all of these books. I love that story because clearly in that person’s mind, this person only had these books in order to display their accomplishments and in particular to them, right? That this person is signaling to me and I have to fight back against that in some way to say, no, no, you couldn’t have possibly read all these books. The way you can basically be captured by, you know, it’s not just like one way, it’s like you looking at that person looking back at you and then you looking back at them and the weird ways you can get caught up in these kinds of things. Instead of thinking like, wow, I wish, you know, hopefully one day I’ll be able to read all these books or something like that. You know, I haven’t read any of them, but one day maybe I can. Instead sort of bogging yourself down in preoccupations about the other person. It can be very natural and very hard to get out of, but if you can find your way out of that, it’s not that other people are indifferent to you and that they don’t have opinions about you or anything like that at all, but that it’s often you’re putting yourself in that other person’s eyes looking back at you. That’s the mistake that you can make. It’s not actually that other person looking at you. It’s you inhabiting them with some preoccupation looking back at yourself. Completely. I wish I had it next to me listening to you. I’ve picked the wrong day to take my egg timer that used to be sitting on my desk into the office because I’ve been using it to have that same conversation with my students where, you know, in your story, you know, the person who was in some ways angry about the size of the library, you know, they’ve turned the egg timer upside down and there’s all that sand drifting away on time that they’re spending worrying about that other person, but the other person on that side of the story isn’t letting that sand dwindle away in reverse. You know, they’re not wasting their time having these thoughts or these, you know, throwaway comparisons that aren’t in any way productive, but are doing everything to drain you of the only resource that really matters, which is your time. I find that just, you know, having something like that on my desk is a very quick way to help people see, well, how much time are you actually letting drift away? Oh, I haven’t heard of that tactic. That’s super fascinating. I mean, and that would apply to anything, right? Like any kind of like bad, bad paths that you find yourself going down. It’s like without the sand falling, turn your mind away from that back towards where you were supposed to be or where you want to be. That’s super interesting. Just before we go on to talk about your, you know, your sort of writing process and your publishing process and stuff like that, which is super interesting. There’s, there’s something I wanted to really talk about this, this idea of syndrome versus phenomenon and even the word imposter. I know you’ve done, you’ve done research, you’ve done a lot of research into this and you’re not, you know, you’re not a psychologist or anything like that, but you are a scientist. And this is just a kind of personal hobby horse I have, but like I find, and I’m just curious what your thoughts are or if there is a discourse around this in psychology, but you know, the, the misuse of the English language by psychologists, I find just incredibly frustrating and damaging. And whenever I encounter sort of things from psychology, I often feel like I’m living in the age of phrenology and I’m, you know, the, one of those people jumping up and down saying, I don’t need to have sort of domain specific expertise to tell you that what you’re doing is unscientific and wrong. So for example, appropriating everyday English language words to refer to constructs within their own discipline is incredibly damaging and misleading. So for, I mean, it’s sort of, to me, that’s sort of like, you know, iconic example of this kind of profound unscientific mistake is using the word depression. Yeah. You know, like if you look behind it, actually, you won’t just be like, eventually you’ll, if they’re real, if they’re actually rigorous, you’ll find a paper somewhere or a manual, you know, famously with a description of what that means and what it actually means is, okay, if you’re trained in these circumstances, observing a person in these ways, and they exhibit these behaviors in response to these stimuli, then we get to say they’ve got this condition or syndrome. But none of that is in the dictionary. If you look up the word depression, none of that is in your everyday common sense experience of using that word or thinking about it or having those experiences and what have you. And you know, my sort of, if I had, if I were on this sort of soapbox in the corner of Hyde Park or whatever, like they used to do sort of, you know, giving my crazy speech, it would be like, instead of using these ordinary words like imposter or depression or what, and certainly the nonsense language about laboratory and experiment, when you’re not doing chemistry, you’re like putting a marshmallow in front of a kid, that’s not a lab and that’s not an experiment. And it’s misleading to use those words. But instead, if you just said, you know, kind of observable condition X, Y, nine dash eight, like they do in cosmology, you know what I mean? Then you go, oh, what’s that? There’d be no loaded language. There’d be no loaded, you know, preconception. You just look it up and you’d be like, oh, if a psychologist under these circumstances observes a person behaving in response to certain stimuli in this way, then we’ve got this sort of pattern that we’ve defined. Anyway, that’s just my little rant. Like, you know, is there a discourse around this in psychology that you’ve come across in your research and stuff like that? Or is it really just to be, to put all my cards on the table, that fucking naive, that people just use these English language words like friendship, you know, empathy, to talk about this. Actually, when you drill down to it, very specific kind of constructs, but using this like nonsense use of language that they do as a, I hesitate to call it a profession. Well, I’m loving this, firstly, because this is really the first time I’ve had a chance to talk about this with someone who has genuine literary prowess far beyond my own, given your own qualifications, but we cycle by it. So what you’re, what you’re anchoring this on is that, yes, we spoke about, you know, I’d written about syndrome versus phenomenon and that is my own personal soapbox, but far more subtly in a different chapter of the book I wrote about the word imposter and use that to think, to try and teach people stories about what it means to be a genuine imposter and whether or not you really want to be using a word like that, you know, to paint yourself in the same terms of those who have been convicted in genuine terms of fraud or being an imposter or being part of a Ponzi scheme. I’ve seen, in short, much of this when I was listening to you. One of the principal things that comes to mind, just to give you one example, is not necessarily from a psychologist, but a revered writer that I learned from when I was trying to figure out how to just articulate this stuff. Writer called John McPhee. Bear with me. I see. You couldn’t possibly have read all those books, Mark. Almost too often. I won’t scramble any longer, but there is a copy of a John McPhee book on the shelves next to me called Draft Number Four. And to come to your point, so John McPhee wrote in that book that as a writer, your friend is not the thesaurus, but the dictionary. If you’re looking for ways to describe a word, don’t look for the other words that are like in the thesaurus. Don’t right click and go to the synonyms. Look at the dictionary definition. Use more words rather than fewer and actually explain the words in simpler terms. But to your point, if you do that, you then get to more specific terms of what you actually mean. Again, I know this probably since I’ve done it several times where I’m hopelessly trying to link this to those in the software space. But I do think about this in those terms when writing programs where, you know, you can easily draw in a whole library of code that someone else has written and using various objects, apply that other code to your own. And there’s ways to do that where you never have to look inside the black box of that library that you’ve brought into your code. And therefore, you might not actually know what’s going on. You might think you know what’s going on. So you’re, as you’re saying, you might think you know what the word means. But really what you’re doing is using it as a contraction for a whole host of other if this, then that things that lie underneath it. So I think it’s, yes, it’s something I’ve come across. And it’s the one case, be it for imposter or syndrome, or like you say, empathy, depression. You know, these are the things where I think there is a genuine case to be made for holding onto the jargon to be pedantic about it. Because as well, I imagine, you know, in a position of leadership, that is your responsibility, you know, to not let those in your care hold these assumptions that might do damage to themselves and then concurrently do damage to how your team is trying to run. You know, these are the cases where you should not apologize for being pedantic, because in that extra time spent to see what’s in the black box, to see what the real definition of the word does, you then get the message as it was intended, and don’t leave on the table the risk of misinterpretation of what’s been said. Oh, yeah, no, I mean, I completely agree with everything you just said. And actually the comparison to software is very apt. I think naming is notoriously difficult thing to do in programming. And these matters of naming are incredibly important, especially when you’re working together with people who have different expertise, right? And so, for example, a version of this is like the programmers and the business people and the people in between them all need to have the same language, you know, to talk about things that they all understand differently, right, from a different perspective. And this is like one of the big challenges that you could that you can have in sort of like, so for example, the sort of programmers will want to talk in the very specific terms, you know, that they all understand. But when you’re in the context of talking to the person who’s going to have to talk to the guy who’s like, what about revenue? You know, and it’s not dumbing it. The important I think the thing is that when you it’s not dumbing it down to sort of try and find a shared language. But at the same time, as you’re saying, you can’t, you know, there’s a great old Simpsons joke where I think his name is Dr. Hibbert. Homer has a heart condition and he needs heart surgery. And Dr. Hibbert is explaining heart surgery to him. And he gets all kind of like the person in the library that in in Umberto Eco’s library that I was describing before. It’s like, oh, all up on your high horse with your fancy talk. And and Hibbert, you know, sort of dumbed it down until the point where he goes, I’m going to tinker with your ticker. And that finally Homer is happy with that. That description because now Dr. Hibbert isn’t being Mr. Fancy Man. But of course, actually, Dr. Hibbert couldn’t have done Homer a greater disservice than to give him these nonsense words that that Homer is finally sort of not doesn’t feel insulted by right. So you do you do have to find a happy medium. But very but I mean, one of the reasons I think your comparison to you know, to software, you know, there actually is something underneath it that’s explicit that this term refers to. Yes. And it’s the same thing in psychology and sort of using using a sort of the sort of, you know, point that I’m making is that like, you know, to take a dictionary word, right, and then use it to apply to something that when someone looks it up in the dictionary, it’s not there. You know, that’s actually just fundamentally a bad, a bad practice. And you know, so words like for example, words like imposter, like, why should why should you write, you know, having had, you know, the experience that you’ve had in life, and all the hundreds of people that you’ve interacted with in your research and stuff like that? Why should you have to go through the exercises of explaining? Well, we all know what a real imposter is. You know, if just some sort of very specific kind of form of naming was used, instead of appropriating these words, from our everyday experience, then just talking about sort of psychological phenomena would be a lot easier and a lot less rot. Yeah, and I think there and that, what seems like it should be obvious is then where the magic is, because once you get, once you swallow the bitter pill and realize that these things are not as obvious as some of us think they should be, then you can turn them into tools to make them more obvious for more people. Because if not doing that, you know, if we are our own devil’s advocate here, then you could stay on the soapbox and then do nothing about it other than point fingers. I think that’s your position of leadership, right? Is then to think, well, it’s not the way I think it should be, not the way I necessarily want it to be. How do I change that? You know, name the action oriented person. That’s how you then create the tools to say, right, here is what’s under the hood. Here is a guided way to look at what’s under the hood. And that maybe circling back to the all MBA for a second, that’s where I learned about what coaching means versus mentorship. It’s like, as a leader, you can then create these tools, but not necessarily give people the answer, lead them up to the point where their revelation becomes their own. The penny drops for them, you don’t drop it on their behalf. And when people have that self-realization, they’ve learned it for themselves, that’s when it sticks. That’s the whole thing that came out of this for me, is to get off of that soapbox and say, well, here’s a tool, here’s how you can lead yourself up to a point. Now you need to do the hard work, you need to do the rest, you need to go the last 10%, journal it for yourself, write out for yourself, teach it on to other people. And then that’s when the learning becomes something longer term. And yeah, so just actually you’ve given me a great segue into the last part of the interview where we talk about your book and how it came about and actually doing something. I can’t hesitate, but I sort of can’t help myself but make a joke about, are you saying that ranting on a podcast means I haven’t solved the problem that I care about? You’ve seeded the solution. The problem has started to be solved. This is the first thing. But anyway, so you’ve written this great book. And so I was just wondering if you could talk about the origin story of the book and how you came to write it and the process of writing it a little bit and how you came to sort of choose Leanpub as a platform for getting it out there. Trying to avoid giving people a nosebleed with me repeating myself. I think I’d love to spend more time actually on the how side of it because a lot of the origins of how it came to be was, it would be very easy for me to say that this was me trying to preach and convert others to think in this way. It started, as I’ve told you in the other parts of the story, this was my itch to scratch for myself. And it was then only in later bits of my career I realized how many people felt this way. And that me writing this book to myself could then be as if I was having a conversation with someone across the table. So that is essentially why, that’s the why behind it. The how it came to be, just before we get to the Leanpub, but the how it came to be was really a conversation with a friend of mine who I’d done my PhD with and met a few years after. And I confided in him to say, look, I’m in this new position. I’ve been writing all of this stuff to myself for a few years. And he seeded the thought of, well, could those thoughts start to cluster into themes? And could you call those themes chapters and start to think about turning it into a book? That was the seed planted. It was then several years down the line linking back into thoughts of trying to learn programming where I thought, well, yes, I’m not a psychologist. I’m not a counselor or anything like that. But I know how to crunch numbers. I know how to collect data. From other bits of my work, I have been exposed to a lot of psychology and have friends who are psychologists who could peer review the way I want to do this. Let’s go beyond the memoir sort of stuff and try to turn it into a research piece where any of the advice of recommendations I give have more underpinning. And that led to a whole lot of stuff. Programming was one part of it. I would never have planned to, but I did eventually hire a genealogist to help me with part of the book, different ways to draw this data in. So the why was all the stuff we spoke about earlier on my personal side. The how was seeded by the friend who said your writing could be a book. The start of the mechanics of the how was then figuring out all those research tools that could come together. But how Leanpub came into the picture was one of the happiest accidents of the whole thing. There was, I’m now ashamed to say no design behind it. I actually had no awareness of the platform before the Alt MBA. So that’s another happy accident that you’ve brought that up because it was actually someone who I was on the Alt MBA with who is a software engineer and his name is Mika. And I still say to him to this day that I thank him for ever mentioning the word Leanpub in passing. So during the Alt MBA, I had committed like, you know, this is me. I need to pull the thumb out of my ass. I’ve had this book on the table for years. I want to get it over the line this year, but I’m still figuring out where to write it. Where do I take all this word document stuff and actually start to be able to not just format it, but find a platform in which I can start to more formally write what is chapter one and two and three. And he mentioned Leanpub and passing, which is when I then went to look at it. My only exposure to anything like it in the past, and I hope this isn’t too far down the lines of blasphemy, but was things like latex and overleaf. You know, as an academic, I’d been exposed to those things and saw a little bit of the light where, you know, those platforms can help you focus more on the writing and not too much on whether you are packing up a particular font or having a particular type of line spacing. You know, that was my first exposure to see all of that stuff can come later, get all of that out of your head and find a way to focus on the writing and allow the magic of some of the automation to happen later where you can then choose whether it’s a book that’s six by nine or a technical book versus a nonfiction book. That’s what that mention of Leanpub and passing allowed me to do. I saw, you know, other platforms that might do the same sort of thing, but when I found Leanpub, I felt, I should say for people listening, I’ve not been paid to say any of that. This is just my, I’m so glad that that accident happened because I don’t even know if I would have published yet had I not found that as quickly as I did. I’ve found that writing in Leanpub has got me to the point of, you know, it’s by no accident that I’ve got on the desk, right, but to have versions of the book like this that look, the part that look professional, I thought that was going to be another massive hell of undertaking. I didn’t realize until Leanpub how much of that could be automated and not just automated, but changeable and, you know, within a few drop-down menus changed to create experiments of what the book might look like in another form. For example, with the book, you know, I held up the hardback version of it there, but the hardback and the paperback are like standard U.S. trade six by nine, right, so that was easy enough to set up in Leanpub. Where I really started to see more of the magic happen was then with my book editor. She really helped drive me to take what was throwaway take-home messages at the end of the chapters and turn them into the tools and the challenges that I’m now using as frontrunners for talking about the book elsewhere. You know, these are the journaling challenges or the research that others can be prompted to do between chapters before they read on. Because of that, from my editor, I then wrote a supplement to the book, which is all of those exercises compiled into a workbook, a personal journal to accompany the main reading, and I had to write that as like an A4 book, so it was taking elements of the book as I’d written it and then figuring out which parts of it could I strip out and pivot into this larger template. I thought, again, that was going to be another couple of years worth of a project to get that to happen. But the book, the workbook, and more recently, yes, yes, the Spanish version of the book, I did it all in Leanpub. For the translation, it was hiring a translator, of course, but having that underpinning in Leanpub has made each next step easier than the last. And I bring it all back to this thing of being able to focus more on the writing and let the magic of what a book looks like come later. Because I don’t know when this will be. I’m not ready to even say where it is, but I’ve started writing my next book, and I’ve done so in Leanpub. And that’s why I think I’ll stick with it because I can see that for anyone here who’s an aspiring writer, figuring out the workflow is arguably more difficult than any of the writing you’ll ever do. I now realize that the writing, as hard as it was, was the easy bit. Figuring out the workflow such that book one can become book two and book three, that was tough. Ditto marketing the thing. Everything becomes a smaller and smaller part of the writer’s journey, I dare say. But yeah, I’m glad to say that I’ve found Leanpub and happier to say that I’ll be sticking with it. Thanks very much for sharing all of that. Before we started recording, one thing I mentioned to Mark was that there are people who actually… We typically do three parts to the interviews. The first part is getting to know the person. There are people who love listening to that. The second part is talking about whatever the book, and there are people who love listening to that because that makes it a totally general interest. Both of those parts make it a totally general interest podcast. But there are people who are like, screw all that. I want to learn how this person’s experience as an author and how they write. When you brought up process there, that’s so important. There’s a lot that I could say in response to what you said so well. That particular point that you’re making about when you’re in the writing phase, our advice is always to try and stay as much in the writing phase as you can without getting worried about formatting. Sometimes people take that to mean that we don’t care about formatting. It’s like we do when you’re formatting. The reason we’re so passionate about it is probably it’s the same reason that focusing on the writing was actually something you had to decide to do is because when we’re perfectionists, we’re like, oh, how’s it going to look? How’s it going to look? How’s it going to look on the page or on the screen? And it’s like, no, no, no. There’s a time and a place for being concerned about that. It might not even be your time or your place at all to ever be concerned about that. Until desktop publishing came around in the 80s. I could go on about this for a long time. One of the ironies of a lot of people who think of themselves as bookish now is that before the 80s, if you were a writer, you didn’t, it was the publisher’s job to make the book look nice. You typed on a typewriter. You never had any expectation that what you type would look anything like what the finished product in the end would be like. You were writing words, sequences of letters and spaces and punctuation and how they would be formatted in the end was something that would be taken care of further on in the process. There was a writing, there was a thinking stage, there’s an imagining stage, there’s a writing stage, there’s an editing stage, there’s a rewriting stage, and then there’s the rewriting stage again and again and again until you get to the end. But finding a process, as you say, that’s so important. And the thing we always advocate for is try and have, when you’re writing to be writing, keep the formatting out of your head. And one of the ways that we try and make that happen with our platform, and we’re not alone in this, but is that we have all sorts of options that we, you know, you can try your book theme, you can do that, you can play around with that, do it on a break, do it on a break from your writing and things like that. But trying to take as much of that out of your hands while you’re in the writing phase is just one of the really important things that we try and do so people can write better books in the end. Absolutely. And listening to this, and given the fact that you’ve reminded me about those who will jump straight to this part, I think there’s really, for me, there was another important part of this theme that I think is worthwhile sharing for those who, like me, are either thinking about their first book, might even be already there and thinking about doing it in Leanpub. I’ll give you another genuine point where I wrestled with this for a long time. Even when I was experimenting with Leanpub, one of the points for me wrestling with was, am I going to self-publish or am I going to go down the traditional route and before publishing, look for an agent who will then pitch it to a big-time publisher and get it going down all those traditional routes. And there are still pros and cons, but getting over the line took longer. But a lot of the supportive content that you at Leanpub have put out eventually got me over that line. By that I mean this. I used to worry a lot about things like piracy and whether or not I could do this on my own, whether it was worthwhile. And one of the medium posts that you’ve put out that I read that really helped switch my thinking was to realize, not if, but the fact that all of these things, if someone really wants to do it, they’re going to bloody do it. If someone really wants to steal or pirate what you’ve got, they’ll find a way to do it, no matter how hard you try. Those people are not your audience. And that really was a revelation for me. And because then that was such a small part of the bigger picture that to read things in that way helped me then focus on what I really wanted to do, which was I was 90% of the way of saying I did want to self-publish. I had been reading stories of the likes of Hugh Howie, who was one of the first big-time self-publishers who’s made it like a massive career for himself. But one of the inspirational bits of his story was the fact that learning all of the mechanisms of how to self-publish, not just to be the writer, but to learn how platforms like Leanpub could give more of that control to you, and that you could have more control of that feedback loop to create new versions of your book and to keep a lot of the decisions for yourself so that you can scale as and when and how you want. And I’m so glad I found that bit that got the worry out of my head, because that’s really the other side of this that those who fast-forward to this part of the podcast should hear. Mechanisms and a platform in the form of Leanpub is the way where you can open the black box and see all the steps that you might otherwise assume are too scary and need someone else to do on your behalf. That’s magic that I don’t do as the writer. I can’t possibly see that. That needs to be farmed out. I can only do this the traditional way, and that’s not the case. So there’ll be those listening to this who are at that crossroads and thinking, can I self-publish? That will be the question in their mind. That was the question in my mind. I would say yes, and it’s worth the experimental time to see how to do that workflow for yourself. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with traditional publishing. Just saying it depends what you want. I wanted this as my first writing adventure to learn the entire workflow such that if I decide to self-publish again, I can. But if I do decide to go for an agent and a bigger book deal, I now have more of the language so that no one can pull the wheel over my eyes. And likewise, I can help work more collaboratively with an agent or a publisher because I know now more of what I’m talking about. There’s so much more wealth to this than worrying about where your book might land or who might try to do anything naughty with your book, let’s say. Thanks very much for that really great answer. I mean, that’s the sort of best kind of first book self-publishing story I could imagine someone telling. Being uncertain, thinking really hard about it, looking down different avenues, a little bit of serendipity, trying different things. And I’ve got to say, it is very gratifying to hear that one or two of those articles about not worrying about piracy actually worked with someone and changed their life. Yeah. I mean, it was game-changing, really. Sounds like I’m exaggerating, but those little things are the things that can snowball into years of procrastination. Well, and I mean, it is one of the reasons I’m genuinely gratified to hear that is like it is something I personally care a lot about. I mean, I remember in one of these articles I talk about it, but there was, I’m going to call him an asshole who got to write an article in the New York Times a few years ago, who was sort of defending a professor who was inflating the prices of his books and sort of angry about the students who were pirating them, that they were cheating the wealthy professor of money from his overpriced textbooks. And then not surprisingly, goes on to talk more asshole talk about, you know, he had a folder in his, I don’t know, internet browser called Thieves. And he would spend his time going around to internet kind of sites, finding pirated copies of his books and calling it thieves. And it’s like, you should be writing more. You should be thinking more. I just thought of that. Yeah. That great idea of like, you know, having like, what are you doing, buddy? Yeah. You know, yeah. Going with the next one. Yeah. Like, you know, I mean, it’s just the reason I get mad about it is because this person had a platform that they could actually use to sort of like draw other people into this nonsense. And it’s like, if you’re a writer, the last thing you should be worried about is, as a bad thing, is more people reading your books. You know, and just, yeah, sorry, just specifically one example. I mean, you showed that copy of your translation. I mean, one of the sort of origin stories of Lean Pub is, you know, we had an author who discovered that their book had been, that had been translated into Russian by somebody and sold by this person without permission. And instead of getting mad, the author was like, wait a minute, I now have a Russian audience, you know, for my book. That’s just the best kind of optimism, isn’t it? Exactly. And so what they did was, I mean, they got in touch, they got in touch with the translator, ostensible pirate, and said, hey, I’ve got a new book coming out. Would you like to translate it? And let’s, you know, write up a contract and stuff like that. And, and so, you know, and like, you know, for example, in, you know, Lean Pub used to be bootstrapped. So, but we would do client work to sort of fund our dreams on the side. And our most lucrative client by far found us by pirating my co-founder’s book. He said, I was looking for books online. I got a pirated copy and, you know, wow, I really want to work with you now, you know? And so, you know, but this is to sort of generalize from this. Like, a lot of the things that we can find ourselves preoccupied with in a kind of very negative way are actually like, it’s not, it’s not the world putting you in a container. It’s you locking yourself into it. And yeah. Yeah. I mean, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve got there before I did, which was like, yeah, you know, that piracy side, but it’s not just that it can block your time, but you can think that that’s the only side of it. And then the other thing positively that I’ve realized is that, you know, Lean Pub’s a part of this. It’s a bigger theme, but in publishing at Lean Pub, you’re then serving a different audience. Again, you’re, you’re serving an audience of people who prefer to access books in this way, to read books as a PDF, to have the flexibility of downloading the EPUB and putting on whatever device they read from, to contribute in terms of their monetary donation more flexibly rather than there being a set price. You know, this, these characteristics then build up an audience, which you call Lean Pub. And you know, these are people who could be learning and being served by your message that might not ever buy a book off Amazon or from a bookstore, you know, because these are, this is a different niche to serve. So that was the other thing for me where I thought, well, you know, it’s not all about all that other stuff. This is a, a group of people who might not be elsewhere and one person who sees it and enjoys it might interact with another person who’s in this community who can then get enjoyment from it as well. You know, outside of Lean Pub Ditto for why it’s worthwhile having the ebook, the paperback, the hardback, the audio version. You know, I’ve done all of those things now because it’s not, it’s not that everyone’s going to buy all of them. It’s that each version, each medium is a message for a different audience who will only buy the audio book, who may only like nice hardbacks, who want paperbacks as far as the eye can see, or who do older reading on an electronic device. These are all different audiences. You can think about serving them all. Oh yeah. No, I completely agree. And just, I just wanted to call out one thing there, which is we don’t advocate piracy on Lean Pub. And, and it’s, but I brought to say that by what you said about the community and people with different interests and stuff like that. So in particular, and this is why we saved this for the end of the episode, cause it’s all this kind of in the weeds stuff, but because we pay an 80% royalty to authors and because we let people decide what to pay, we actually show you how much the author is going to get from your purchase on Lean Pub, which actually means that we have extremely low refund rates, I think compared to the industry. And actually people often pay more than they have to for Lean Pub books, because there’s this connection between them and the author that’s there that you don’t get in a normal commercial, you know, bookstore relationship, right? Where it’s like, I have no idea how much the author is going to get. And if I did know, maybe I wouldn’t buy that book because they get so little typically. But, but anyway, but you know, that, that’s, that’s all to say that like, you know, there’s there, as you say, there are all these different, one thing to keep in mind is when you go down the self publishing route or even the publishing route, there’s all sorts of people in all sorts of circumstances are going to come to you in all sorts of different ways. And one of the main things to keep in mind is anyone who finds their way to your work. Great. You know, that that that’s a good result. If it’s through the paperback, if it’s through the hardback, if it’s through, they, they found it on a Airbnb bookshelf, you know what I mean? You know, and didn’t, didn’t, and you know, had a great night reading it, you know, and, but didn’t pay you a cent, but then they, now they know who you are and they got something from it. They learned, maybe they had this moment where they’re like, I’ve always felt this way. I didn’t know what the name for it was, but now I have it. It’s imposter phenomenon Thank you very much. You know, Mark, for sort of taking years out of your life to, to write about this and get this out there. But with all that said this is, we’ve now done a feature length kind of interview. And so in the somewhat interests of time, the very last thing that I say for the question to ask on these interviews, if the guest is, is, is a lean pub author is, if there was one terrible problem with our platform that you had you shaking your fist at the screen all the time that we could fix for you, or if there was one magical feature we could build for you, is there anything you can think of that you would ask us to do that you think would help you or other authors or readers? I have been selfishly thinking about this for an unusual book format I would like to trial. If I said much more than that, that would give the game away, but I want to write a particular book. And it may be my first foray into fiction writing, where one doesn’t read the book the way one would suspect to read a book. So to achieve that, I think there could be more flexibility on, on the previews that are generated. Let me put it that way. That has been the single most positive thing so far. Authors thinking about writing one of the game changers for me in Lean Pub was the tightness of the feedback loop. And when a bit of writing was done, click the button, generate the preview, see it as a beautiful formatted PDF. And for some reason I always spot errors easier than in a PDF than elsewhere. So that feedback loop was constant and it made iteration easier. But the future projects I’m thinking about doing in Lean Pub, there’s parts of that where it would be nice to have a few more cogs in what that preview looked like. I know I’m being probably very unhelpfully mysterious in saying that, but maybe to give you a bit more value than just that answer. There’s another element of the platform that I haven’t explored that in answer to your question, you know, some constructive criticism might be. There’s other parts of, let’s say, the community functions, the forum sorts of functions that an author has for Lean Pub. But I think I would benefit on seeing more educational content about upfront. Why do I say that? So others, I think certainly in software where you’re looking at more activity based writing. You know, I’ve said that in my book, I’ve got a lot of tools and challenges on the entrepreneurial side. I’ve been turning my book into seminars and workshops and going out and doing paid speaking on that side of things. So I’m looking more and more about the book as the starting point and the course as the next iteration of it. And I know that’s another whole other conversation for what Lean Pub can do. But as part of that and part of our conversation about community, I know there’s this whole other world of using forums and creating more of a community that you can see in Lean Pub. I haven’t really made use of any of that. And I just wonder, am I the sort of person, you know, like coming across your article on piracy and not focusing on that? You know, if I could see more stuff on that other part of the possibilities in a Lean Pub workflow, would I make more of it? Yeah, thanks very much for sharing that. The community part is something that, you know, we’ve always been sort of so focused on sort of book generation and working with authors and stuff like that, that sort of community side of things. We do have forums that you can create for books. We have an author’s forum and things like that, which is all based on the platform called Discourse. But there is so much more we could do. And basically, you know, we actually do, it was a few years, it was way too late that we realized we’d been doing everything over email. And it’s like, authors are asking us questions directly on email, and we’d answer them on email. It does not scale and does not help because then we made a help center, which is, you know, again, like we were, you know, not an invention of ours, but something we should have been doing for years. And actually sharing more, finding ways to share more about all the sort of like information we have and experience that we have is something that we’re trying to focus on more going forward. In particular, we might, you know, start sharing more on it. We do it, we do it on sort of like social media and stuff like that. But having a dedicated place, like probably our authors forum, which you can find a link to on the in the sort of footer of our homepage, if you’re interested, many were listening to us, posting there, probably every day, something would actually probably be very, very helpful to people. I mean, you just ignore it if it’s not interesting. But if it is, click into it and see it. And it is, it is very easy for us to second guess ourselves and also to just underestimate how useful sort of things that sort of, you know, that we sort of deal with every day might be sort of like news, obviously will be news to people, you know, who don’t who don’t do this all the time. And so that’s actually sort of one one sort of sort of thing we know that we need to do better. And when we try to do better, and thanks very much for bringing that up. And, and again, you know, for sort of like saying like that sort of, you know, for us to hear the sort of success story of like, you changed my mind, and got me going on something, you know, can be good motivation from our end as well to sort of, you know, try and get out there more. But, Mark, well, thank you very much for taking some time out of your your evening in Glasgow, to talk to me and to talk to our audience about about, you know, your story and your book, and your experience as an author. And thank you very much for choosing LeanPub as your platform. We really appreciate it. It’s all parts of that are a joy, to say the very least. And thank you for taking the time as well. It’s not just me that’s turned my egg timer upside down for us. And, and it’s been so worthwhile. You know, and then tying this to your closing comments, I think it’s equally endearing to be engaging on a platform where you’re asking open questions for feedback like you have. It’s, you know, it’s a wonderful signal to have that, you know, you, like all your authors are living to learn, and trying to make the experience better all the time. So it was a happy accident for me, but one that I’ll be grateful for for a long time. I’m looking forward to doing more with the platform. Thanks again, Len. Thanks very much. And as always, thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of the Front Matter podcast. If you like what you heard, please rate and review it wherever you found it. And if you’d like to be a LeanPub author yourself, please check out our website at leanpub.com. Thanks.