Chapter 1: An Innocent Fraud is Born

I don’t know happiness. But overachievement and an overwhelming dread? With them, I’m intimate. If you’re here, that resonates, and you don’t have a damn clue what to do about it. I didn’t either.

Before we get to my career woes or yours, allow me to tell you a story.

Part 1 – The Intimidated Actor

A young African American actor was preparing to make the treacherous leap from small-time TV to the Big Screen. Full of hope and adventure, the year 2000 brought the actor a rare chance to make it in the cutthroat business of cinema. Through the sludge of cheesy game shows, charmless work as a bodyguard, small commercials, forgettable independent movies, and cancelled shows, this was it. One chance to escape the small time.

The aspiring actor was tailor-made for the hitman role he was playing in his inaugural movie. Before TV, the actor had survived a hard-hitting career in sport. This new movie, his first movie, was a singular moment in which to start a new and bold adventure. He knew that such a chance might never present itself again.

Eventually, the day finally came when our young ambitious actor dressed himself for the part. His lines were rehearsed and he was good to go. The star of the show, the lead actor, was also on set that day. The director called “ACTION!”, and it was time to shine. Now enveloped in his role as a serpentine assassin, our young actor said his first line to the star of the movie. The lead actor turned to respond to the lines just whispered into the air of the suburban sci-fi set. When their eyes met, the young actor froze.

There was a problem.

A sharp intake of breath from the cold night caught in his throat. The unseen icy droplets cut like microscopic daggers. The young actor’s mind flooded with horrible thoughts, like bone-chilling water consuming the hull of a sinking ship. As if from nowhere, looking into the eyes of the lead actor gave voice to terrible whispers in the young actor’s mind:

“You don’t deserve to be here.”

“You’re just a dumb football player!”

“You are a farce! These people are going to figure you out.”

More thoughts kept rushing into his mind, one after the other, like an emotionless swarm of locusts digesting and degrading everything in their path:

“These people are going to figure you out.”

“You’re a fake. You’re a phoney!”

“You fooled everybody. It’s a wrap. They’re going to find out and they are going to KICK YOU OUT OF HERE!”

The passionate young performer felt like he had frozen stiff in front of the other actor for hours. In reality, he had merely blinked. That one glance into the eyes of a more established colleague made him think his own efforts were somehow useless. His shredded ego was nothing more than the cooling ash flicked from a filthy cigarette, falling through the air and disintegrating underfoot. All his crippling thoughts came at once, all before his watch had the chance to tick.

By chance, in the same moment, there was an issue with the movie set. The lighting was wrong and they had to do another take. A sigh of relief trembled gently from the actor’s lungs. He had frozen. It was obvious. A shot at a movie career was so nearly wasted.

In that short serendipitous break between takes, the young actor had another series of thoughts.

Instead of repeating the cycle and declaring himself a fake, he challenged himself to question what might happen if he listened to the initial onslaught of abusive thoughts that told him to give up.

Would he really want to go back to his old sporting career? Would he really want to go back to doing security jobs and sweeping floors? Not a chance. On the second take, he said his lines and committed to doing the best job he possibly could. Since then, he has only looked back to recount this story to people suffering the same neurotic thought process.

That actor was former American football player Terry Crews. Almost two decades after that testing experience as a young actor, Crews became a celebrated actor in TV and film. He also grew to become a successful artist, businessman, and live entertainer. The lead actor he was so deeply intimidated by in that early movie shoot was Arnold Schwarzenegger (who, by the way, was another sportsman turned movie star). The movie was The Sixth Day, a box office success that earned nominations for best and worst movie alike.¹

During that fateful movie shoot back in 2000, Crews had mustered up the courage to rebrand himself. He had initially trained for one job – pro football – and then tried to escape that mould. Through it all, he was conscious of judgement from those who thought he was wasting his time and that he couldn’t make the transition. More than that, he was almost crippled by the internal doubts about his ability to change career.

The other key point to this story is that Terry had been star-struck by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a bodybuilder turned actor who had earned his break by struggling through terrible B-movies and persisting in the face of constant criticism. Crews was so awe-inspired by Schwarzenegger’s present glittering movie career that he wasn’t seeing how the comparisons he made between himself and Arnie were unjustified. Terry was nothing, a ‘nobody’ in the movie business. But here was Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man who had moved country as well as career to get to where he was when Terry met him. Arnie was The Terminator, for crying out loud! The fact that Arnie had a twenty-year head start didn’t seem to matter to Crews when he had his flash of despair. That instant comparison was still enough for Terry Crews’ mind to scream out, convincing him that he was some sort of fraud.

There is something remarkable about the Terry Crews story that I haven’t yet called out. And it’s the part of the story that most resonated with me and my own struggles of feeling like a fraud. Somehow, through the panic and the pain, Crews was able to call himself out on those dark, debilitating thoughts that almost ruined his new acting career. In the momentary calm between takes, he was able to mindfully separate the reality of his situation from the unfounded thoughts that could so easily have roadblocked the whole movie and his part in it.

The career of a millionaire movie star may seem like a world away from our lifestyles but I’m willing to bet that you probably noticed similarities between Terry’s self-destructive thought process and a memorable moment in your own life. I’m betting that there has been a time when you questioned your own value and position despite your abundance of tangible hard work and well-documented progress.

This is what happened to me when I heard Terry Crews’ talk about his story for the first time. I was sitting on the bus on my way to my university office, headphones lodged in my ears, listening to Crews being interviewed for the renowned business podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show.² Crews recalled his story with such passion and heart that I listened intently, cocooned from the outside world, grasping his every syllable. I was utterly transfixed. I heard Terry’s story and I was truly listening to it. With every second that passed, Terry’s story resonated with mine, ticking all the same boxes of feeling like a fraud. If the Terry Crews story truly isn’t for you, you’ll read similar accounts from Kate Winslet (Oscar-winning actress),³ Leo Tolstoy (famous writer of greats such as War and Peace), Gloria Vanderbilt (famed 20^th century artist and businesswoman),⁴ Mike Cannon-Brookes (tech billionaire, co-CEO of Atlassian),⁵ Denis Diderot (18^th century French polymath),⁶ Emma Watson (Harry Potter and celebrated stage actress),⁷ and Neil Gaiman (graphic novelist).⁸ This list goes on, and if you look for more stories of self-doubters from within your own interests, you will find at least one.

I am not an actor and have never been a sportsman (at least, not one of note). I have, however, aspired to a career working in a competitive environment, and I’ve thought deeply about whether or not I’ve ever been worthy of working where I am. And I’m willing to bet you’re still here because you’ve got your own imposter story to tell. So, allow me to share with you a little more on how these imposter feelings first arose in me.

Part 2 – Phoney in the Family

Growing up in a working-class family, I was always playfully labelled ‘the smart kid’. At home, my childhood love of dinosaurs and my inexplicable desire to be a palaeontologist sparked seemingly harmless jokes from family about someone having picked up the ‘wrong kid’ from the maternity ward.⁹ There was never any malice in being pigeon-holed like this at home. School was a little more difficult.

In primary school (or grade school depending on where you’re from), I was dubbed ‘The Professor’, a nickname signalling that I tended to do well on assignments and class tests. At that time, being curious and academically inclined was seen as somewhat out-of-the-ordinary. It was worthy of some regular (albeit good-humoured) ridicule. Apathy was to fit in at school, aptitude was not.

My teachers, with their bird’s eye view above a class full of three-foot-tall kids, could see this most clearly. They could see a student’s place among the crowd and saw that a kid who projected any academic interest would likely be seen as a threat by the others. Innocent but sometimes exiled. I had friends but I also had enemies. On my very last day of school, one young teacher, Mrs Lockhart, inscribed a notebook of mine saying:

“Good luck for the future. Let me know when you discover the fountain of youth.”

At the time, I felt deeply encouraged. I still have that notebook.

Looking back, being seen as ‘the clever one’ at home and in school seeded expectations in my mind for years to come. It’s not like I was a ‘boy genius’ in my youth. I couldn’t tie my own shoelaces till I was about eight years old. I was twenty-one before I could use a washing machine unsupervised, and I have never been able to drive a car.

Curious about everything, I worked hard and performed well in exams. I was voted Most Likely to Succeed in my high school yearbook. In truth, I played right into those early ‘smart kid’ labels I acquired at home and in grade school. From then on, the expectation to be the best, to be the smartest person in the room, has stayed with me. Whenever this position has been challenged, I’ve panicked. Quietly, regularly, painfully. I panicked.

Like many people of my generation (technically a Millennial, having been born in the late 1980s), I benefited enormously from opportunities created by my working-class parents and grandparents. I was the first in my family to go to university straight from school. Only my maternal grandfather had been to university before me, but not until he was in his forties, having amassed a lifetime of labour-intensive jobs.

Professionally, I dedicated the first third of my life to science and to building a career in academia. It’s a bit like climbing an oily ladder to reach the window of a tall house. Some rungs on the ladder are just waiting to sink splinters into your gripping hands. This troubled climb up the ladder towards an academic career amounts to about 3–7 years for a first degree, 3+ years for a PhD, and several postdoctoral jobs over an ill-defined number of years, all before eventually landing a trial job as a walking, talking, lecturing, researching, exam-marking, paper-writing, grant-bidding academic. Even then, you still haven’t climbed in the high window of the tall house. That job isn’t yet permanent. It might never be permanent. There are some rungs left on the ladder, maybe some splinters, and maybe a complete collapse that sends you cascading back to the bottom. You can never know how many steps are left. Author, speaker, and business coach Simon Sinek calls this never-ending career gauntlet the Infinite Game. And it was the very practice of trying to step up to the next rung on my career ladder that led to more threatening problems.¹⁰

Part 3 – Convinced of Being a Fraud

When I started my job as a postdoctoral researcher, after my PhD and before independent research, it marked the first extensive period in my career that I had taken on research outside the comfort of my PhD group. The people I had known, the surroundings I had become familiar with, the PhD research I was doing, it had all become comfortable and safe. Those PhD days had certainly been peppered with anxious and exciting times spent in other countries, at conferences large and small. The job move from PhD to postdoc was altogether different.

As well as moving to a new city for my postdoc, I was also entering a brand-new laboratory with new equipment and new people to learn from. I had a scholarship on my CV and money in my pocket. What wasn’t to like? In many ways, I was living the scientist’s dream. I was climbing the ladder and I could now see the window I was aiming for. But that all changed after the first day in the new job. In an instant, I started comparing myself to the other postdocs in the group, looking at their track records, their publications, their experiences. The rapid conclusion drawn in my head was:

I am not as good as these people. How the hell did I get into this group?

This worrying thought was made worse by the fact that I planted the seeds of doubt by Googling my new colleagues’ professional biographies before I ever met them in person.

During my earlier PhD days, before the postdoc, I would happily bury my head in a research project, read papers, expand my scientific horizons, and exercise my creativity. In the postdoc job, my mind was telling me that I could no longer do that. From that first day on the new job, I felt a crushing pressure to be the best.

The weighty comparisons I was making between myself and others were crippling my productivity. They were almost powerful enough to physically crush my spine, exposing my marrow as well as my spirit. I somehow found that I couldn’t enjoy my work the way I used to. As with the young Terry Crews starting out in the world of film, an immediate and intimate alarm in my head was now consuming my every waking moment. I was rapidly convincing myself that I was going to be stripped of my degree and humiliated, paraded through town like a medieval heretic. A professional pariah. A fraud exposed!

You would be forgiven for thinking I hated my new job, but I didn’t. The two years in that postdoctoral position were brilliant in many ways. What persisted beneath the surface, however, was my neurotic self-doubt. It was always there. With the rhythm of daylight, those thoughts would come and go. Come and go. Come and go. And with the regularity of the days came a regimented draining of my confidence. In secret, in desperation, it was only by opening an empty word document and typing out these thoughts in a journal that I ever made it to the end of that postdoc contract.

Even when I climbed the ladder again and started my first independent academic post (two years after the postdoc job), I went through the same thought cycle all over again. In the first few days of my independent research fellowship, I went to visit some of the more experienced academics and see what their take on life in academia was like. In my eyes, these colleagues had made it. They had climbed the ladder, avoided the slips, and pulled out the splinters. They were free and clear and had climbed through the window atop the ladder. They were in.

With a sickening feeling of déjà vu, all I could focus on were the successes those other academics had, the grants they had won, the number of students they had. I felt so deeply shaken and panicked after talking with one colleague in particular that, after the meeting, I paced through the corridors into a toilet cubicle, sat on the seat, and held my head in my hands. I was enveloped by the sensation that I was in the WRONG place. The WRONG job. How had I managed to fool everyone into thinking I was able to make a difference here? Was I not wasting their time as well as my own?

I was being silly. Knowing what I know now, it is plain to see that I was wrapped up in a small, egotistical view of a situation that was, in fact, completely under my control. I was needlessly engulfed by the deep-set concept that, through a flash comparison, I was instantly worthless in the shadow of my colleagues. It was all absolute bullshit.

When speaking to academic colleagues, I never once stopped to acknowledge that they were years ahead of me, with different experiences, different training, different paths to the same career crossroads. I didn’t stop to think that they might also be comparing themselves to me.

In my enduring self-doubt, not one millisecond had been reserved for me to realise that my colleagues saw that I had a different and valuable perspective to bring to the team. Such feelings have haunted my career. I know now, through stories like that of Terry Crews, and others that I’ll share with you in this book, that I am far from being the only one who struggles with the feelings of not knowing enough.

Feeling like a fake, a fraud, a phoney, someone waiting to be ‘found out’, is widely known by the common term Imposter Syndrome.¹¹ It’s something that has taken me an embarrassing number of years to identify internally, and even longer to find some means of managing it. It’s this story of discovering and coming to terms with the so-called Imposter Syndrome that I want to tell you more about. It’s a story that begins, appropriately enough, by having discovered that the word ‘Syndrome’ itself is something to be questioned with more care. Is that really what we should be calling this thing?

Your Chapter Challenges

The bottom of every chapter includes actions for you to try before continuing with the book. Challenge yourself to consider the following points right now before moving on:

1. Anyone can feel like a fraud. Find the others! References 2–8 in the Notes section for Chapter 1 give you a taste, but now it’s your turn to discover this fact for yourself.

Find three more stories of people who have reported feeling like a fraud.

Find one famous person, one friend, and one colleague or family member.

Who are they? What was the scenario in which they felt like a fraud?

2. Build some awareness of your internal and external pressures to succeed.

What are the places around you that influence your view of success?

Who are the people in your life who shape your definition of success?

What drives you to succeed, even when no one is looking?