Overcome imposter syndrome

I spoke last week at Vancouver’s Design Thinking event and was asked about imposter syndrome, here’s my simple and effective answer.

First, remember the ego trap. Imagine you are a plumber. You work with pipes and toilets all day. Do you imagine you’d have imposter syndrome about your work? If you guessed no, you’d be wrong.

Having self-doubt is normal. It can be healthy. It means you are looking to learn. You just can’t let the fact that you have a feeling define how you see yourself. It’s just a feeling. Having the feeling is not a problem but letting it define you is.

There are some patterns in design history that work against designers and how they feel about themselves. You need to notice and avoid them.

1. You are a designer, not an artist. Art is about personal expression. Design is solving a problem for someone else. Imposter syndrome is more likely if you see your work as a personal expression of your identity. That’s high stakes! Instead lean in to seeing your work as skills and services for hire. If your client is happy then you should be too.

2. It’s not a competition. Designers often compare themselves with the best work they see in the world as if they were in the design olympics hunting a gold medal. Remember that your clients do not care what is trending on instagram or Dribble. Your clients care about one thing: did you solve their problem? That’s it! Focus on helping your clients more than competing in an imaginary competition no one else cares about.

3. Find mentors and peers your trust. Don’t confuse social media for the real world. Design is a creative field which means it’s subjective and (bad) opinions are everywhere. Ground your sense of good work in people you trust. People who have good taste, are honest and give good feedback. If you have this you won’t worry about other people’s opinions as much.

4. Get out of the design bubble. Imposter syndrome can just mean you spend all your time with people like you! Designers are a minority in the working world. Most of your career will be spent with people with ZERO design skills. You will seem like a god to them for your creative abilities since they have none of them. That’s the real world you need to influence, not the insular world of design culture and conferences.

5. We see highlight reels, not outtakes. Designers can be impossible to work with and have clients that hate them and won’t work with them again. But we won’t see this in a portfolio. As Jenny Lawson wrote, “Don’t compare your behind-the-scenes look to everyone else’s highlight reel.” We really don’t know how successful other designers are on their projects since we’re not there.

Your imagination and your skills may never line up perfectly. This is normal. Why? Imagination and taste is just in a person’s mind. Skill is in the real world. This means there’s a gap that’s common between what your mind can imagine and what you can actually build. Everyone feels it, even the most successful creative people. Ira Glass captured this well:

“Nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish someone had told this to me… all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.… there’s a gap… for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good…. It’s not that great.… It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you…. A lot of people never get past this phase.… they quit…

Everybody goes through that…. And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work… it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap.

But don’t quit. So what if what you make isn’t as amazing as what you imagined? It’s still good. It’s still an accomplishment. It’s only you that is holding on to a self-inflicted impossible standard that no one can live up to. Why do that to yourself? If you love the work you do and care about the craft, keep going. Set more realistic goals. Enjoy that you get to do this kind of work at all. And as you do, your craft will catch up to your taste.

Feelings are one thing, but deciding what they mean is another. The feeling of doubt is just a feeling (and it’s common for many adults, including plumbers). It doesn’t necessarily mean you are not good enough. It can mean instead:

• Doing good work is important to me

• I can set practical goals for how I want to improve

• I’m lucky to have a creative career and I should have gratitude

• I’m inspired by the great work other designers do

Same feeling, different interpretations. These interpretations are positive. They are empowering. They take that emotional energy and cast it in a way that can be used as fuel instead of for self-destruction. Meeting someone who does better work than you doesn’t make you an imposter: it just means you’ve met someone you can learn from. Their talents don’t negate yours. Your clients sill need you to help them.

I’ll leave you with this quote from designer Katie Riley:

The challenge is remembering you’re only an impostor if you try to impersonate someone else.

People hired you to be you. Don’t forget that. Everyone else is already taken. Just be the best version of you that you can be.