Yeah, I get it — everyone that I work with is smarter than me too. I do lots of interviews (for software engineers), and sometimes I tell others on my team “Damn! If I had to pass the screening I give to these people, I’d never have been allowed into the building…”

So I’m a fairly proud impostor, I suppose you could say. Recognizing my tendency to inflate my own achievements, amazed at my willingness to fake competence, ever reminded of how much less awesome I am than the standard calls for, it’s a theme that keeps yielding things to talk about, for me.

That willingness to be open is important, I think. It’s a mistake to keep one’s impostordom a secret: it suggests that you really believe that the noise in your head defines you. When you’re open about it, when you’re willing to share that noise and “own” it, there’s two immediate benefits: [1] others around you — who are also often tormented by unexpressed self-doubts — are given a bit more permission to be themselves; [2] your willingness to acknowledge your own self-doubts leaves you standing in a place about 1/2″ beyond those concerns.

The voices in your head are there for a reason: their job is to fill the void created by “I don’t know who I am.” So they encourage you to posture and preen, to pile extra acronyms and bullet points onto your resume, to carefully parse e-mails from the boss, trying to detect praise or criticism, to listen to others with a filter that focuses on “what are they saying about me?”

This is not your personal weakness, this is the human condition: self-doubt is a direct result of the fact that the mind is not capable of coming up with a satisfying answer to “who am I?” So it makes shit up; it experiments with what it made up, it tries to find validating evidence and cling to it, it pretends to be more certain than it really is, and so forth. This is “ego maintenance”, it’s very human.

While you’re not going to get rid of the machine in your head which does this stuff, it is possible to grow up with regard to it — to have an adult relationship with your own self-doubts and the daemon which struggles to eliminate them. An adult relationship is “awareness and supervision” — dropping the external pretenses, being willing to acknowledge what is, being open about it, recognizing that this psychological reactive machinery doesn’t define you.

People at work will share things with me that they wouldn’t tell their own mother. Why? I think it’s because they can sense that I have some ownership of my own darkness, that I have a sense of humor about it, that it doesn’t torment me… and they want to stop being tormented as well. That isn’t about me not having any self-doubt, it’s about the ability to stand on a solid ground which isn’t subject to such doubts, and relax about them as a result.

At the end of the day, I have this job because I’m skilled enough to add value to the business, not because I’m the sharpest knife in the drawer. It’s a great privilege to work with so many highly intelligent and accomplished people, I really admire many of them. There is no rule which says I have to compete. The voices that talk like that are old friends, but they’re not sought for advice.