🙈 Downsides of surrounding yourself with brilliant, skilled people

On Imposter Syndrome & the Pleasures of Amateurism

Imposter syndrome is the feeling that one is wildly unqualified for their role compared to one’s peers. Historically it’s not something I’ve much had to deal with, at least professionally, but since 2020 I’ve been moving more and more into the tech world — and in some ways I think I was hired specifically because of my amateurism — and I’ve been forcing myself to come to terms with the idea that I do not, in fact, suck. 

At risk of coming across as less than humble, an article from

Peter Gray

made me reflect on the value of learning for the sake of learning cool things. More importantly, it made me determined to be a little more confident in sharing my research.

The purpose of the article was to extol the virtues of amateurism — it was more in the vein of common sentiments like “don’t turn your hobby into a job, or it’ll suck the joy out of it” than “you don’t need to go to college if you want a job in tech, just do hobby projects and a bootcamp, and you’re good to go” but it really got me thinking. You can tell because it came out in January, and I’m still thinking about it.

It’s really easy to end up in a bubble where you are a small fish in a big pond and think that you are uniquely terrible. Especially for those of us who are sort of perennially online, or for people whose entire educational experience took place in advanced classes and elite programs, it’s easy to lose sight of what normal looks like. 

I was the worst-at-math kid in my high school AP calculus BC class; I got the worst grade possible on that particular AP exam — I remember looking at my SAT score for math and being mortified by how low it was, even after learning that 1100 was the cut-off to be considered excellent for my particular high school. Being friends with the kinds of people who get tapped as midshipmen to tutor calculus classes at the Naval Academy, and knowing multiple people who casually got perfect scores on the SAT, it’s hard to remember that my math skills are okay, actually. 

I made a new fellow-mom friend last week, and we got to talking about my past as a history teacher. She asked me what my era of expertise was, and I hedged a bunch. Oh, I taught world history, it’s more of a survey course, I haven’t written a thesis or anything. What an insane standard to hold myself to for a casual conversation with a new friend! I should have just said that I really enjoy pre-history, especially things involving Phoenicia¹ and steppe nomads.

At risk of getting too personal on the internet, it wasn’t until I met my husband that I really came to terms with the idea that I was not uniquely dumb for my social group. I still remember standing in the shower, trying to figure out how one piece of obscure science fit together with another piece of obscure science, frustrated to the point of tears when he said to me: “The smartest people in the world don’t know this either! There is no unified theory of physics!” 

I’m bad at learning hard science from textbooks. My physics teacher — who replaced our department chair mid-year — was remarkably terrible. My calculus teacher was a wonderful algebra teacher who had no business teaching calculus, and she knew it. So the lack of a unified theory of physics was honestly kind of a revelation. 

I got my first computer in elementary school; an old laptop a friend of my father’s was giving away. I played my first ‘social’ computer game — Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands, it still exists check it out — using telnet, a monospace terminal-style protocol that didn’t really have ‘delete’ capabilities, or fonts. It wasn’t literally the command line, but it had that vibe. But I was a prepubescent girl on the internet in 1997; all the people I talked to were way better at computers than me. 

One of the guys I met thanks to Diablo and Ultima Online was, as far as I know, one of the first people who figured out how to get Linux on Xbox — he hosted my very first hand-coded website, an embarrassment of a thing in the days when all the HTML was raw, CSS was still just a thought experiment, and Geocities was barely a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Ah, the magic of iframes. 

I kept playing MUDs until well after college… but I never become one of the folks in the community who were good at ‘scripting.’ I never needed to — there were always people who enjoyed it more, although I picked up a few tricks here and there. Learned a little Lua from some friendly coders who wanted me to be able to adapt the default behavior of the combat packs. Figured out what aliases were, and triggers, and for loops. Not real code. Barely even script kiddie stuff, really. Meanwhile, the guys I was in school with were remotely hacking printers.

Still, I learned how to install mod packs, and how to compile things, and how to inspect raw code files, and get Windows to stop hiding my dotfolers. I could follow those directions well enough, but from my perspective, so could everybody. The spaces I hung out in were impenetrable if you couldn’t. 

My husband once casually said that he considered being able to build your own computer to be a basic life skill, like changing your own oil or patching a tire — neither of which I’d ever done, either. I’ve never needed to. I’ve always had AAA, I’ve always been able to call my dad or my brother or a boyfriend or swing into a friendly reliable mechanic shop if I needed that kind of help. 

I’d never considered myself particularly technical. The opposite, really; I’ve made it a point to be the sort of person technically-inclined people actually enjoy helping. 

Then I got involved with the Obsidian community. I’m not much of a hacker; I can squint my way through enough PHP to tweak a Wordpress theme, I guess, but I need help for the complicated stuff (like migrating DNS). I spent my life in technical spaces feeling like a toddler chasing after the big kids — no one was ever unkind, but I was never swimming in their lane. 

Hanging out in the Obsidian discord wasn’t the first time I’ve ever felt useful or wanted in a technical corner of the internet, of course. I was a girl on the internet in the ‘90s. I helped run game guilds, I’m great at playing healbots and support characters in video games, I genuinely enjoy handling logistics. But if knights were the lords and heroes of the medieval world, then PvPers are certainly the gods of gaming, and I’ve never been good at that either. 

In the gaming world, I know I’m not top-tier because the rankings are extremely legible, and combat games have very clear winners and losers. Real life is not so cut and dried. The more developer-adjacent I’ve become, the more I’ve come to realize that even highly compensated senior developers with excellent educations and years of experience can fall afoul of the same sorts of problems I do.

I count very lucky that my hobbies and passions have given me useful networking opportunities and job skills. But one of the things that

Peter Gray

,

Adam Mastroianni

, and

Erik Hoel

all talk about is the importance of amateur science. Let’s build a fleet and change the world, they say. Erik quit academia to do citizen-science, and one of the most impactful Roman historians of the current era is a ‘mere’ adjunct with a popular blog.

One of the things that’s been interfering with my writing pace lately is that a lot of my time has been spent reading and thinking about things where I feel sort of unqualified to comment publically. Parenting books, economics debates, that sort of thing. There’s a certain pressure that comes from having a newsletter where most folks signed up because I’m particularly knowledgeable about leveraging a specific tool… but I feel like my last few articles have gotten disconnected from showing what I use the tool for.

So stay tuned. Next week (the article is already scheduled!) I’m going to swallow my fear and talk about parenting and management, even though I feel like a total imposter doing it.

1. I’ve written about Phoenicia a bunch, actually. Here’s my thoughts on the state of scholarship regarding on Elissa of Carthage, aka Dido. Here’s an overview of cultures Carthage interacted with. Here’s my best guess at why we don’t learn more about Maritime Empires like Phoenicia. Here’s everything I know about ivory, which was traded by the Phoenicians. There’s more, but seriously, I should have just said ‘Phoenicians!’