There’s been a lot of chatter recently about “Imposter Syndrome,” which Psychology Today defines thusly:
People who struggle with imposter syndrome believe that they are undeserving of their achievements and the high esteem in which they are, in fact, generally held. They feel that they aren’t as competent or intelligent as others might think—and that soon enough, people will discover the truth about them. Those with imposter syndrome are often well accomplished; they may hold high office or have numerous academic degrees.
To be clear, Imposter Syndrome isn’t actually a clinical disorder. It’s purely a pop psychology term for what might otherwise be called “low self-confidence,” or, in an earlier era, “humility.” But it begs an uncomfortable question: if you think you aren’t as competent as you’re percived, what if you’re right? After all, who better to evaluate your own abilities than yourself?
At the risk of trivializing the anguish of people who “hold high office or have numerous academic degrees” and yet feel that they are “undeserving of the high esteem in which they’re held,” I believe there’s a deeper issue here. Our society has lost sight of mastery.
To put another way, people don’t know what it means to be really good at something, nor what it takes to achieve a truly high level of skill.
What is Mastery?
Developing advanced skill in anything - mathematics, music, bricklaying - has been extensively discussed by popular figures such as Tim Ferriss (4-Hour Workweek) and Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point). Gladwell’s conclusion that 10,000 hours of practice was the secret formula to mastery provoked quite a bit of debate, with Ferris and others claiming that it was possible to “hack” their way to achieving mastery in much less time.
Many of the bright-eyed acolytes who followed the advice of Ferriss and his ilk quickly discovered that the hacks did not work quite as well as advertised. To understand why that’s the case, let’s look at a graphical representation of the 10,000 hours theory.
The idea here is simple. The more lifetime hours you accumulate in the development of some skill, the more of that skill you acquire. You get good at what you do, right? Wrong.
Or, more precisely: not quite. Here’s what the skill-acquisition curve really looks like.
When you have low skill in something, it only takes a small amount of effort to improve. Think about starting to learn to play piano: stickers on the piano keys tell you which note is which, and the music notes are labeled with the letter names. See the note labeled “C” on the paper, find the “C” key, poke it, and voila! you’re playing piano. It doesn’t take much work to get better.
But something unpleasant happens as you move further along the skill curve: it takes more effort to get better. Once the stickers come off the piano keys, and the notes aren’t labeled anymore, you have to read the music, and remember where the keys are. It’s tougher. Plus, you have to play with both hands at the same time. It gets tricky!
Most people get to this point and stop.
What point is it? It’s about the “intermediate” level. Many, many people reach the intermediate level in music, language, woodworking, knitting, or cooking, and stop getting better. It takes too much effort to progress any further, and they can do most of what they want to do, so it’s not worth the additional effort to keep improving.
Let’s take a deeper look at this curve. Here are a few more labels.
A religious educator named Martin M. Broadwell is the first known person to use these terms, but the psychologists quickly glommed onto them, because they made so much sense.
Unconscious incompetence is the first stage on the road to mastery. This is where you don’t even know what you need to learn to get good. You’re just poking at the piano keys.
Conscious incompetence is when things start getting hard. You can read music with effort, and you can slowly and painfully learn to play a song with both hands. You know what you need to do, but it doesn’t come easily.
Conscious competence is next. You can read music with some fluency, and are comfortable playing with both hands, but many pieces of music are still too advanced for you. But, you can play Christmas carols at the holiday party though, and that might be enough for you to stop putting in any work to get better.
For the tiny minority of people who keep working at it, the next and final stage of mastery is unconscious competence. At this point, you no longer need to think about reading music - you do it automatically. You can sit down and play almost anything, because you have trained yourself to be able to perform complex actions without thinking about them.
This, in a nutshell, is what mastery means. If you can’t do it automatically, you haven’t mastered it. You haven’t committed the necessary information to implicit memory, and you haven’t developed the coordination to do it faster than the speed of thought.
This is how a boxer can dodge a punch, a musician can play a complex sheet of music, and a bricklayer can build a flawless wall, all at top speed. They have gotten so good, they don’t have to think about what they’re doing.
What About Talent?
Talent has been described as a “force multiplier.” It moves you along the bell-curve faster, which makes it easier to stay motivated when the required effort increases. But, except in very rare cases, talent will not actually remove the need for diligent practice. Mozart, Mendelssohn, Sammy Sosa, and Bruce Lee all had to work very hard to attain their level of mastery, despite being phenomenally talented.
For those of us who are not prodigies in any particular area, there is no substitute for hard work and diligent practice. There are ways to practice more efficiently, and ways to learn more effectively, but even the best teacher can’t do the practice for you.
So, if you feel like you aren’t quite as good as people think you are, don’t automatically jump on the Imposter Syndrome train. Ask yourself, do you have unconscious competence in your avocation? If not, challenge yourself to break past the intermediate / conscious competence level; put in the extra effort, quit looking for excuses or hacks, and truly attain that highest level of skill.
Nicely written exposition.
This topic relates to the current state of affairs in govt education: our youth are rewarded for memorizing and regurgitate “facts” while ignoring skill building.
Roy H. Williams has studied unconscious competence and believes that if we discover what talented people do unconsciously we can mimic those abilities.
Harry Palmer, in the “Avatar Masters Handbook” presents a series of mastery levels for measuring self-progress. His step-by-step method is complete with debug steps for overcoming confusion, struggle and discouragement.