Comments on: Imposter Syndrome

By: Adrien

Adrien — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:12:23 +0000

Man
.
I didn’t see that cartoon before. That’s priceless.
.
And also you’re obviously…

a.Ignorant
b. Not helpful
c. A fascist
d. All of the above.

So there.

By: Adrien

Adrien — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 06:47:19 +0000

My mother used to work for an ‘engineer’ who was a complete nimcompoop. Didn’t know a blueprint from toilet paper. After six months she knew more about building hydroelectric power stations than he did.

But he had a sooper accent courtesy of Harrow and Oxbridge and said ‘oh how simply splendid’ an awful lot.

By: Legal Eagle

Legal Eagle — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:58:09 +0000

Ooh, that’s awesome, JC, I’m going to put a link to it at the base of the post.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:51:13 +0000

Elsewhere:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/impostor.png

By: skepticlawyer » Student, grade thyself…

skepticlawyer » Student, grade thyself… — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:48:42 +0000

[...] that students will often misjudge which questions they do well. There’s also a link back to my post on imposter syndrome, which tends to suggest that some people have great difficulty in judging whether they are really [...]

By: Legal Eagle

Legal Eagle — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:15:24 +0000

Yup, I’ve seen it before. Or sometimes, people get promoted just because management needs to get them out of their present position because they are so useless…which is a disaster area…

By: Adrien

Adrien — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:53:52 +0000

JC had some story about a guy that made management on Wall St because he was useless. Everyone split on this firm and went somewhere else. They him behind ’cause he was useless and so he got promoted.

The Forrest Gump effect.

By: Legal Eagle

Legal Eagle — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:27:47 +0000

Yes, perhaps it’s true that success is partly luck – and a lot of it is also about timing. Gotta be in the right place at the right time. Someone can have bucketloads of talent, but just not quite make it, whereas sometimes absolute nuff nuffs make it big just because of sheer dumb luck.

By: Adrien

Adrien — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:12:14 +0000

Um well speaking of experience in the art world.

Well there is the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Bring that up with farty types and they’ll call you a fascist. Which is interesting because I’m not the one trying to silence dissent with intimidation and slander.

But I think luck plays a part. To have talent is lucky. I inherited my dad’s brain so I never had to actually study much. If I inherited my mother’s brain I might’ve done well but I would’ve had to, ulp, work.

Luck almst always plays a part. Think of the Rolling Stones. Almost immediately and exceptionally successful. Very much a time and place thing, a little earlier, a little later and they would’ve petered out in the early to mid 60s. One of those bands like the Yardbirds.

However talent would’ve still helped ‘em out. Keith Richards would be known now as an obscure yet great musician (probably dead). Jagger’d still be Sir Michael, still be mega-wealthy but not because of rock n roll.

Sid Viscious on the other hand would still be dead from smack only we wouldn’t have the t-shirts to tell you so.

By: cuckoo

cuckoo — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:05:19 +0000

Interesting post. From my own perspective, one class of people even more prone to Impostor Syndrome is Anyone with anything to do with contemporary art (and in most cases, deservedly so.) I’ve known many Museum curators in this field, and have given up being astonished when they confide in me their terror at being exposed as impostors. After all, they work in a world where there is no objective measure of worth or merit. Not even “success”. Everything depends on their opinion, or even more, on their fear of someone else’s opinion. They live in daily dread of having their opinion shown up as worthless, and what possible defence could they have against that? I could count about two people I know in this field who actually have thought-out their values and opinions in this area, and who could defend them in argument if required. Everybody else just falls back on their one defence “Well, everybody else thinks it’s good!!”