“Yes, We are all individuals!”
When I was a kid, my parents in their infinite wisdom let me watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian. One of the more inspired scenes of the movie comes when Brian, an accidental false messiah, tries to convince his followers to go away because he is not in fact the Messiah.
Brian: Look. You’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals!
Followers: Yes, we’re all individuals!
Brian: You’re all different!
Followers: Yes, we are all different!
Man in the crowd: I’m not.
Followers: Shh. Shhhh. Shhh.
Brian: You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves!
Followers: Yes! We’ve got to work it out for ourselves!
Brian: Exactly!
Followers: Tell us more!
Brian: No! That’s the point! Don’t let anyone tell you what to do!
While the scene is generally funny, I love that in admitting he isn’t different, that one man in the crowd actually proves himself to be the only individual. I think about that guy a lot when it comes to imposter syndrome.
Fairly early in my career as a product manager I volunteered to work on a project turning my team’s service into a platform. The project required working with all of our upstream and downstream consumers (of which there were many) on changing message schema in a way that would be backwards compatible. About one month into the project, I was reviewing all the proposed schema changes with my director and engineering lead when they pointed out a major flaw in my work: I had not accounted for a certain type of exception in my proposal. As they probed me on the issue however, it quickly became clear that while I should have noticed the issue before presenting to them, I wasn’t the only one who missed this detail. None of the partners I was working with, many of whom were more senior engineers and product managers than I was, had thought about how to handle the same exception type in their own systems. Yes I could have done better, and felt like a little bit of a failure for not realizing the problem sooner, but it occurred to me that more experienced people than I had failed just as hard for missing it.
Sometimes I still feel inadequate. I can feel like I’m punching way above my weight class and have no idea how I’m going to get from where I am to where I need to be. In these instances though I draw strength from knowing that no one ever really knows what they’re doing. Some people might have more experience than me, or more technical knowledge, but if they had already solved the problem then I wouldn’t be working on it. I’m not different, I’m an imposter like the rest of them. In being the one to admit it though, like that guy in Life of Brian, I can differentiate myself from the rest of the crowd and move on to bigger and better things.
