Being on the internet means, that you share things, and so do other people. Many people post cool stuff they are building on x, for example this 16yo kid making his own gui assembly debugger. Now while he is just sharing his achievements, many people older than him could potentially develop something called as impostor syndrome where they think they are never good enough. I scroll LinkedIn sometimes and see people winning hackathons left and right, and getting placed at good internships, even though I’m still in school I sometimes get this feeling I am not good enough. I do not blame these talented people on the internet, that would be dumb. Dealing with impostor syndrome to me is just about having a mindset.

Good Thing

I feel like impostor syndrome is a good thing. It it something that keeps you grounded and reminds you that there will always be people better than you at some things and this should drive you towards working on that and becoming better at it. It is the reason why top colleges will produce the most skilled people, being surrounded by toppers will keep you grounded. Having basic MERN skills in a college full of people who do not know how to use HTML will eventually limit and slow you down. For people who are not in top colleges, they see people on x building crazy things. Sometimes even the consistency of people just doing things regularly, even if it not that impressive, is enough to make one think they are wasting their life. And that IS a GOOD THING.

Embrace It

A bell curve take I hear all the time is to brush off impostor syndrome, and telling yourself you are much better than what you believe yourself to be. Impostor syndrome should give you this inner drive to do more. No one is born talented, in the words of Bob Ross,

The keyword here is interest. If I feel that I’m way too behind in something I have no interest in, say assembly development, no matter how hard I try I will never be able to create my own assembly debugger. You simply cannot have impostor syndrome over something you have no interest in.

Do not hit the panic button

One thing to avoid is over panicing and thinking it’s already over for you. Comparing yourself to some person who is leagues above you, will obviously lead to stress. Do not feel hopeless seeing that you are at the bottom and someone is on a peak that seems too steep for you. Rather than that, I would focus on carving a staircase out of it, figuring out where do I lack and how do I learn those things. Do not keep over ambitious goals, you cannot aim to create the entirety of neovim at your first attempt in a terminal text editor, keep them realistic at first, like just getting basic insertion, deletion, and movement commands.

Just do things, man

You are more capable than you think, anon, quoting alịa on x,

And just do things dude. Your time and efforts would eventually win. You might start out bad, but proper execution overcomes all, you just need to develop an interest for it. Many people, because I’m 17 (as of writing this blog), think I’m some child prodigy whose been programming since the last decade or something. Let me show you how dumb I was till the last year. I used to think backend is something I would never get the hand of, and now I am working on my kind of a mini SaaS floww. Impostor syndrome has made me get out of my ReactJS comfort zone bubble and try out new frameworks, new languages, and sometimes, even switching from web development to low level. You do not need self discipline or some sophisticated daily routine to upskill yourself, a dose of impostor syndrome should be enough.

Ending

This post was written in 5 minute intervals over a span of 4 days since I was travelling, so I apologise if my writing was a bit choppy. While researching over this, I found 2 other posts by fairly famous tpot people:

1. embracing impostor syndrome by @kennethnym
2. Impostor Syndrome (x article) by @alia0209