Imposter Syndrome, that evergreen subject of academic blogging, is back, thanks to a characteristically thoughtful post by Lesboprof and a follow-up about administrative imposter syndrome by Dean Dad. (Administrative imposter syndrome is arguably the cause of the most literate known case of psychosis. The problem is real!)
The best advice I’ve seen on coping with it is, basically, to adapt by faking it:“Take a chance and “wing it;” this is not a sign of ineptness, but rather a sign that you are intelligent and able to rise to a challenge.”
By coincidence, I’ve been reading Michael Chabon’s new book, Manhood for Amateurs, which features a splendid little essay on “Faking it”:
This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself. To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls. “To keep your head,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his classic poem “If,” which articulated the code of high-Victorian masculinity in whose fragmentary shadow American men still come of age, “when all about you are losing theirs”; but in reality, the trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head when, deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh, shit!
Perhaps in the end there is little difference between keeping one’s head and appearing to do so; perhaps the effort required to feign unconcern and control over a situation itself imparts a measure of control. If so, then the essence of traditional male virtue lies in imposture, in an ongoing act of dissimulation–fronting–which hardly conforms to the classic Kipling model of square-dealing candor.
Although faking it can be deeply problematic, as Chabon admits later in the essay, it’s also a way to help break out of feeling stale or in a rut, or even just a way to get started with something new. As Bre Pettis and Kio Stark put it in “The Cult of Done Manifesto“:
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
To bring this back around to academe: Faking it is a crucial way to get anything accomplished. All Many abstracts for conferences or proposals for books or sabbaticals or anything else are written before the project described therein is finished, or sometimes even started. You build a constituency for a new course in part by positing its existence, and then trusting that a successful iteration of it will lead to even more interested students. Al Filreis gave an excellent example of thison Twitter the other day: “In the late 90s univ’s had big plans for ‘distance learning’ but it all fell through (not enough $). Now it simply happens.” It happens through getting out there and doing the work–even if, or perhaps especially when, you’re not 100% sure of what you’re doing.
What can you start right now, even if you’re not exactly sure you’re ready to do it?
Image is by flickr user Goddard Photo and Video / CC licensed (like we’ve been to the moon! as if!)
5 Comments
I think this can be good advice — still, don’t forget the downside of faking it: wrestling with an impossible argument that you made with bravado on a conference abstract, trying to accomplish unrealistic goals on a grant proposal, etc. Fakers need to take a clear-eyed look at the possible costs of their fakeries before making the leap. I think what’s really important is both the ability to embrace the opportunity to take a chance on an idea, and the tenacity to shoulder the responsibility of cleaning up whatever messes you might make in the process — especially if they involve other folks who agreed to take the leap with you.
Oh, no doubt: Once you actually start on something, tenacity is key. It can’t just be faking all the way down. (Chabon has a funny paragraph about this, but there’s a point at which quoting stuff in a blog post just seemed icky.)
I’d much rather abandon something that proved impossible, or to at least scale it back, then wait too long to try. Reasonable people can probably disagree, though, and it’s crucial, as you say, to be mindful of the impact on others.
I don’t think I so much fake it about what I know, but fake it about looking like I know what I know, if that makes sense. In other words, what I find is often the case is not that I don’t have the ability to do something or that I don’t know something but that I feel like I can’t do it or don’t know it. Looking confident often leads to being confident.
Great post. (What I needed today as I face down a deadline for two projects.) On a related note, done is better than perfect!
Fascinating subject. Here’s a post about another type of “faking it” — about the kind of emotional and intellectual work one does that may seem tangential to a project or not like “work” at all but that is in fact crucial to moving forward in the conceptualization stage. Or so my typist claims. It’s here: http://roxies-world.blogspot.com/2009/10/interim-report.html
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