A couple of weeks back, I wrote a little bit about “embracing the awesome”, as mentioned by one of my favorite internet people, author Carrie Vaughn. In her piece, she talks a little bit about “impostor syndrome”; the feeling a lot of us have on occasion where we feel like frauds in areas where we’re actually competent.

Carrie said she’s write about it again someday, though she hasn’t yet (probably something to do with her releasing two new novels this summer), but some other folks have, including Scalzi, who touched on it today, from the opposite direction: people who are obviously incompetent but fail to notice.

Scalzi’s piece is interesting, as always, though what interested me the most was actually a link found in the comments on his piece; an article by Steve Schwartz regarding the impostor syndrome feelings, and exploring where some of those feelings come from.

In trying to come to this answer, Schwartz presents the theory that there are three types of knowledge, which he colorfully calls:

1. Shit You Know
2. Shit You Know You Don’t Know
3. Shit You Don’t Know You Don’t Know

He provides numerous examples indicating that the only truly dangerous information falls into category three, and points out that the purpose of a good, well-rounded education is less about increasing category one than it is about making category three as small as possible. This means that a well-educated person, while having quite a bit of knowledge in category one, is going to have, by virtue of specialization in certain areas, and the survey nature of a liberal arts eduation is going to have a much larger pile of knowledge in category two.

Essentially category two is the stuff that you don’t know, but thanks to the research skill set you keep in category one, you can go about finding it without much difficulty.

Having a lot of category two information isn’t a bad thing; it makes you, as the author points out, “not dangerous” and generally reliable, which isn’t a bad place to be.

That is, until you think about how much stuff you know you don’t know in relation to what you do (and how no matter who you are, the stuff you don’t know you don’t know is always going to be an order of magnitude larger). It’s enough to make anybody feel a little dumb, inadequate and out of their depth.

The key to overcoming this feeling, is to recognize that really, nobody’s really in any better position than you are. The confident person you see is just like you, except they’ve already come to this realization that nobody really knows what they’re doing, and feel okay about it, or they’re one of those people who legitimately believe they know everything there is to know (they have very small stores of category two knowlege, and thus, a much larger category three than you), which makes them terribly dangerous.

Anyway, if you feel like a fraud sometimes, it probably means you aren’t, but if you always feel like you’re at the top of your game, then you might want to step back and re-evaluate things.

Over the last three decades and change, I’m at a place where I’ve started coming around to this realization; which means that I feel like a fraud perhaps a little bit less than I used to. I recognize, however, that a lot of that is kind of emotional memory of my childhood and young adult self-esteem issues, and, with work, can be overcome. As you might imagine, I find the analysis Mr. Schwartz presents more than a little bit comforting.