Want to find that secret manual that tells you how to behave in all situations, overcome life’s challenges, reach your potential, and connect with those around you? I spent years looking for such a manual, one that I was convinced everyone else had access to, but I didn’t. My answer now: read a book! Well, a novel, really. Or some poetry. A biography, if you must, but preferably not. Find a fiction best seller list and start reading. Why? Well first let me give you some background.
Some years ago, probably around the time I started reading management books, but likely even before that, when I read technical books, history, or scientist biographies, I not only stopped reading novels, but I sort of proudly declared myself devoid of time to read fiction. Who could be bothered with fiction when there’s so much to learn from non-fiction? Well, me, for one. Or, at least I should have been.
Another useful bit of useful background is the impostor syndrome. I could do a whole post about the impostor syndrome (and frankly, I’m kind of surprised I haven’t by now), but I think it’s a concept that is becoming pretty well known these days, so let me just summarize it as that common feeling we get that we are not really qualified to do what we are doing and that some day, someone will discover that we’ve just been faking it and the gig will be up. The origin of the impostor syndrome is easy to understand: we all know our own self doubts or struggles and yet, we don’t talk about them and more specifically, those we work and interact with don’t talk to us about their doubts and struggles – they only tell us all the great things they can do. Modern, curated social media tends to make that sense even worse. We end up with the misguided impression that everyone else knows what they’re doing and we know we don’t, so we feel like an impostor.
One of the ways out of the syndrome is recognizing that everyone has feelings like this and everyone has their own doubts that they just don’t talk about. If you are an impostor, so is everyone else around you, so who cares any more?
I admit I still find myself feeling like a professional impostor at times, but then I remember what I just said above and I remind myself that while there is always someone who knows more about a specific topic than I do, or more about more different things than I do, I also know more than others. I tend to go deeper than most people who are as broad and broader than most people who are as deep. That’s my trick and it’s been my strength and niche and it sort of keeps the professional impostor at bay.
But what I only recently realized is that while the professional impostor was reasonably dealt with, the personal one has been front and center in my life for a long time, without me even being aware of it. I truly believed that everyone else in nearly every life context had the secret manual that I somehow never got a hold of. They all knew how to act, behave, and overcome life’s obstacles in ways that I simply didn’t. Why was I so messed up and struggling in things everyone else just got?
You’d think a look around my own extended family (and I don’t think we’re very different from most other families) would have assured me that wasn’t the case: plenty of failed relationships and divorces, various struggles with addictions, family members cutting each other off or not talking to each other…. Those aren’t the outcomes of people that have the secret manual. My family provided plenty of evidence that it wasn’t just me, but I didn’t really see it.
So why didn’t I get the lesson that everyone struggles with life and it’s not just me when I had ample evidence within my own family? Well for one, although these struggles existed, we still never talked about them. We didn’t talk about the mistakes we were making or the doubts and uncertainties we had. So, although I saw the results of normal people struggling with life’s challenges, I could still safely ascribe the troubles to circumstances or one-off issues, not universal cluelessness as we all struggle with finding our path through life.
Even my history and biography reading could have conveyed this message to me, but I didn’t hear it there either. Partially, because their purpose is usually not the struggle itself, but the resolution, thereby tending to actually increase the impostor feeling in the reader. And partially because, as with my family, I applied the inverse fundamental attribution error1 – I attributed good intentions and bad circumstances to others’ misfortunes and incompetency and failure to my own.
My personal impostor was so strong that I saw others’ struggles and undesired outcomes, I vowed not to replicate them, and yet I continued to believe everyone else knew what to do and only I struggled to get through life and find happiness, connection, and fulfillment within it. Universal incompetence at solving life was right in front of me, but I was blind to it and believed I was the only incompetent one.
Years ago, I started to include fiction back in my reading list, and meeting a poet at a friend’s gathering once, I began to read (and later write) some modern verse. I was listening to a lot singer songwriters (having already gone down the Blues rabbit hole years before). Who writes more songs of struggle and pain than singer/songwriter-types and Blues musicians? Every book, every verse, every lyric, every movie even – all were further evidence that to struggle, to mess up, to be lost, are all part of the human condition. And yet, still, I remained blind, and thought it was only me – that I was the only one without the secret manual.
I’m not sure what eventually opened my eyes, but they did open and I began to share some of my doubts and struggles with others and I got back not just sympathy and empathy, but an understanding of others’ life struggles as well. We began to talk about what we never talk about and I became more open to the idea that maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe it’s all of us. I now see this in every book I read, movie I watch, song I hear. This message is everywhere, yet, apparently, it’s also surprisingly easy to ignore.
I now wonder if this isn’t the primary purpose of literature, stories, movies, poetry, music, theatre (has to be spelled in the British style in this context): to talk about what we don’t talk about to help people realize we are not alone, we all struggle, and no one has all the answers. It was there in front of me, in front of all of us, all this time. We just have to see it and we have to be willing to talk about it and share our doubts and struggles with each other. It is through this work that we will overcome our obstacles and connect with humanity around us in ways impossible in curated social media.
The secret manual? I’m beginning to think this is it. We all struggle. We are all impostors. There is no secret manual. This is the secret manual. It’s not a secret. Talk about it. Share it with someone. That’s how we get through this. Together.
1 The fundamental attribution error – our tendency to apply malice or ill intent to other people’s behaviors and environmental circumstances and good intentions to our own. The person that cuts us off on the road is a jerk and a lousy driver; when we cut someone off it’s because we were distracted and inadvertently made a mistake. It’s interesting that I’ve never thought before about how the impostor syndrome actually reverses this logic. Either way, though, the assumption generally remains an error.
