Deconstructing Impostor Syndrome: A Theory of Self-Reflection and Comparison in Social Interactions

This comment here reminds me of theory. It’s a theory that I came up with. I’m pretty proud of it. Not the 2 by 1 horn, but it’s a pretty solid theory. It’s related to impostor syndrome. What I’m gonna tell you all about it.

So in , Formalism of Theory, there’s basically three pillars to impostor syndrome, and they’re all related to . The first one is the easiest to identify, and it’s also the easiest to fix. And it’s your brain following an evidence baseline of thinking, doing something new. You’ve never done it before, so you’re doubting if you can do it like on paper that’s reasonable and that’s just you being a to yourself. The fix pretty easy try to do new things, you do them, then you accomplish the thing. And you’ve now convince yourself you can do it and pass your syndrome fix. If you fail, you figure out what you’re not good at, what you need to get better at, and you can work on that thing. Try again, succeed again. Easy to fix.

theory 1, the second pillar in theory is the toughest. It’s nefarious. It’s really hard to deal with this one. And it has to do with comparisons. You know, you could really think of our brains, I mean, evolved to be comparison machines. The way that we tell if one idea is better than another, if one person is better than another, whatever, it’s by making comparisons. If our future is going to be the way that we want, we compare it to our present, to our past. We compare the people that we date to one another. Like this comparison thing, you can’t stop. We simply cannot stop it. Lots of research on this too, by the way. And it doesn’t just apply to our thoughts. It also applies to like our vision. When we see things, what we’re really focusing on, our brain is doing comparisons of the things that we are seeing and trying to see what stands out, what’s the contrast. Again, lots of research on this. Unfortunately, there’s not really a way to turn this off. So we end up comparing ourselves to other people, say for example, in our field, in our profession, right? In our Social Circle. And if you’re compares, comparing yourself to other people, there’s gonna be people who are better than you. Like that’s just the what that’s the way it is. And you’re gonna notice that and that’s gonna be the source of some impostor syndrome. And for some people, this devolves if they can’t catch it. If they can’t catch the fact that somebody else being good at something is making them feel less than, they will sort of like merge that feeling with a sort of hatred for that person where this is a person who, yeah, they’re good at their job, but I just don’t like them. Like there’s something wrong with the way that they do, where they think they’re so good. And personally, I think that a lot of that has to, unless they’re really a bad person, which of course, there are people who are. You know, there are people who are good at their job and not good people. But a lot of times, you know, that there may be an element of impostor saying that element of insecurity, and it’s easier to just look down on somebody who is above us then it is to say, , you know, they kind of make me feel unscared. I’m not calling anybody out. I’m not calling myself out. This is, again, this is the formal, this is dig head formalism. I’m just going through the formalism now. Like I said, you can’t turn off the comparison, but what you can try to do is you can try to be conscientious in and recognize when somebody’s like really good at something and try to piece from them what you can like, what are the things that I can work on that they’re so good at that makes them so good at the thing? This has to do with your brain being a to you. Again, by making these comparisons like head, move, and it’s you to yourself.

And now we have the third pillar of theory, which posits that as we go through life, or social animals, and when we interact with people, their interactions affect us. They do. They affect how we think, how we see, they perfect. They affect our perspective, how we feel about ourselves, how we interact with the world. There’s no way around it. We’re social animals. But there is gonna be some percentage of people that we encounter who are just . They are. They can’t help it. Sometimes you’re just a . I mean, there’s pretty high chance that you’ve been a at times. I mean, there’s pretty high chance that I’ve been a at times. A slim chance, but it is possible. And the important thing to do in the third pillar of the formalism in theory is to remember to always multiply a dig heads, comment, feelings, thoughts, perspective, behavior by 0. And all you math out there know any number multiplied by 0 is zero. It’s called the multiplier, and it’s my elegant solution to the third pillar of theory. You see, because a can’t help it. It doesn’t actually matter the quality of the work that you do, what accomplishments you have, it doesn’t really matter. It makes no difference to a dig head. They’re just gonna be a dig head. They, there’s nothing that’s attached to the behavior of a and the behavior of you. There are two separate things. You take the multiplier and you can just, it’s like wiping the slate clean. And feel free to use this formalism anyway that you like. Just please cite me, Tyler at all. 2024 DT star kid theory. You can’t stop a , but you can multiply them by zero.