You're a fraud (and other lies)

By now, if you're a creative person, you've heard of "Imposter Syndrome." If you haven't, you've most likely felt it. If neither of these is true, you may be a sociopath and I'm scared of you.

As a kid, you felt impervious to death, illness or failure (assuming you were loved and relatively well adjusted). As an adult, those things start getting real heavy on the ol shoulders--and seem to compound in direct relation to the number of candles on your birthday cake. Maybe once you hit a certain age, the failure part becomes more of a "Screw it!" attitude because you know time is contracting. (This may be around the same time you start wearing your bra on the outside.)

What holds us back is the terrifying belief that what we have to say doesn't matter, what we can do isn't all that impressive, and if we try with all our might and still flop, it's gonna hurt more than a flat splat off the high diving board.

I am knee-deep in it right now. That little voice in my head is running in circles pulling on her hair, chattering on about all the reasons I shouldn't. She likes my direct-deposited paycheck and sensible 401k allocations. She enjoys paid vacation time and free office supplies. I'm trying my best to use my mom-of-two-kids tuning out skills on her. But, girlfriend is persistent.

I'm not here to pretend I know EVERYTHING about ANYTHING. I don't. But, I have to trust that I've learned something worth sharing. More importantly, I'm curious and I have a fair amount of confidence that my curiosity will serve me (and you) in ways I can't really see with perfect clarity just yet. That's called faith, I guess.

That wretched little voice is begging me not to post this. What will people think? You'll lose even more credibility if you admit you're muddling through on a quest for the right path to create and deliver the best content and experience. I'm searching for my duct tape to wrap around her mouth.

When your own voice says, "You're a fraud!" it means you're scared. Scared can be good. When it says, "Nobody's going to care!" it probably means that rejection is the hairy, green monster that's behind that fear. When it says, "You know nothing!” know this: everyone knows something. Anyone who professes to know everything is either that dude who was on Jeopardy, Ken someone, or just a snake oil salesman.

We're all learning. I'm hoping we can do it together.