I have a constant impression that everyone around me is more competent than me at everything. Does it actually mean that I am, or is there some sort of strong psychological effect that can create that impression, even if it is not actually true? If there is, is it a problem you should see your therapist about?
And when I tried to analyzed my certainty that – even despite the whole multiple intelligences thing – I couldn’t possibly be as good as them, it boiled down to something like this: they were talented at hard things, but I was only talented at easy things.
It took me about ten years to figure out the flaw in this argument, by the way.
Let’s say that you and I decide to play pool. We agree to play eight-ball, best of five games. Our perception is that what follows is a contest to see who will do something called winning.
But I don’t see it that way. I always imagine the outcome of eight-ball to be predetermined, to about 95% certainty, based on who has practiced that specific skill the most over his lifetime. The remaining 5% is mostly luck, and playing a best of five series eliminates most of the luck too.
I’ve spent a ridiculous number of hours playing pool, mostly as a kid. I’m not proud of that fact. Almost any other activity would have been more useful. As a result of my wasted youth, years later I can beat 99% of the public at eight-ball. But I can’t enjoy that sort of so-called victory. It doesn’t feel like “winning” anything.
It feels as meaningful as if my opponent and I had kept logs of the hours we each had spent playing pool over our lifetimes and simply compared. It feels redundant to play the actual games.
This reminds me of my criteria for learning: “You have understood something when it appears to be easy.”
The mathematicians call this state ‘trivial’.
It has become easy because you trained the topic until the key aspects became part of your unconscious competence. Then it appears to yourself as easy—because you no longer need to think about it.
Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.
Psychological research done in the early 1980s estimated that two out of five successful people consider themselves frauds and other studies have found that 70 percent of all people feel like impostors at one time or another. It is not considered a psychological disorder, and is not among the conditions described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Consider that maybe you might be wrong about the imposter syndrome. As a person without it—its hard to know how you think/feel and how you concluded that you couldn’t have it. But maybe its worth asking—How would someone convince you to change your mind on this topic?
what if you developed a few bad heuristics about how other successful people were not inherently more successful but just got lucky (or some other external granting of success) as they went along; whereas your hard-earned successes were due to successful personal skills… Hard earned, personally achieved success.
its probably possible to see a therapist about it; but I would suggest you can work your own way around it (consider it a challenge that can be overcome with the correct growth mindset)
I think people are quick to challenge this type of impression because it pattern matches to known cognitive distortions involved in things like depression, or known insecurities in certain competitive situations.
For example, consider that most everyone will structure their lives such that their weaknesses are downplayed and their positive features are more prominent. This can happen either by choice of activity (e.g. the stereotypical geek avoids social games) or by more overt communication filtering (e.g. most people don’t talk about their anger problems). Accordingly, it’s never hard to find information that confirms your own relative incompetence, if there’s some emotional tendency to look for it.
Aside from that, a great question is “to what ends am I making this comparison?” I find it unlikely that you have a purely academic interest in the question of your relative competence.
First, it can often be useful to know your relative competence in a specific competitive domain. But even here, this information is only one part of your decision process: You may be okay with e.g. choosing a lower expected rank in one career over a higher rank in another because you enjoy the work more, or find it more compatible with your values, or because it pays betters, or leaves more time for you family, or you’re risk averse, or it’s more altruistic, etc. But knowing your likely rank along some dimension will tell you a bit about the likely pay-offs of competing along that dimension.
But what is the use of making an across-the-board self-comparison?
Suppose you constructed some general measure of competence across all domains. Suppose you found out you were below average (or even above average). Then what? It seems you’re in still in the same situation as before: You still must choose how to spend your time. The general self-comparison measure is nothing more than the aggregate of your expected relative ranks on specific sub-domains, which are more relevant to any specific choice. And as I said above, your expected rank in some area is far from the only bit of information you care about.
As an aside, a positive use for a self-comparison is to provide a role-model. If you find yourself unfavorably compared to almost everyone, consider yourself lucky that you have so many role-models to choose from! Since you are probably like other people in most respects, you can expect to find low-hanging fruit in many areas where you have poor relative performance.
But if you find (as many people will) that you’ve hit the point of diminishing returns regarding the time you spend comparing yourself to others, perhaps you can simply recognize this and realize that it’s neither cowardly nor avoidant to spend your mental energy elsewhere.
Possibly parallel—I’ve had a feeling for a long time that something bad was about to happen. Relatively recently, I’ve come to believe that this isn’t necessarily an accurate intuition about the world, it’s muscle tightness in my abdomen. It’s probably part of a larger pattern, since just letting go in the area where I feel it doesn’t make much difference.
I believe that patterns of muscle tension and emotions are related and tend to maintain each other.
It’s extremely unlikely that everyone is more competent than you at everything. If nothing else, your writing is better than that of a high proportion of people on the internet. Also, a lot of people have painful mental habits and have no idea that they have a problem.
More generally, you could explore the idea of everyone being more competent than you at everything. Is there evidence for this? Evidence against it? Is it likely that you’re at the bottom of ability at everything?
This sounds to me like something worth taking to a therapist, bearing in mind that you may have to try more than one therapist to find one that’s a good fit.
I believe there’s strong psychological effect which can create that impression—growing up around people who expect you to be incompetent. Now that I think about it, there may be genetic vulnerability involved, too.
Possibly worth exploring: free monthly Feldenkrais exercise—this are patterns of gentle movement which produce deep relaxation and easier movement. The reason I think you can get some evidence about your situation by trying Feldenkrais is that, if you find your belief about other people being more competent at everything goes away, even briefly, than you have some evidence that the belief is habitual.
I’ve had a feeling for a long time that something bad was about to happen.
Nancy, I believe you are describing anxiety. That you are anxious, that if you went to a psychologist for therapy and you were covered by insurance that they would list your diagnosis on the reimbursement form as “generalized anxiety disorder.”
I say this not as a psychologist but as someone who was anxious much of his life. For me it was worth doing regular talking therapy and (it seems to me) hacking my anxiety levels slowly downward through directed introspection. I am still more timid than I would like in situations where, for example, I might be very direct telling a woman (of the appropriate sex) I love her, or putting my own ideas forward forcefully at work. But all of these things I do better now than I did in the past, and I don’t consider my self-adjustment to be finished yet.
Anyway, If you haven’t named what is happening to you as “anxiety,” it might be helpful to consider that some of what has been learned about anxiety over time might be interesting to you, that people who are discussing anxiety may often be discussing something relevant to you.
If nothing else, your writing is better than that of a high proportion of people on the internet.
Do you know me?
More generally, you could explore the idea of everyone being more competent than you at everything. Is there evidence for this? Evidence against it? Is it likely that you’re at the bottom of ability at everything?
I find a lot of evidence for it, but I am not sure I am not being selective. For example, I am the only one in my peer group that never did any extra-curricular activities at school. While everyone had something like sports or hobbies, I seemed to only study at school an waste all my other time surfing the internet and playing the same video games over and over.
The idea that playing an instrument is a hobby while playing a video game isn’t is completely cultural. It says something about values but little about competence.
One important difference is that video games are optimized to be fun while musical instruments aren’t. Therefore, playing an instrument can signal discipline in a way that playing a game can’t.
I’m not sure that’s true. There’s selection pressure on musical instruments to make them fun to use.
Most of the corresponding training also mostly isn’t optimised for learning but for fun.
There’s no corresponding constraint on video games.
In an age of eSports I’m not sure that’s true. Quite a lot of games are not balanced to make them fun for the average player but balanced for high level tournament play.
At THOSE games? Yes. I can complete about half of American McGee’s Alice blindfolded. Other games? General gaming? No. Or, okay, I am better than non-gamers, but my kinda-gamer peers are crub-stomping me at multiplayer in every game.
Studying—very easy. Now, when I am a university student—quite hard.
Studying—very easy. Now, when I am a university student—quite hard.
Seems like you fell prey to the classic scenario of “being intelligent enough to breeze through high school and all I ended up with is a crappy work ethic.”
University is as good of a place as any to fix this problem. First of all, I encourage you to do all the things people tell you you should do, but most people don’t: Read up before classes, review after classes, read the extra material, ask your professors questions or help, schedule periodic review sessions of the stuff you’re supposed to know… You’ll regret not doing those things when you get your degree but don’t feel very competent about your knowledge. Try to make a habit out of this and it’ll get easier in other aspects of your life.
And try new things. This is probably a cliché in the LW-sphere by now, but really try a lot of new things.
Well, here’s a confusing part. I didn’t tell the whole truth in parent post, there are actually two areas that I am probably more competent than peers, in which others openly envy me instead of the other way around. One is the ability to speak English (a foreign language, most my peers wouldn’t be able to ask this question here), another is discipline. Everyone actually envies me for almost never procrastinating, never forgetting anything, etc. Are we talking about different disciplines here?
Sometimes, I just have trouble understanding the subject areas. I am going to take MathiasZaman’s advice: I always used my discipline to complete in time and with quality what needs to be completed, but not into anything extra. Mostly, though, it is (social) anxiety—I can’t approach a professor with anything unless I have a pack of companions backing me up, or can’t start a project unless a friend confirms that I correctly understand what it is that has to be done. And my companions have awful discipline, worst of anyone I ever worked with (which is not many). So I end up, for example, preparing all assignments in time, but hand them in only long after the time is due, when a friend has prepared them. I am working on that problem, and it becomes less severe as the time goes.
First of all: I don’t agree that group assignments are bad. Those problems are my problems, and most complex tasks in real life really benefit from, or require, collaboration. I think that universities should have more group assignments and projects, even if it would mean I’ll drop out.
Second, I wasn’t talking about group assignments in my post. I was talking about being too anxious to work on your own personal assignment, unless a friend has already done it and can provide confirmation.
So it seems like you can solve the problems… but then you are somehow frozen by fear that maybe your solution is not correct. Until someone else confirms that it is correct, and then you are able to continue. Solving the problem is not a problem; giving it to the teacher is.
On the intellectual level, you should update the prior probability that your solutions are correct.
On the emotional level… what exactly is this horrible outcome your imagination shows you if you would give the professor a wrong solution?
It is probably something that feels stupid if you try to explain it. (Maybe you imagine the professor screaming at you loudly, and the whole university laughing at you. It’s not realistic, but it may feel so.) But that’s exactly the point. On some level, something stupid happens in your mind, because otherwise you wouldn’t have this irrational problem. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s there in your head, influencing your emotions and actions. So the proper way is to describe your silent horrible vision explicitly, as specifically as you can (bring it from the darkness to light), until your own mind finally notices that it really was stupid.
I have no trouble imagining all the horrible outcomes, because I did get into trouble several times in similar scenarios, where getting confirmation from a friend would have saved me. For example, a couple of hours after giving my work to a teacher, I remembered that my friend wasn’t there, even though he was ready. I inquired him about it, and it then turned out that I gave it to the wrong teacher, and getting all my hand-crafted drawings back ended up being a very time and effort consuming task.
Reading that it sounds like your core issue is around low self confidence.
Taking an IQ test might help to dispell the idea that you are below average. You might be under the LW IQ average IQ of 140 but you are probably well above 100 which is the average in society.
It seems that you have a decent IQ. Additionally you seem to be conscious and can avoid procrastination which is a very, very valuable characteristic.
On the other hand you have issues with self esteem. As far as I understand IQ testing gets used by real psychologists in cases like this.
Taking David Burns CBT book, “The Feeling Good Handbook” and doing the exercises every day for 15 minutes would likely do a lot for you, especially if you can get yourself to do the exercises regularly.
Another stupid question to boot: will all this make me more content with my current situation? While not being a pleasant feeling, my discontent with my competence does serve as a motivator to actually study. I wouldn’t have asked this question here and wouldn’t receive all the advice if I were less competent than everyone else and okay with it.
That’s a really interesting question, and I don’t have an answer to it. Do you have any ideas about how your life might be different in positive ways if you didn’t think you were less competent than everyone about everything? Is there anything you’d like to do just because it’s important to you?
Do you have any ideas about how your life might be different in positive ways if you didn’t think you were less competent than everyone about everything?
Not anything specific.
Is there anything you’d like to do just because it’s important to you?
I have goals and values beyond being content or happy, but they are more than a couple of inferential steps away from my day-to-day routine, and I don’t have that inner fire thingy that would bridge the gap. So, more often than not, they are not the main component of my actual motivation. Also, I am afraid of possibility of having my values changed.
There are two separate issues: morale management and being calibrated about your own abilities.
I think the best way to be well-calibrated is to approximate pagerank—to get a sense of your competence, don’t ask yourself, average the extracted opinion of others that are considered competent and have no incentives to mislead you (this last bit is tricky, also the extracting process may have to be slightly indirect).
Morale is hard, and person specific. My experience is that in long term projects/goals, morale becomes a serious problem long before the situation actually becomes bad. I think having “wolverine morale” (“You know what Mr. Grizzly? You look like a wuss, I can totally take you!”) is a huge chunk of success, bigger than raw ability.
think having “wolverine morale” (“You know what Mr. Grizzly? You look like a wuss, I can totally take you!”) is a huge chunk of success, bigger than raw ability.
Is Zuckerberg’s “Move fast, break things” similar/related?
I sometimes have a similar experience, and when I do, it is almost always simply an effect of my own standards of competence being higher than those around me.
Imagine, some sort of problem arises in the presence of a small group. The members of that group look at each other, and whoever signals the most confidence gets first crack at the problem. But this more-confident person then does not reveal any knowledge or skill that the others do not possess, because said confidence was entirely do to higher willingness to potentially make the problem worse through trial and error.
So, in this scenario, feeling less competent does not mean you are less competent; it means you are more risk-adverse. Do you have a generalized paralyzing fear of making the problem worse? If so, welcome to the club. If not, nevermind.
I personally am a fan of talking therapy. If you are thinking something is worth asking a therapist about, it is worth asking a therapist about. But beyond the generalities, thinking you are not good enough is absolutely right in the targets of the kinds of things it can be helpful to discuss with a therapist.
Consider the propositions:
1) everyone is more competent than you at everything and
2) you can carry on a coherent conversation on lesswrong
I am pretty sure that these are mutually exclusive propositions. I’m pretty sure just from reading some of your comments that you are more competent than plenty of other people at a reasonable range of intellectual pursuits.
Anything you can talk to a therapist about you can talk to your friends about. Do they think you are less competent than everybody else? They might point out to you in a discussion some fairly obvious evidence for or against this proposition that you are overlooking.
I asked my friends around. Most were unable to point out a single thing I am good at, except speaking English very well for a foreign language, and having a good willpower. One said “hmmm, maybe math?” (as it turned out, he was fast-talked by the math babble that was auraing around me for some time after having read Godel, Escher, Bach), and several pointed out that I am handsome (while a nice perk, I don’t what that to be my defining proficiency).
Originally you expressed concern that all other people were better than you at all the things you might do.
But here you find out from your friends that for each thing you do there are other people around you who do it better.
In a world with 6 billion people, essentially every one of us can find people who are better at what we are good at than we are. So join the club. What works is to take some pleasure in doing things.
Only you can improve your understanding of the world, for instance. No one in the world is better at increasing your understanding of the world than you are. I read comments here and post “answers” here to increase my understanding of the world. It doesn’t matter that other people here are better at answering these questions, or that other people here have a better understanding of the world than I do. I want to increase my understanding of the world and I am the only person in the world who can do that.
I also wish to understand taking pleasure and joy from the world and work to increase my pleasure and joy in the world. No one can do that for me better than I can. You might take more joy than me in kissing that girl over there. Still, I will kiss her if I can because having you kiss her gives me much less joy and pleasure than kissing her myself, even if I am getting less joy from kissing here than you would get for yourself if you kissed her .
The concern you express to only participate in things where you are better than everybody else is just a result of your evolution as a human being. The genes that make you think being better than others around you have, in the past, caused your ancestors to find effective and capable mates, able to keep their children alive and able to produce children who would find effective and capable mates. But your genes are just your genes they are not the “truth of the world.” You can make the choice to do things because you want the experience of doing them, and you will find you are better than anybody else in the world by far at giving yourself experiences.
I suppose that the problem emerged only because you communicate only with people of your sort and level of awareness, try to go on a trip to some rural village or start conversations with taxists, dishwashers, janitors, cooks, security guards etc.
Well, does it impact what you are willing to do or try? Or it’s just an abstract “I wish I were as cool” feeling?
If you imagine yourself lacking that perception (e.g. imagine everyone’s IQ—except yours—dropping by 20 points), would the things you do in life change?
Guesses here. I would be taking up more risks in areas where success depends on competition. I would become less conforming, more arrogant and cynical. I would care less about producing good art, and good things in general. I would try less to improve my social skills, empathy and networking, and focus more on self-sufficiency. I wouldn’t have asked this question here, on LW.
I frequently feel similar and I haven’t found a good way to deal with those feelings, but it’s implausible that everyone around you is more competent at everything. Some things to take into account:
Who are you comparing yourself to? Peers? Everyone you meet? Successful people?
What traits are you comparing? It’s unlikely that someone who is, for example, better at math than you are is also superior in every other area.
Maybe you haven’t found your advantage or a way to exploit this.
Maybe you haven’t spend enough time on one thing to get really good at it.
I have a constant impression that everyone around me is more competent than me at everything. Does it actually mean that I am, or is there some sort of strong psychological effect that can create that impression, even if it is not actually true? If there is, is it a problem you should see your therapist about?
Reminds me of something Scott said once:
See also: The Illusion of Winning by Scott Adams (h/t Kaj_Sotala)
This reminds me of my criteria for learning: “You have understood something when it appears to be easy.” The mathematicians call this state ‘trivial’. It has become easy because you trained the topic until the key aspects became part of your unconscious competence. Then it appears to yourself as easy—because you no longer need to think about it.
Impostor syndrome:
Err, that’s not it. I am no more successful than them. Or, at least, I kinda feel that everyone else is more successful than me as well.
Consider that maybe you might be wrong about the imposter syndrome. As a person without it—its hard to know how you think/feel and how you concluded that you couldn’t have it. But maybe its worth asking—How would someone convince you to change your mind on this topic?
By entering some important situation where my and his comparative advantage in some sort of competence comes into play, and losing.
what if you developed a few bad heuristics about how other successful people were not inherently more successful but just got lucky (or some other external granting of success) as they went along; whereas your hard-earned successes were due to successful personal skills… Hard earned, personally achieved success.
its probably possible to see a therapist about it; but I would suggest you can work your own way around it (consider it a challenge that can be overcome with the correct growth mindset)
I think people are quick to challenge this type of impression because it pattern matches to known cognitive distortions involved in things like depression, or known insecurities in certain competitive situations.
For example, consider that most everyone will structure their lives such that their weaknesses are downplayed and their positive features are more prominent. This can happen either by choice of activity (e.g. the stereotypical geek avoids social games) or by more overt communication filtering (e.g. most people don’t talk about their anger problems). Accordingly, it’s never hard to find information that confirms your own relative incompetence, if there’s some emotional tendency to look for it.
Aside from that, a great question is “to what ends am I making this comparison?” I find it unlikely that you have a purely academic interest in the question of your relative competence.
First, it can often be useful to know your relative competence in a specific competitive domain. But even here, this information is only one part of your decision process: You may be okay with e.g. choosing a lower expected rank in one career over a higher rank in another because you enjoy the work more, or find it more compatible with your values, or because it pays betters, or leaves more time for you family, or you’re risk averse, or it’s more altruistic, etc. But knowing your likely rank along some dimension will tell you a bit about the likely pay-offs of competing along that dimension.
But what is the use of making an across-the-board self-comparison?
Suppose you constructed some general measure of competence across all domains. Suppose you found out you were below average (or even above average). Then what? It seems you’re in still in the same situation as before: You still must choose how to spend your time. The general self-comparison measure is nothing more than the aggregate of your expected relative ranks on specific sub-domains, which are more relevant to any specific choice. And as I said above, your expected rank in some area is far from the only bit of information you care about.
As an aside, a positive use for a self-comparison is to provide a role-model. If you find yourself unfavorably compared to almost everyone, consider yourself lucky that you have so many role-models to choose from! Since you are probably like other people in most respects, you can expect to find low-hanging fruit in many areas where you have poor relative performance.
But if you find (as many people will) that you’ve hit the point of diminishing returns regarding the time you spend comparing yourself to others, perhaps you can simply recognize this and realize that it’s neither cowardly nor avoidant to spend your mental energy elsewhere.
Possibly parallel—I’ve had a feeling for a long time that something bad was about to happen. Relatively recently, I’ve come to believe that this isn’t necessarily an accurate intuition about the world, it’s muscle tightness in my abdomen. It’s probably part of a larger pattern, since just letting go in the area where I feel it doesn’t make much difference.
I believe that patterns of muscle tension and emotions are related and tend to maintain each other.
It’s extremely unlikely that everyone is more competent than you at everything. If nothing else, your writing is better than that of a high proportion of people on the internet. Also, a lot of people have painful mental habits and have no idea that they have a problem.
More generally, you could explore the idea of everyone being more competent than you at everything. Is there evidence for this? Evidence against it? Is it likely that you’re at the bottom of ability at everything?
This sounds to me like something worth taking to a therapist, bearing in mind that you may have to try more than one therapist to find one that’s a good fit.
I believe there’s strong psychological effect which can create that impression—growing up around people who expect you to be incompetent. Now that I think about it, there may be genetic vulnerability involved, too.
Possibly worth exploring: free monthly Feldenkrais exercise—this are patterns of gentle movement which produce deep relaxation and easier movement. The reason I think you can get some evidence about your situation by trying Feldenkrais is that, if you find your belief about other people being more competent at everything goes away, even briefly, than you have some evidence that the belief is habitual.
Nancy, I believe you are describing anxiety. That you are anxious, that if you went to a psychologist for therapy and you were covered by insurance that they would list your diagnosis on the reimbursement form as “generalized anxiety disorder.”
I say this not as a psychologist but as someone who was anxious much of his life. For me it was worth doing regular talking therapy and (it seems to me) hacking my anxiety levels slowly downward through directed introspection. I am still more timid than I would like in situations where, for example, I might be very direct telling a woman (of the appropriate sex) I love her, or putting my own ideas forward forcefully at work. But all of these things I do better now than I did in the past, and I don’t consider my self-adjustment to be finished yet.
Anyway, If you haven’t named what is happening to you as “anxiety,” it might be helpful to consider that some of what has been learned about anxiety over time might be interesting to you, that people who are discussing anxiety may often be discussing something relevant to you.
Do you know me?
I find a lot of evidence for it, but I am not sure I am not being selective. For example, I am the only one in my peer group that never did any extra-curricular activities at school. While everyone had something like sports or hobbies, I seemed to only study at school an waste all my other time surfing the internet and playing the same video games over and over.
The idea that playing an instrument is a hobby while playing a video game isn’t is completely cultural. It says something about values but little about competence.
One important difference is that video games are optimized to be fun while musical instruments aren’t. Therefore, playing an instrument can signal discipline in a way that playing a game can’t.
I’m not sure that’s true. There’s selection pressure on musical instruments to make them fun to use. Most of the corresponding training also mostly isn’t optimised for learning but for fun.
There’s also selection pressure on instruments to make them pleasant to listen to. There’s no corresponding constraint on video games.
In an age of eSports I’m not sure that’s true. Quite a lot of games are not balanced to make them fun for the average player but balanced for high level tournament play.
Having a background belief that you’re worse than everyone at everything probably lowered your initiative.
Obvious question: Are you better at those games than other people? (On average, don’t compare yourself to the elite.)
How easy did studying come to you?
At THOSE games? Yes. I can complete about half of American McGee’s Alice blindfolded. Other games? General gaming? No. Or, okay, I am better than non-gamers, but my kinda-gamer peers are crub-stomping me at multiplayer in every game.
Studying—very easy. Now, when I am a university student—quite hard.
Seems like you fell prey to the classic scenario of “being intelligent enough to breeze through high school and all I ended up with is a crappy work ethic.”
University is as good of a place as any to fix this problem. First of all, I encourage you to do all the things people tell you you should do, but most people don’t: Read up before classes, review after classes, read the extra material, ask your professors questions or help, schedule periodic review sessions of the stuff you’re supposed to know… You’ll regret not doing those things when you get your degree but don’t feel very competent about your knowledge. Try to make a habit out of this and it’ll get easier in other aspects of your life.
And try new things. This is probably a cliché in the LW-sphere by now, but really try a lot of new things.
Thanks. Still, should I take it as “yes, you are less competent than people around you”?
Maybe just less disciplined than you need to be. “Less competent” is too confusingly relative to mean anything solid.
Well, here’s a confusing part. I didn’t tell the whole truth in parent post, there are actually two areas that I am probably more competent than peers, in which others openly envy me instead of the other way around. One is the ability to speak English (a foreign language, most my peers wouldn’t be able to ask this question here), another is discipline. Everyone actually envies me for almost never procrastinating, never forgetting anything, etc. Are we talking about different disciplines here?
If you already have discipline, what exactly is the difficulty you’re finding to study now as compared to previous years?
Sometimes, I just have trouble understanding the subject areas. I am going to take MathiasZaman’s advice: I always used my discipline to complete in time and with quality what needs to be completed, but not into anything extra. Mostly, though, it is (social) anxiety—I can’t approach a professor with anything unless I have a pack of companions backing me up, or can’t start a project unless a friend confirms that I correctly understand what it is that has to be done. And my companions have awful discipline, worst of anyone I ever worked with (which is not many). So I end up, for example, preparing all assignments in time, but hand them in only long after the time is due, when a friend has prepared them. I am working on that problem, and it becomes less severe as the time goes.
I agree; group assignments are the worst. Is there any way you can get the university to let you take unique tests for the themes you already master?
First of all: I don’t agree that group assignments are bad. Those problems are my problems, and most complex tasks in real life really benefit from, or require, collaboration. I think that universities should have more group assignments and projects, even if it would mean I’ll drop out.
Second, I wasn’t talking about group assignments in my post. I was talking about being too anxious to work on your own personal assignment, unless a friend has already done it and can provide confirmation.
So it seems like you can solve the problems… but then you are somehow frozen by fear that maybe your solution is not correct. Until someone else confirms that it is correct, and then you are able to continue. Solving the problem is not a problem; giving it to the teacher is.
On the intellectual level, you should update the prior probability that your solutions are correct.
On the emotional level… what exactly is this horrible outcome your imagination shows you if you would give the professor a wrong solution?
It is probably something that feels stupid if you try to explain it. (Maybe you imagine the professor screaming at you loudly, and the whole university laughing at you. It’s not realistic, but it may feel so.) But that’s exactly the point. On some level, something stupid happens in your mind, because otherwise you wouldn’t have this irrational problem. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s there in your head, influencing your emotions and actions. So the proper way is to describe your silent horrible vision explicitly, as specifically as you can (bring it from the darkness to light), until your own mind finally notices that it really was stupid.
I have no trouble imagining all the horrible outcomes, because I did get into trouble several times in similar scenarios, where getting confirmation from a friend would have saved me. For example, a couple of hours after giving my work to a teacher, I remembered that my friend wasn’t there, even though he was ready. I inquired him about it, and it then turned out that I gave it to the wrong teacher, and getting all my hand-crafted drawings back ended up being a very time and effort consuming task.
Reading that it sounds like your core issue is around low self confidence.
Taking an IQ test might help to dispell the idea that you are below average. You might be under the LW IQ average IQ of 140 but you are probably well above 100 which is the average in society.
I can guess that my IQ has three digits. It’s just that it doesn’t enable me to do things better than others. Except solving iq tests, I guess.
It seems that you have a decent IQ. Additionally you seem to be conscious and can avoid procrastination which is a very, very valuable characteristic.
On the other hand you have issues with self esteem. As far as I understand IQ testing gets used by real psychologists in cases like this.
Taking David Burns CBT book, “The Feeling Good Handbook” and doing the exercises every day for 15 minutes would likely do a lot for you, especially if you can get yourself to do the exercises regularly.
I also support Nancy’s suggestion of Feldenkrais.
Another stupid question to boot: will all this make me more content with my current situation? While not being a pleasant feeling, my discontent with my competence does serve as a motivator to actually study. I wouldn’t have asked this question here and wouldn’t receive all the advice if I were less competent than everyone else and okay with it.
That’s a really interesting question, and I don’t have an answer to it. Do you have any ideas about how your life might be different in positive ways if you didn’t think you were less competent than everyone about everything? Is there anything you’d like to do just because it’s important to you?
Not anything specific.
I have goals and values beyond being content or happy, but they are more than a couple of inferential steps away from my day-to-day routine, and I don’t have that inner fire thingy that would bridge the gap. So, more often than not, they are not the main component of my actual motivation. Also, I am afraid of possibility of having my values changed.
I don’t think I know you, but I’m not that great at remembering people. I made the claim about your writing because I’ve spent a lot of time online.
I’m sure you’re being selective about the people you’re comparing yourself to.
There are two separate issues: morale management and being calibrated about your own abilities.
I think the best way to be well-calibrated is to approximate pagerank—to get a sense of your competence, don’t ask yourself, average the extracted opinion of others that are considered competent and have no incentives to mislead you (this last bit is tricky, also the extracting process may have to be slightly indirect).
Morale is hard, and person specific. My experience is that in long term projects/goals, morale becomes a serious problem long before the situation actually becomes bad. I think having “wolverine morale” (“You know what Mr. Grizzly? You look like a wuss, I can totally take you!”) is a huge chunk of success, bigger than raw ability.
Is Zuckerberg’s “Move fast, break things” similar/related?
Look up the imposter syndrome. And try not to automatically say; “I don’t have it because I never did anything of noteworthyness”
---Oh dang; someone else got to it first.
How did you go with your opinions of imposter syndrome now?
Possible, but unlikely. We’re all just winging it and as others have pointed out, impostor syndrome is a thing.
I sometimes have a similar experience, and when I do, it is almost always simply an effect of my own standards of competence being higher than those around me.
Imagine, some sort of problem arises in the presence of a small group. The members of that group look at each other, and whoever signals the most confidence gets first crack at the problem. But this more-confident person then does not reveal any knowledge or skill that the others do not possess, because said confidence was entirely do to higher willingness to potentially make the problem worse through trial and error.
So, in this scenario, feeling less competent does not mean you are less competent; it means you are more risk-adverse. Do you have a generalized paralyzing fear of making the problem worse? If so, welcome to the club. If not, nevermind.
I personally am a fan of talking therapy. If you are thinking something is worth asking a therapist about, it is worth asking a therapist about. But beyond the generalities, thinking you are not good enough is absolutely right in the targets of the kinds of things it can be helpful to discuss with a therapist.
Consider the propositions: 1) everyone is more competent than you at everything and 2) you can carry on a coherent conversation on lesswrong I am pretty sure that these are mutually exclusive propositions. I’m pretty sure just from reading some of your comments that you are more competent than plenty of other people at a reasonable range of intellectual pursuits.
Anything you can talk to a therapist about you can talk to your friends about. Do they think you are less competent than everybody else? They might point out to you in a discussion some fairly obvious evidence for or against this proposition that you are overlooking.
I asked my friends around. Most were unable to point out a single thing I am good at, except speaking English very well for a foreign language, and having a good willpower. One said “hmmm, maybe math?” (as it turned out, he was fast-talked by the math babble that was auraing around me for some time after having read Godel, Escher, Bach), and several pointed out that I am handsome (while a nice perk, I don’t what that to be my defining proficiency).
Originally you expressed concern that all other people were better than you at all the things you might do.
But here you find out from your friends that for each thing you do there are other people around you who do it better.
In a world with 6 billion people, essentially every one of us can find people who are better at what we are good at than we are. So join the club. What works is to take some pleasure in doing things.
Only you can improve your understanding of the world, for instance. No one in the world is better at increasing your understanding of the world than you are. I read comments here and post “answers” here to increase my understanding of the world. It doesn’t matter that other people here are better at answering these questions, or that other people here have a better understanding of the world than I do. I want to increase my understanding of the world and I am the only person in the world who can do that.
I also wish to understand taking pleasure and joy from the world and work to increase my pleasure and joy in the world. No one can do that for me better than I can. You might take more joy than me in kissing that girl over there. Still, I will kiss her if I can because having you kiss her gives me much less joy and pleasure than kissing her myself, even if I am getting less joy from kissing here than you would get for yourself if you kissed her .
The concern you express to only participate in things where you are better than everybody else is just a result of your evolution as a human being. The genes that make you think being better than others around you have, in the past, caused your ancestors to find effective and capable mates, able to keep their children alive and able to produce children who would find effective and capable mates. But your genes are just your genes they are not the “truth of the world.” You can make the choice to do things because you want the experience of doing them, and you will find you are better than anybody else in the world by far at giving yourself experiences.
I suppose that the problem emerged only because you communicate only with people of your sort and level of awareness, try to go on a trip to some rural village or start conversations with taxists, dishwashers, janitors, cooks, security guards etc.
Is that basically a self-confidence problem?
Is it? I don’t know.
Well, does it impact what you are willing to do or try? Or it’s just an abstract “I wish I were as cool” feeling?
If you imagine yourself lacking that perception (e.g. imagine everyone’s IQ—except yours—dropping by 20 points), would the things you do in life change?
Guesses here. I would be taking up more risks in areas where success depends on competition. I would become less conforming, more arrogant and cynical. I would care less about producing good art, and good things in general. I would try less to improve my social skills, empathy and networking, and focus more on self-sufficiency. I wouldn’t have asked this question here, on LW.
I frequently feel similar and I haven’t found a good way to deal with those feelings, but it’s implausible that everyone around you is more competent at everything. Some things to take into account:
Who are you comparing yourself to? Peers? Everyone you meet? Successful people?
What traits are you comparing? It’s unlikely that someone who is, for example, better at math than you are is also superior in every other area.
Maybe you haven’t found your advantage or a way to exploit this.
Maybe you haven’t spend enough time on one thing to get really good at it.
Long shot: Do you think you might have ADHD?.pdf) (pdf warning) Alternatively, go over the diagnostic criteria
Your link is broken because it has parentheses in the URL. Escape them with backslashes to unbreak it.
Thank you very much.
You’re welcome!
Peers.
It being unlikely and still seeming to happen is the reason I asked this question.
Maybe. And everyone else did, thus denying me of competitive advantage?