Feeling like an imposter is okay

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well hello, this is The Daily Five with Aurooba. That's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:15] It doesn't matter how good you might be at something, it's pretty normal to feel like an imposter sometimes. And when you're slogging through something, that's when that feeling tends to rear its very weird head. So let me share with you how it appeared for me today. Sometimes, the slog is sitting at my desk, getting started on an idea for an episode, stopping halfway, deciding it's terrible, and then sitting there for another half an hour trying to think of something worth saying.

[00:00:48] I know, not every idea is a gem and not every episode is going to be valuable, but I still want it to be something, you know, I can get behind, and sometimes it really is hard to figure out what that is. Obviously, I use personal anecdotes and learning to illustrate a point, so some people have called it a type of public journal, even though I dislike that.

[00:01:11] There are folks who use stories about others to make a point, and definitely separate the professional from the personal there. But I use my own life and my own learnings because they are often hard won confirmations of insights and understanding, and proof of my ability, in some way, to do what I'm talking about. Not always, and not perfectly, but it's there.

[00:01:36] When we're in the slog, sometimes we give up because things take a long time to do and they don't always get easier. The first season of The Daily Five was 98 episodes, and I'm a third of the way into this season of 100 episodes. I have done a bunch of reps. Some would say a lot of reps. And yet there are certainly days where it takes me 45 50 minutes to come up with something to say. Yes, once I know what to say it's a 20 minute process to get the episode done, which is really not a big deal, but getting to that point sometimes takes a really long time.

[00:02:13] Creativity is a muscle that gets stronger with repetition, they say. That doesn't mean you never struggle, or you stop struggling, or that it becomes easier. Before recording this, I sat here for half an hour struggling to figure out what to say and came up with four ideas, got halfway through the points I wanted to make, and then scrapped it because it just made me cringe.

[00:02:35] And, you know, I have a bunch of semi related thoughts running through my head right now. There's this idea of getting, or giving, 100 percent in whatever situation you find yourself in. That one is inspired by an episode of the legal drama Suits I watched last night. There's this other idea of putting in your reps and getting comfortable with boredom because no matter how much talent you have, you are ultimately going to have to put in a certain volume of work to get really good, which is inspired by that pottery story of that professor a lot of us know about, and the paperclip strategy that James Clear popularized, which always seems to stick in my head. Which of course leads me to the concept of the 10, 000 hours rule. But then that leads me to the idea of the first 20 hours, which a lot of generalists and people in the business of varied skill acquisition identify with.

[00:03:28] And all of that leads me to the idea that I, today, hit snooze twice in the morning on my alarm and failed to wake up at 5am. And I should probably not be disappointed with myself and forgive myself, but it's the truth that I'm a tiny bit disappointed with myself, and what am I doing here recording an episode about creating a better life when I failed to wake up on time today? Yes, while It may have taken a couple minutes, three minutes or almost four, to vocalize that.

[00:03:59] In my head, that is all happening all at once in the space of a few breaths, and then repeating some variation of it. Welcome to Feeling Like an Impostor, the Aurooba edition. I don't know if there's a solution, but I do know that not every day feels like this, and while I have no idea what it means to accept feeling like this, I can at least have the hope that perhaps tomorrow I won't feel like this.

[00:04:27] So, if you're feeling like an imposter, or things are feeling really hard and that's making you feel like an imposter, remember that it doesn't feel like that all the time. And it's okay if it feels like that sometimes. You can get through it. Maybe that is what it means to put in the reps. Maybe that is what the 10, 000 hours rule is about.

[00:04:47] You know?

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?