Video Transcript
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hey there it’s Gary Schuster your friendly neighborhood in vener and um welcome to another episode of The Innovation Cafe um today we’re going to talk about something that’s super super important for well for really for everyone but for inventors in particular the impostor superpower now I know most people know it as the impostor syndrome and I get that because it’s been around since the 1970s and people have been talking about it but in the context of innovation and really in the context of most things it’s much more of a superpower than it is anything else so what should inventors think about the impostor syndrome well let’s find out um let’s turn to some of our favorite inventors here we go with Albert Einstein now this guy I mean well-known innovator right um was once known to call himself an
involuntary swindler because of the high esteem in which his work was held there’s a reason for that um that probably didn’t help that um after finishing school he could not get a job teaching physics which is what he really wanted to do so he ended up working at the patent office which is a fine Choice um as you’ll learn from watching this channel I I love patents I think that there a fantastic uh way to protect inventions but he spent you know he got hired there as a technical expert third class which is a little bit weird to think about Albert Einstein as third class technical expert it took him four years to get promoted to technical experts second class so he probably was walking away from that job at the patent office feeling a little bit like an impostor um but his lack of any formal Career Success of any formal uh you know detailed formal training is probably
what led him to his groundbreaking theories you don’t need to have all those internalized things that can’t be accomplished so let’s look to my Angelou fantastic author trailblazing and yet she thinks people are going to figure her out one day that she’s run a game on everyone and um you know she’s she’s not really worth what people think she is as an author I mean how can she think of herself still as an impostor after reaching that level of success well that’s that’s what happens when you make a living with your mind when you when all that you got really is your brain power and that’s what you’re making a living on it’s not like you can test it it you can’t I mean yes they’re tests but they don’t really test creativity uh it’s not like going to the gym and how much can I bench press and yeah okay so I’m going to be really good at doing this form of construction that involves this level of lifting um this
is intellectual stuff and we all have a lot of self-doubt now Tina Fay may have um probably did actually see it’s Innovation Cafe so here we go with the coffee um Tina Fe kind of nailed it she says the beauty of the impostor syndrome is that you vacillate between extreme ego Mania and a complete feeling of I am a fraud oh my God they’re on to me now if you have never felt that you’re probably not doing it right you should be able to innovate in areas that you’re not really expert in and feel like a complete fraud and yet keep on going because that’s that’s really uh the key to Innovation so let’s take a look at Cheryl Sandberg and she’s also fairly well known at least in the Tech
Community as uh the number two person at uh Facebook and she’s been there for you know she’d been there for very long time and yet there are still days when she thinks she wakes up and thinks oh my God I am I am what am I doing here I’m a fraud so it’s pretty well established the successful people don’t always feel like they deserve their level of a success um you know you you start to ask these questions what am I doing here I’m not that creative how did I come up with that I must have stolen it somehow that I don’t remember doing did I just scam everyone into believing in me have I run a game on the patent office somehow and they think that I know what I’m doing um they’re going to find me out man I am going to be found out so you’re not alone if you’re feeling this you are definitely not alone okay uh and this affects really everyone who is creative and it absolutely affects creators now when you think about it if you screw
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something up in your job you’re waiting for the world to end but you shouldn’t be cuz Thomas Edison nailed it Thomas said us and famously said I have not failed I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work of course that that’s what progress is progress is trying over and over and over and over to come up with a thing and then finally it happens for you it’s it’s not rocket science it’s not even brain surgery it’s it’s pretty straightforward stuff if you don’t fail you can never succeed so how can you fail that many times and not have a mountain of self-doubt you can’t really so if you’re doing it right if you’re being creative and you’re approaching it in the right way um this is sort of the same same thing as when you do brainstorming
sessions and you say okay let’s start out with this idea there’s no bad ideas let’s just go over everything and we’ll figure out later what what we’ll stick with and this is the Innovation version of that um you know you you you’re going to get it wrong and you should get it wrong a bunch of times because if you get it right the first time well life would be no fun would it um there’s there’s a lot to the challenge you need to know enough to understand what is possible but not so much that you have internalized what other people think is impossible so your professors at University well you know we we can’t do that we’ve tried many times for decades to do this thing and you know it can’t be done well no it can’t be done yet can’t be done with current technology don’t internalize that stuff if you’re in a graduate program you know take all the advice on here’s what we’ve discovered here’s how things work and
take with an enormous ocean filled with salt not just a grain of salt the idea that there are things that are impossible because it’s just impossible for now so now before we head on let me talk a little bit about a really really important subject and that is neurodiversity okay neurodiversity is what supercharges Innovation and in a corollary to that is there really is no such thing as neurotypical and you know if you think that there is is I get it there you know this is how science tends to function but really rethink it a little bit I mean I get why people come to think that there is a neurotypical but there isn’t um neurodiversity is a superpower okay now think about it if everyone thought about everything the same way would we would we create anything new would there be anything new on Earth no this is what I hope Apple was
describing in its advertising campaign think different I mean literally think different and people who are neurodiverse literally do think different and it’s important to look at it as as as another superpower it it’s an amazing thing so let’s look at some people with uh with neurodiverse traits Thomas Edison Nicola Tesla Albert Einstein there are plenty of people plenty of innovators who are what psychologists would think of as a neurodiverse so Nicola Tesla was thought to have OCD he probably had a better level of focus on a lot of his tasks ADHD is it’s like it’s like the inventor’s identification badge almost I mean you have Thomas Edison who did okay as an inventor Larry Page of Google Benjamin Frank Alexander granbell Wilbur Wright Galileo Bill Gates and again Nicola
Tesla it’s so many others the ability to skip from subject to subject to subject in your head allows you to connect things that people who have really linear thinking don’t connect and that’s the critical that’s the secret sauce of innovation is wow if you take these four things from these four totally different areas and combine them you get something amazing so you know don’t don’t feel like it’s holding you back it’s pushing you forward and yeah you know you still need to deal with the side effects of it and those of us with ADHD have figured out you know how to live a successful life most of us anyhow with it um another trait which is tied a lot with Innovation is U one that Albert Einstein Elon Musk Mark Zuckerberg Bill Gat GES and others are thought to have which is autism spectrum and you know that’s I think much more of of a profound um difference to how your brain
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processes information which means that you have a more profound set of superpowers that you know if you’re the only one who thinks in this Lane over here and everyone else is thinking in these Lanes well if the invention happens to be in this Lane you’re the one who’s going to discover it so cannot emphasize enough how important it is to embrace neurodiversity and to just leave in the Dustbin of History this idea that there should be some neurotypical I mean in the same way that there’s not a perfect male body or a perfect female body there’s not a perfect human brain every human brain has its own good parts and bad parts and mediocre parts and and that’s I think what we really need to focus on let’s look at the impostor syndrome as a superpower because that that’s really the subject of today’s uh of today’s talk um when you feel like an impostor what what does that mean what’s that a sign of well it’s a sign for one that
you’re pushing some boundaries right imposters push boundaries and you know you’re in an unexplored area so there’s no validation that you’re going to find um there are there’s a Rogues gallery of fakers and let’s just go through some of them really quickly there’s Harvard Dropout and well-known intellectual buffoon Mark Zuckerberg no none of those things other than the harbard Dropout are true he didn’t know that it was impossible and it was impossible at the time to manage the amount of data that Facebook and the other meta entities have with a database you couldn’t do it but no one told him that and he didn’t stay at Harvard long enough to have it hammered into his head that no man that’s impossible don’t even think about it so he did he thought about it and figured it out and solved it um Rogue number two Steve Jobs dropped out of
Reed College didn’t even have a degree in design I mean how was he ever going to succeed at anything well because no one told told him that things certain things couldn’t be done and even when things were known to not be doable he would try to do them um sometimes you would You’ have him develop technology and it’s like well we’re going to have to figure out once storage density gets to this place or battery energy density gets to that place or bandwidth over cellular networks gets here then we’ll roll out the invention so you know he even would invent for things that were were still to come that some of the techn techology hadn’t arrived there but he could see it coming um you know no one told him you couldn’t do it and even when someone did tell him that’s not possible he would just say it’s not possible yet wait around you’ll see um Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard Elon Musk made it all the way through one full day at Stanford and dropped out on day two um and these people are not failures uh by any uh any stroke of the imagination Richard Branson dropped out
of high school Jack dorsy who founded Twitter NYU drop out Walt Disney dropped out of high school Michael Dell dropped out of uh University of Texas Austin Henry Ford dropped out at 15 years old um Thomas Edison had him beat though because he dropped out of school at 12 years old so what do these people have in common other than wild runaway success and a seeming inability to sit in a classroom well I mean we can speculate what drove them all to drop out and then later succeed um wildly but I know one of those things and that is they weren’t taught they can’t do it they were taught well here’s some things that could be done some of them were I even Thomas Edison didn’t even get to that part at 12 years old I mean they were barely covering you know uh algebra but they weren’t taught limits and that’s the key you know limits are just what people currently think can’t
be done too much expertise makes you think too many things are impossible expertise can be the enemy of innovation now there’s really two kinds of inventions um the first one is incremental inventions so um you know think about well we were able to to jam another 5% more storage onto a magnetic hard drive that kind of thing and that requires a lot of education and expertise but then there are these sort of big picture inventions and with the big picture invention um you know you can think of regenerative braking where you know it’s key to making electric cars workable is instead of just burning all the energy in your momentum out in the brakes it actually runs runs the uh motor backwards and generates electricity um you know that kind of big idea uh the the big idea of being able to take a
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Communications call and go from Tower to Tower to Tower so that you can be moving that’s a big idea and then you need you need people for the smaller portions of that like okay well how do we T technically handle the network handoff and how do we send packets to the correct place I mean things like that but the big picture stuff and these are all the Rogues galleries is all Big Picture People the impostor is a Creator because they don’t know what’s supposed to stop them right you if you don’t recognize that you can’t do it then you’re going to try to do it and that’s what they did so let’s turn to maybe my favorite impostor of all time um Hedy Lamar um Heddy Lamar was the most promising new actress of 1939 starting 30 feature films um no Science Background whatsoever so what did she accomplish I mean she had no no real education other than you know some acting classes so what what did she accomplish the big thing she’s
remembered for is something called frequency hopping and that is critical to early cell networks it’s I mean it really is what makes possible almost all modern telecommunications she developed this as a way to jam or to prevent jamming of Allied Torpedoes during World War II and you it took like many things she probably felt like a huge impostor coming up with that because it took well over a decade for that technology to get the attention of the US Military and uh it might not have helped but it does illustrate the point really well that her co-inventor on that was a composer with no formal science training so again there this big picture invention of well what if we go from one frequency to another um she also invented a self-c carbonating soft drink which didn’t quite taste good and so that didn’t uh didn’t succeed it was pill you dropped into a a drink and it would self-c
carbonate um she invented improvements in traffic signaling in uh aircraft uh you know she she was sort of a modern modern-day Da Vinci and yeah no training she was the ultimate impostor another impostor the world’s wealthiest man adjusted for inflation wealthiest human to ever walk the earth John Rockefeller John D Rockefeller um his formal education 10 weeks of bookkeeping classes that’s it uh then he went into bookkeeping for four years or so then he went into produce and food wholesaling so so far it doesn’t sound like the guy that’s going to end up running the the most enormous Monopoly on energy ever conceived um he then eventually built a Refinery he got into construction built a Refinery that someone else owned and after a few years he decided you know maybe it’s time for me to mess around with refineries so he
purchased the refinery and eventually formed Standard Oil and the rest is history I mean the guy well he John D Rockefeller I mean he he was quite successful at it and and probably um we can thank or curse him depending on how you feel for um you know aggressive antitrust laws that got passed um in the wake of that and some steel monopolies um so now let’s go to someone who you might not think is is quite an impostor but absolutely is okay um Jeff Bezos he did have the background you needed to succeed in the world of the internet he had bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science so that’s pretty much those are the big ones right except for Amazon it’s not the big ones for Amazon Amazon’s real challenge was Logistics and no one told him he had no background in logistics he didn’t know that you could ship you know 1.6 million packages on an average day
175 million products on a single day in 2019 I mean that’s a logistics nightmare and you got to get these Goods you have to either drop ship them or package them and you have to get them shipped and you have to have agreements with Distributors and it just seems an impossibility and it was probably thought of as an impossibility before he not knowing that he couldn’t do it did it so there really is I mean he he really is a a prime example of someone who knew enough to know what was possible he could do all the programming for it he could start to take orders online um you know but he didn’t really know what couldn’t be done which is the logistics part of it and to give you an idea of how surprising it was that they were able to do this level of logistics even Amazon was apparently surprised because they had installed in their headquarter a bell and every time
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someone submitted an order the Bell would ring and sometime between taking an order every few hours and taking 170 m 75 million product orders a day they turned that Bell off because it just became White Noise and constant ringing so it it surprised even them so let’s reframe how we think about the impostor syndrome it’s the impostor superpower get used to calling it that and stop with the impostor syndrome stuff yeah sometimes you need to explain to people what you’re talking about yeah you know I’ve got the impostor superpower that’s how I’m creative you might know it as the Imposter syndrome but let me tell you why it’s wrong right that’s the way you approach this thing um and you know listen to those impost feelings of being an imposter because those are actually surprisingly probably a sign of growth if you’re feeling like wow I’m stepping out of my Lane I’m an impostor I’m not trained in
this and you know like uh my Angelou I’ve been running a game and they’re going to find me out um I’m an involuntary swindler because I’m off coming up with these physics theories that I have no business coming up with well no those are all legitimate things and they’re all signs that you’re succeeding so here’s to you fellow imposters fellow creators fellow inventors um live your life as an impostor it will never never get old you’ll always be doing fun stuff