Video Transcript

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Hey there, it’s Gary Schuster, your friendly neighborhood inventor, and welcome to another episode of The Innovation Cafe. Today we’re going to talk about something that’s super, super important for — well, 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.

Let’s turn to some of our favorite inventors. Here we go with Albert Einstein. Now, this guy — I mean, well-known innovator, right? 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. That probably means he didn’t think of himself all that highly. He was looking around at the level of recognition he was getting and thinking, “I don’t deserve this.” That’s impostor syndrome, and it drove him to keep pushing, keep questioning, keep innovating.

Maya Angelou once said, “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.'” Eleven books! And she still felt like a fraud. That’s the impostor syndrome at work. And yet she kept writing, kept creating, kept producing amazing work.

How do you feel like an impostor after reaching that level of success? Well, that’s what happens when you make a living with your mind. When all that you’ve got really is your brainpower and that’s what you’re making a living on, it’s not like you can test it. You can’t — I mean, yes, there are tests, but they don’t really test creativity. It’s not like going to the gym and how much can I bench press. This is intellectual stuff, and we all have a lot of self-doubt.

Now, Tina Fey kind of nailed it. She says, “The beauty of the impostor syndrome is that you vacillate between extreme egomania 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 when you do that, you’re going to feel like a fraud. And that’s okay.

When you think about it, if you screw something up in your job, you’re waiting for the world to end. But you shouldn’t be, because Thomas Edison nailed it. Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Of course, that’s what progress is. Progress is trying over and over and over to come up with a thing, and then finally it happens for you. 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, this is sort of the 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 we’ll stick with.” And this is the innovation version of that. You know, you’re going to have a lot of self-doubt. You’re going to feel like a fraud. But that’s actually a sign that you’re pushing boundaries.

Let me talk about neurodiversity for a moment, because I think it’s really, really important. There is no such thing as “neurotypical.” And I know if you think there is, I get it — this is how science tends to function. But really rethink it a little bit. Neurodiversity is a superpower. Think about it: if everyone thought about everything the same way, 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.” Literally think different. And people who are neurodiverse literally do think different, and it’s important to look at it as another superpower.

Let’s look at some people with neurodiverse traits. Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein — there are plenty of innovators who are what psychologists would think of as neurodiverse. Nikola Tesla was thought to have OCD. He probably had a better level of focus on a lot of his tasks. ADHD is associated with hyperfocus — the ability to lock onto something and just go deep into it. These aren’t disabilities in the context of innovation. They’re different ways your brain processes information, which means that you have a more profound set of superpowers. 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.

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.” 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 that’s what we really need to focus on.

Let’s look at the impostor syndrome as a superpower, because that’s really the subject of today’s talk. When you feel like an impostor, what does that mean? What’s that a sign of? Well, it’s a sign for one that you’re pushing some boundaries. Impostors push boundaries. They don’t stay in their lane. They go into areas where they don’t have formal training, and that’s where innovation happens.

Cameron Powell, who I work with, is a great example of this. He’s a patent lawyer who is also an inventor, a writer, a filmmaker. He didn’t stay in one lane. He went from practicing patent law to inventing technology to writing books to making videos about innovation. And I guarantee you he’s felt like an impostor at various points along that journey. But that didn’t stop him. It drove him.

Now, let’s look at some famous people who didn’t let their lack of formal credentials stop them. 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. And these people are not failures by any stroke of the imagination. Richard Branson dropped out of high school. Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter — NYU dropout. Walt Disney dropped out of high school. Michael Dell dropped out of the University of Texas Austin. Henry Ford dropped out at 15 years old. Thomas Edison had him beat — he only had three months of formal schooling. His mother home-schooled him after that because his teachers said he was “too difficult.”

Now, I’m not advocating dropping out of school. Education is incredibly valuable. But what I am saying is that formal education is not a prerequisite for innovation. These people succeeded not despite their lack of credentials, but in many cases because of it. They didn’t know what they weren’t supposed to be able to do, so they just went and did it.

You know, when you think about the big inventions — regenerative braking, where instead of just burning all the energy in your momentum out in the brakes, it actually runs the motor backwards and generates electricity. That kind of big idea. Or the big idea of being able to take a 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 people for the smaller portions of that, like how do we technically handle the network handoff and how do we send packets to the correct place. But the big-picture stuff — and these are all big-picture people. The impostor is a creator because they don’t know what’s supposed to stop them. 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.

Let’s turn to maybe my favorite impostor of all time: Hedy Lamarr. Now, most people know Hedy Lamarr as one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood history. She was an actress in the golden age of Hollywood. What most people don’t know is that she was also a brilliant inventor. During World War II, she co-invented a frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system that was designed to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.

She had no formal training in engineering or communications technology. She was an actress. But she understood the problem, she understood the concept, and she worked with composer George Antheil to develop the technology. They received a patent for it. The Navy didn’t use it at the time, but the technology eventually became foundational to things we use every day — Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS. She also invented improvements in traffic signaling, in aircraft — she was sort of a modern-day Da Vinci. And yeah, no training. She was the ultimate impostor.

Another impostor: the world’s wealthiest man, adjusted for inflation — the wealthiest human to ever walk the earth — John D. Rockefeller. His formal education? Ten weeks of bookkeeping classes. That’s it. Then he went into bookkeeping for four years or so, then he went into produce and food wholesaling. So far it doesn’t sound like the guy that’s going to end up running the most enormous monopoly on energy ever conceived. He then eventually built a refinery — he got into construction, built a refinery that someone else owned — and after a few years, he decided 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.

And Jeff Bezos. Now, Bezos is interesting because he had the technical chops — he was a computer science grad from Princeton. But when he decided to start selling books online, that was considered an impossibility. Online commerce barely existed. The logistics of shipping physical products to millions of customers — nobody had done it at scale. Even Amazon was apparently surprised by their own success, because they had installed in their headquarters a bell, and every time someone submitted an order, the bell would ring. And sometime between taking an order every few hours and taking 175 million product orders a day, they turned that bell off because it just became white noise and constant ringing. 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’re going to feel like a fraud. Yeah, sometimes you’re going to wonder if you belong. But that feeling is a signal that you’re doing something right. You’re pushing into new territory. You’re challenging yourself. You’re growing.

Embrace it. Use it. Let it drive you to work harder, to learn more, to push further. The greatest innovators in history all felt like impostors at some point. The difference is they didn’t let it stop them. And neither should you. Thanks for watching Innovation Cafe, and I’ll catch you next time!