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People like to call each other out on Facebook and stuff like that, but more importantly for me is it's that constant view of the curated content from people. You only see the best of people's lives, and you think everybody else is happier than me. Everybody else is living this perfect life, and only I have problems. I... |
We perceive them to be at some level, and then we hold ourselves and compare ourselves to that perceived level, and not the actuality of it. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** That's the key, I think you've just nailed it right on the head there... It's the comparing yourself to everybody else, and you don't know their circumstances, what got them to where they're at, or you don't know the total level of preparation they had to put into whatever it is that you're judgi... |
I always have to remind myself that the only person I should ever be judging myself, my character, who I am too, is me from yesterday. If I'm always saying, "I need to get better than...", it's going to be better than me from yesterday, not everybody else out in the world. Their circumstances and mine are different, it... |
**Bill Kennedy:** I sometimes feel like I'm living a double life, because I work really hard to try to make sure that what I'm communicating is accurate, but I always internally have this lack of confidence, that I'm gonna say something wrong... Which is why up until really recently I haven't seen a lot of meetups reco... |
But when I get up in front of that group, I've gotta shut that off and say, "I'm up here and I've gotta pretend I'm an authority on this and I've gotta be that person" and when that's over, I go back into my panic mode, like "What did I do, what did I say? Is everything gonna be okay?" and then get the courage to do it... |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's funny you say that, because it's kind of the same thing from my perspective too, and for years I've avoided public speaking and blogging about stuff. I just wanted to work on cool stuff, I didn't want to share it out of that fear. Even the podcast... We're on episode 30 and I'm just starting t... |
People don't see that, right? They see the outward perspective, and you're analyzing everything you're doing, and every uhm and uh and nervousness and things like that, but most people don't realize, so they perceive that you're this walking ball of confidence, just walking out on stage, preaching to people and stuff l... |
\[08:19\] Although there are some people who can just do it. Brandon Philips from CoreOS... I watched him backstage, he's just working on his computer, just waiting for them to tap him on the shoulder and be like, "Alright, you're up". He just goes on stage, and everybody else is just kind of like rocking in their shoe... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Yeah, we have to sort of disassociate the knowledge that you as a presenter, that you're gonna sort of relay and how you're gonna do that, the knowledge that you have that you wanna impart, from the delivery and how smoothly or not smoothly it can go. These things should be separated, because one... |
Some people take years and years to master it, and to your point, to some people it just comes very naturally. But you have to detach those things. Your inability to deliver a great talk should not be coupled with what you know; you can't tie those things together in that way. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, I wanted to touch on that point. Before that, we've never really defined what impostor syndrome is, and I wanted to read the entry on Wikipedia. It says here it's a concept describing high-achieving individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persis... |
I think I'm a little bit like that. After I spoke a couple times, I'm like "Okay, I can do this... No big deal." But I'm not a great speaker. It takes time and experience, and you have to practice. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's a skill, like anything else. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Exactly. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, and some people practice a lot, and they are terrible. But some people just haven't had the experience and the chance of exposure, and I really wouldn't want these people to label themselves as having impostor syndrome. All that there is happening is that you just haven't been exposed to th... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** This is a nice tie-in into the whole meetup and sort of leveling up to a full conference with a larger audience. Those baby steps that you're talking about, you can take them within the context of a small audience. Your local Meetup group is a perfect place to do that, because it's a much smaller... |
That's like your training ground to be able to deliver a talk, make mistakes and get some constructive feedback and learn from those experiences, and then sort of build up to the point where you can actually submit a proposal to something like GopherCon where you're gonna have 1,500 people looking at you. |
\[11:57\] You're not gonna go 0 to 100 and expect to have the best result possible. That may happen, but to those that it happens to, those are outliers. For the vast majority of people I know who do an excellent job of delivering a talk, they practice their hearts out. They put in time and time and time again. |
Bill's on the call, he likes to say he's an impostor, but I've seen Bill deliver several talks, and he is masterful at it. He walks the room, he works the room, and that stuff doesn't come just naturally, I know he practices. |
This stuff is not gonna come easily, but there are ways to level up to that, and you are going to find there are people within the community who are willing to also help you with that. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And lightning talks are another way to do it. Some people don't realize that the level of the time that goes into creating a talk, how many months sometimes some of these talks that we see... Most people don't just turn it on; there's a lot that goes into doing that, and that dipping your toes in..... |
And this show - basically last year, for 2016 I set a goal that I wasn't gonna hide behind the curtains out of fear anymore, that I was gonna start doing things to start putting myself out there, and this show was actually one of the things I forced myself to do, because it's consistent putting yourself out there. I th... |
The interesting thing is we look at Bill speaking or things like that, but here is kind of like a fun thing to think about - Bill and I, and Brian, all worked on a book together, so this is kind of fun, because Bill will commonly make comments to people, especially in the GoTime channel about things I could teach peopl... |
**Bill Kennedy:** Yeah. Dude, I went through I think half of the month of November and December - I went through this period in my head that I didn't know enough to be teaching because of all of the new stuff that's going on around, just like Docker, Kubernetes, all the new improvements... And I sat there, I literally ... |
For me, I don't have the problem delivering the message, I'm lucky that way... But I'm constantly questioning the message, and my thoughts, my ideas and my philosophies, and "Are they good enough? Are they right?" I always feel like I'm on the opposite side of everybody else, but I think what causes me to feel like I'm... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** There's a healthy balance... In my career I've seen myself evolve in a way that I know what I don't know, and I know what I can speak confidently about. When I'm not confident about something, I'm willing to say "Well, I don't know enough about this." It's being able to have that retrospect, look... |
\[15:44\] The people who work the hardest at understanding where their gaps are, what they need to work on, what they need to study - those are the people who are continuously improving themselves, those are the people I wanna model myself after. The thing about, "Oh, it's gonna come naturally" - again, those are outli... |
**Erik St. Martin:** The interesting thing though too is there's kind of two additional factors with putting yourself out there to teach somebody something, whether that's training or giving a talk or writing a blog post - at the end of the day, you're trying the technology you have and educate people. There's two side... |
Secondly, mentoring people is a great way to learn yourself, because you do not want to teach somebody incorrectly, therefore you're going to be more careful and make sure that you fully understand the things that you're about to tell somebody. I can tell you that going into the book and coming out of the book, I know ... |
When you sit down and you start working on that, you're like "Wait..." You start questioning your own assumptions about things. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** It all sounds like work to me. I mean, if you're willing to put in the work to get better at something, whether it's a talk or whether it's writing a book, it all comes down to work. Once you've done the work, being able to tell yourself, "Okay, I am prepared. I have done the work. I can have con... |
**Bill Kennedy:** Florian made a really good point that I wanna bring up - every once in a while you've got to have somebody validate what you're doing, even if it's months later. Without some level of validation - at least I know for myself... Every once in a while, that's the pickup that I need, that somebody says "T... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think that getting validation is good and it helps gauge you, but I think it can become toxic too, because then you're constantly seeking validation to be proud of your own accomplishments, and that's not good either. You're never gonna be happy, and people see that. It happens all the time at co... |
It becomes hard, because if you're not excited and proud of your own work, it shows in your delivery. You're gonna kind of hang, waiting to get that feedback, whether you're watching the audience or not, and it's gonna show, you're not gonna deliver the powerful thing. |
That's kind of like, you know, Bill, when you get up and talk, you have this way of talking, right? That's because you just turn off your mind. You just get up there and deliver, and you don't really think about what everybody's thinking at that moment; you go home, and then think about it. |
**Bill Kennedy:** I do, but you also want to at least -- okay, maybe I'm teaching and I'm gonna give a talk at a Meetup... I want somebody to feel like they got something out of it, that there was value in the last 20 or 30 minutes of you spending time and me being there, and teaching you these things, and I'm not teac... |
\[20:06\] You absolutely shouldn't be looking for the validation, but I know for me every once in a while it's nice to get it, because I think it helps me remember why I'm doing a lot of what I'm doing, and it helps me to move forward. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So I wanna kind of talk a little bit about the sources of impostor syndrome a little bit, but I think before we do that, let's take a quick sponsor break. |
**Break:** \[20:33\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Okay, so we are back and we're talking about impostor syndrome. Before the break we were leading into validation and things like that, and I wanted to talk about some of the causes and lead into it a little bit with our perception of other people being kind of a primary cause. But I think another o... |
I think that can also play a huge role in it too, because you feel like because you don't have that computer science degree, that you're constantly looking for a way to prove that you share the same knowledge and skill set as these people you're surrounded by that have masters degrees in computer science. Does anybody ... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I constantly feel like when I'm in the company of said people who do have those advanced levels of knowledge, that the moment they start talking about the highly technical stuff and start talking about how you optimize this and start throwing terms around that I've never heard before and that I d... |
**Erik St. Martin:** If you know the answer, it's easy. If you don't, it's impossible, right? |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Right, exactly. |
**Bill Kennedy:** But different people work on different things, and Damian Gryski really helped me with this. Damian is amazing, right? He knows the algorithms, he knows a ton of things, and there are times when I sit back and I go, "God, I wish I knew half of what he knew", and at one time he literally helped me thro... |
That really helped me put in perspective what I know and where I'm at, depending on where he is and where he's at. |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[24:15\] I've seen some stuff by him where it's like, "That's it. I quit." \[laughter\] So I wanna make a quick point about that, too... I've had the opportunity to speak with some people from the Go team that work on compiler stuff and everything, and we were kind of having a similar conversation... |
The other question, leading back to the whole autodidact thing - does anybody here have a formal CS degree? |
**Bill Kennedy:** I have an undergraduate degree. |
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