![]() So these bastions of tech knowledge knew that they didn’t know everything, knew that no one knew everything, and by extension knew that I didn’t know everything. ![]() If you think you do, I suggest that you talk to some other people about the topic, or recognize that you might be suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. ![]() Those sages of technology had advanced far enough in their career that they learned a central truth. They didn’t think less of me for not knowing everything. The vast majority of people I met weren’t calling me an impostor. My old fear of being an impostor would rear its familiar, ugly head, and I would scamper away to my corner and lick my wounds.īut here’s the thing. Each time I gained a certain level of confidence in a topic, I would feel like someone else was calling bullshit. Same thing with networking, storage, servers, cloud, etc. I thought I knew a lot about VMware, and then I started talking to people managing thousands of VMs, and I realized I maybe knew 30% of what makes up VMware vSphere. ![]() I thought I was a pretty sharp Active Directory admin, and then I dug a little deeper and realized that I maybe knew 5% of what makes up Active Directory. Each technology I learned simply showed me how little I knew about the other technologies that radiate away from it. Getting started was easy, but gaining confidence was hard. That single incident created within me a constant fear a nagging voice in the back of my head that says, “You’re a fake and a liar, and sooner or later someone is going to call you on your bullshit.”įast forward several years, and several increasingly more awkward haircuts later, and I found myself in the tech industry. I had been found out! I was a poser, a fake, a wannabe. That very night I disposed of my poncho and the glamour I thought it had worked upon my status. That label, however accurate, stung deep. And he called me what could easily be the most damning name an aspiring cool kid could hear, “Poser.” If you’ve followed along so far, you won’t be surprised to discover that I couldn’t meet his challenge. A schoolmate who was an occasional friend - more often a nemesis - challenged me to name another Grateful Dead song. It wasn’t till the first day of school arrived that I was called on my bullshit. Claiming to be a Dead Head, and humming Touch of Grey, mostly because I didn’t know any other songs from my theoretical, favorite band. To show how cool I was, I wore that poncho unchallenged for the remainder of the summer. Therefore - my eleven-year-old brain sang with glee - purchasing the baja and wearing it make me cool. And the baja poncho bearing the emblem was also cool. That would, of course, be the Touch of Grey single that served as an introduction of The Dead to many of my peer group. My cousin explained that the dancing bear was in fact a totem of The Grateful Dead, and I vaguely recognized the name from MTV. What I could dimly sense - as a budding, rebellious teenager - was that this place was cool, and I wanted to be cool. The whole place stank of some unknown odor, which I would later be able to identify as a mélange of patchouli, sandalwood, and pot. I didn’t know what a bong was, or what all these dancing bears were about. Over the summer I had visited my first Head Shop, ushered in by my older and ostensibly wiser cousin. Before I even knew there was a term, I thought I was an impostor.
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