Aiming for confidence in second career, despite Impostor Syndrome

October 4, 2014 1:45 PM

I am a middle-aged person who changed careers about six years ago. I love my second career, data visualization; I have dreamed of doing this as a job for decades. I really want to excel, because I think it's a fascinating and useful field. I love to pore over the amazing, beautiful, limit-expanding work being done by others... who I then always remember are highly trained specialists, way out of my league.

I want to read and see all the cutting-edge stuff, which inspires me... and then demoralizes me, because my intermediate-level skill set seems so meager by comparison. I know it's crucial to get over myself and to keep a beginner's mind as much as possible. I'm hanging in there. But I'm afraid I will be (or already have been) left out/left behind. I have to sell myself and my expertise to potential clients, but I myself am not sold. When talking to myself and others, how can I frame the situation in a way that keeps my morale and confidence high?

I had a lot of success in my first career: I was a magazine journalist for more than 20 years. (David McCandless was a journo too; he has been one of several role models.) Once I decided to make the change, I went back to school and earned a masters degree in information science, with an emphasis on information visualization. I've read dozens of relevant books. I have no formal design training, but I think I have a pretty good eye. As mentioned above, my viz skills are now at an intermediate level, which has been sufficient for me to set up a solo shop. I read a lot and keep abreast of the latest developments in the field. I have created original visualizations that were well received (including two "staff picks" at Visual.ly), acted as a consultant for people outside the field, and executed a few paying jobs from clients. I keep doing online courses to strengthen various related skills: statistics, data cleaning, programming, tool use. And yet, faced with the freedom to define and execute big personal projects that would teach me a whole lot and improve my portfolio, I am dithering and practicing with Khan and Codecademy modules, waiting till I "feel ready" before jumping in to something scary. (Such an insidious form of procrastination!) I have some beautiful, ripe datasets just sitting there on my hard drive...

I doubt I will ever be able to do expert-level work in this field and that bothers me because I see how awesome other people's skills and visualizations already are. Sometimes looking at other people's work makes me sick with envy because they learned all this stuff so young and so well. Please help me come to terms with being a middle-aged n00b, a late starter in a fast-moving field.

tl;dr: If you have, as a middle-aged person, just joined a new field where smarter, younger people are breaking new ground, what do you tell yourself to keep your confidence up?

PS: I've had many years of therapy, including CBT. YANMT.

posted by GrammarMoses to Work & Money (9 answers total)

Do you have an actual portfolio of your best work? If not, make one. Even if it's private. When you get to feeling down and out, leaf through it.

This isn't intended as a magic solution that will solve all of your problems. But looking over your best work from time to time and remembering why it's good is one small step you can take.
posted by doctor tough love at 2:13 PM on October 4, 2014 [2 favorites]

Experience and expertise in a different field can be an advantage that others lack. Learning something new with prior knowledge of an unconnected field is how advances are made. Think about the unique skills and knowledge that you can bring to bear because of your age and experience elsewhere - things that might seem entirely irrelevant at first glance, and second...

Watch the first season of James Burke's "Connections".
History wasn't made by visionaries, it was made by people who knew one field and ended up working in another, and applied that prior experience to the new field in a way that it had not been applied before.
posted by anonymisc at 2:42 PM on October 4, 2014 [4 favorites]

Best answer: It makes sense that we want to be at the top of our field, but it's very easy to fall into a trap of seeing other people who are excelling, finding ways in which they are better than us, and then on the basis of not being perfect or the best, discounting all of our value, and somehow make all of our accomplishments, such as your Visual.ly staff picks, "not count". If this is the proposition you are holding yourself to -- if your work has to compare to that of the very best or else your entire worth as a person is destroyed -- then of course you are finding ways to avoid doing it.

The way out of this is to detach your sense of self-worth relative to other people, who have lived very different lives and may have all kinds of different struggles that you know nothing of, and measure yourself against yourself. How about this for a narrative: after twenty years as a journalist you followed your dreams. When you starting doing data viz you had a lot to learn and there were probably times when it seemed like the whole idea was pointless and you would never succeed, but you did -- you worked hard and kept developing skills, and today you are actually living your dream job and getting better at it with every project. You have paying clients; you are consulting; you are getting noticed on the internet, and all this after only six years. You are a data viz professional, and many people out there would love to say the same, but they aren't near that level yet. You may not be an expert yet, but I am sure you're getting better, and if you continue to get better with every project, then who knows how good you'll be another six years. So just focus on one project at a time and measure yourself against yourself.
posted by PercussivePaul at 3:33 PM on October 4, 2014 [10 favorites]

Best answer: Passion almost always trumps ability. I'd much rather work with someone with intermediate skills who was passionate about their work than someone who was an expert and simply called it in every day, or who was something of a prima donna. Of course, being an expert and passionate is good, but there is also plenty of room for those who are passionate intermediates.

Also, something else to keep in mind. Although it's sometimes hard to be the expert, it's more than possible to be a good support to other people who are. There can be a lot of satisfaction in this, as doing well in a profession is often a group effort. Find a profession and a group of people who feel similarly, and it's easy to see what you do as contributing to a whole that cannot be done solely by one person, no matter how good they are.

Personally, I find myself an intermediate in my profession, as well. But I work on a team of people who seriously are experts in my field, and it's a blast to work with them. I'm pretty comfortable being a right-hand person who can bring some consulting and passion to a project than the person who is a superstar. It's pretty fun to do things as a group of people towards an important purpose, if you find the right group of people. It's not as important to be an expert as it is to do good, and a team effort gets at this goal most effectively.

Also, it's amazing the number of people who are at the top of their field or experts who are sort of faking it like the rest of us. More people have impostor syndrome than you would think. Some people are just honest about it, while others fake it.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:54 PM on October 4, 2014 [3 favorites]

I know this feeling. You have to realize that SO MANY PEOPLE feel this way. Are you having this feeling because of your lack of formal training in design? I have a friend who is a illustrator/artist at a big famous company. A student asked him once, "where did you go to school?" He said, "School? Why would I want to go to school???" I'm not putting down anyone's formal training but I love him for that. Basically no one in the end cares if you were formally trained.

Maybe what you need is to let go of thinking that you need to be cutting edge all of the time and just put yourself out there. What if you did one of those challenges for yourself, like a data visualization-a-day for 30 days or something like that? Try not to be too attached to the results and how much you like or don't like it. This person did something similar and created a website a day.
posted by biscuits at 4:13 PM on October 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

I suspect you're underrating the skills you gained as a journalist. You know how to assess your audience, frame questions, and pull readers in.
posted by yarntheory at 6:51 PM on October 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is just a stage you are working through. Were these people experts six years in? No. Give yourself some time!
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 8:11 PM on October 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I've always found Ira Glass's little bit about the 'taste trap' very reassuring. Here it is in comic form.

The crux of the idea is that you get into a creative discipline because you have the taste to be able to recognise good work and want to do your own. But that good taste means you recognise and give unreasonable weight to the deficiencies in your own work. But that that hump, should you overcome it, will lead you into a cycle of consistent improvement by harnessing and directing your own drive to improve.

The trick is in recognising your own implicit bias against yourself.
posted by Happy Dave at 6:29 AM on October 5, 2014 [5 favorites]

I know that Gladwell's 10,000 hour thing is imperfect and has been partially debunked, but...I still find it helpful. When I find myself comparing myself to other people who are accomplishing more and doing more and have been in the field longer...well..I haven't put in my 10,000 hours yet. You'll get there. I tell my students the same thing when they get frustrated -- you have to put the time in to get there.
posted by eleanna at 11:39 AM on October 5, 2014 [1 favorite]