Imposter Syndrome  | Mike Cannon-Brookes | TEDxSydney

[Music] [Applause] so I've experienced a lot of success in my life over a decade ago I started a business with my mate straight out of uni with my mate Scott now having no prior business experience and not really any grand plan in fact our goals when we started were not to have to get a real job and to not have to wear a suit to work every day check and check today we have thousands of amazing employees and millions of people use our software around the planet and technically even outside the planet if you count those that are currently on their way to Mars so you'd think that I know what I'm doing every day when I go to work well let me let you in on something most days I still feel like I often don't know what I'm doing I felt that way for 15 years and I've since learned that that feeling is called imposter syndrome have you ever felt out of your depth like a fraud and just kind of guessed slash bullshitted your way through the situation petrified that at any time someone was going to call you on it well I can think of many examples where I felt like this interviewing our first HR manager having never worked in a company that had an HR department terrified as I walked into the interview thinking what am I going to ask this person or attending board meetings in a t-shirt surrounded by suits and acronyms are flying around feeling like a five-year-old as I surreptitiously write them down in my notebook so I can look them up on Wikipedia when I get home light up or in the early days when people would call up and ask for accounts payable I would freeze and think wait are they asking for money or giving it to us and I would I would cover the phone cover the mouthpiece of the phone hey Scott you're in accounts and pass it across we both did a lot of jobs back then so for me imposter syndrome is a feeling of being well well out of your depth yet already entrenched in the situation internally you know you're not skilled enough experienced enough or qualified enough to justify being there yet you are there and you have to figure a way out because you can't just get out it's not a fear of failure and it's not a fear of being unable to do it it's more a sensation of getting away with something a fear of being discovered that that at anytime someone is going to is going to figure this out and if they did figure it out you'd honestly think well that that's fair enough actually the writer one of my favorite writers Neil Gaiman put it so beautifully in a commencement address he gave at a university called make good art and I want to make sure I get is quite correct I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door and a man with a clipboard would be there to tell me that it was all over but they caught up with me and that I would now have to go and get a real job now when there's a knock of my door I still feel like some sort of dark suited clipboard man is going to be there to tell me that my time is kind of up and being a crap cook I'm quite relieved when it's just someone with a pizza for the kids but it's important to note that it's not all bad there's a lot of goodness I think in those feelings and this isn't some sort of a kind of motivational poster type talk a beginning now where it's more of an introspection to my own experiences of impostor syndrome and how I've tried to learn to harness them and turn them into some sort of a force for good and a great example of those experiences is in the early days of Atlassian's history we're about four years old and we had about 70 employees and at the advice of our auditors the most good stories start with advice from an auditor we we entered the New South Wales Entrepreneur of the Year competition now we were surprised when we won the New South Wales Entrepreneur of the Year in the young category for entrepreneurs under 40 there were eight categories and so surprised in fact having looked at the list of people we were up against I didn't even turn up to the award ceremony so Scott collected the gong by himself and then we traveled off to the national awards I thought I should probably turn up to those so we rented some suits I invited a girl that I had just met we'll get to her in a second and off we went to the big black-tie gala now our surprise turned to shock in the first award of the night the young category when we beat all of the other states and won the Australian Young Entrepreneur of the Year and when the shock went off we got a lot of champagne to the table and the party began and the night was surely over we were having a royally great time so fast forward to the last award of the night and our shock turned into everybody's shock when we won the Australian Entrepreneur of the year against all of the other categories now so shocked was everybody else in fact that the announcer the CEO of Ernst & Young opened the envelope and the first words out of his mouth were oh my god and then he reset himself and announced that we had won so we knew we were in way too deep and from there the water got a lot deeper because we jetted off to Monte Carlo to represent Australia in the world entrepreneur of the year against 40 other different countries now in another rented suit I was at one of the dinners and sitting next to a lovely man called bill nero de azevedo who was the winner from portugal total champion at 65 he had been running his business for 40 years he had 30,000 employees don't forget at the time we had 70 and he had four billion euro in turnover and after a couple of wines I remember admitting to him that I felt that we did not deserve to be there that we were well out of our depth and at some times someone was going to figure this out and send us home to Australia and here I remember just paused and looked at me and said that he felt exactly the same way and that he suspected all the winners were feeling that way and that despite not knowing Scot awry or really anything about technology he said that we were obviously doing something right and should probably just keep going now this is a pretty big light bulb moment for me for two reasons one I realized that other people felt this as well and two I realize it doesn't go away with any form of success I had assumed that successful people didn't feel like frauds and I now know that the opposite is more likely to be true and this isn't just a feeling that I have at work it happens in my personal life too in the early days I was flying back and forth to San Francisco every week for Atlassian and I racked up a lot of frequent flyer points and got access to the Qantas business lounge now if there's ever a place that I don't belong it doesn't help when I walk in and they generally look at me in shorts and jeans and say or jeans and a t-shirt and say can I help you son and you are you lost but anyway sometimes life happens in the Qantas lounge when you least expect it one morning over a decade ago I was sitting there on my regular weekly commute and a beautiful woman from way out of my league walked into the Qantas lounge and continued walking straight up to me in a case of mistaken identity she thought I was someone else so in this case I actually was an impostor but rather than freeze as I would have historically done instead or chivalrously maybe inform her of her error I just tried to keep the conversation going and classic Australian became some sort of forward movement and a phone number and I took that girl to the awards ceremony earlier a couple of months later and more than a decade later I'm incredibly happy that she is now my wife and we have four amazing children together but you'd think that when I wake up every morning I wouldn't roll over and look at her and think she's going to say who are you and who gave you that side of the bed get out of here but she doesn't and I think she sometimes feels the same way and apparently that's one of the reasons that will likely have a successful marriage you see in researching this talk I learned that one of the attributes of the most successful relationships is when both partners feel out of their league they feel that their partner is out of their league they feel like imposters and if they don't freeze and they're thankful and they work harder and they stretch to be the best partner they can it's likely to be a very successful relationship so if you have this feeling don't freeze try to keep the conversation going even if she thinks that you're somebody that you're not now feeling like or people thinking I'm someone I'm not actually happens quite frequently a great example for my more recent past a few months ago I was up late at night with one of my kids and I saw something on Twitter about Tesla saying that they could solve South Australia's rowling series of tower crises with one of their large industrial batteries now without thinking I fight off a bunch of tweets challenging them and saying were they really serious about this and in doing so I managed to kick it kind of a very small rock off a very big hill that turned into an avalanche that I found myself tumbling in the middle of because you see a few hours later Elon tweeted me back and said that they were deadly serious that within a hundred days of contract signing they could install a hundred megawatt hour facility which is a giant battery on a world class size one of the biggest ever made in the planet and that's written all hell really broke loose within 24 hours I had every major media outlet texting and e-mailing and trying to get in contact with me to get opinion as some sort of expert in energy now at the time I couldn't really have told you the difference between a one-and-a-half volt double-a battery that goes in my kids toys and a hundred megawatt hour industrial-scale battery facility that goes in South Australia that could potentially solve their power crisis so I was now feeling a chronic case of impostor syndrome and it got truly bizarre and I remember thinking to myself kind of started something here and I can't really get out if I if I have been in the situation I'm gonna sort of setback renewables in Australia and maybe just look like a complete idiot because of my like idiocy on Twitter so I thought the only thing I could do was to try not to freeze and to try to loan so I spent a week trying to learn everything I could about industrial-scale batteries and the electricity grid and renewables and the economics of all this and whether this was even a feasible proposal I talked to the chief scientist the truck to the CSIRO at multiple ministers and premiers trying to give me their side of the story from both sides of the aisle managed exchanged tweets with the Prime Minister even managed to pull off a passing impression let's say of an energy expert on ABC Lateline but as a result of all this South Australia did put out a battery tender and they had more than 90 applications for that battery tender and the national conversation of a period of a few months moved from this sort of theatrical lumps of coal in the parliament to discussing kind of which industrial scale battery chemistry was the best for building large-scale renewable batteries so I think that the important lesson is by that time in my life I knew well that I wasn't impostor I knew I was miles out of my depth but instead of freezing I tried to learn as much as I could motivated by my fear of generally looking like an idiot and tried to turn that into some sort of a force for good so one of the things I've learned is that people think that successful people don't feel like frauds but I think especially knowing a lot of entrepreneurs the opposite is more likely to be true but the most successful people I know don't question themselves but they do heavily question regularly question their ideas and their knowledge right they know when they're when the water is way too deep and they're not afraid to ask for advice they don't see that as a bad thing and they use that advice to hone those ideas to improve them and to learn and it's okay to be out of your depth sometimes I'm frequently out of my depth it's okay to be out of your depth it's okay to be in a situation where you just can't push the eject button so long as you don't freeze so long as you harness the situation don't be paralyzed and try to turn it into some sort of a force for good and it's important that I say harness here because this isn't sort of pop psychology BS about conquering imposter syndrome for me it's merely about being aware of it in fact I'm extremely aware of feeling like an imposter right now as I'm up here some sort of pseudo expert on a feeling that I couldn't even put a name to a few months ago when I agreed to do this talk which if you think about it is kind of the point isn't it thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 213,400

Rating: 4.9539499 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Australia, Business, Psychology

Id: zNBmHXS3A6I

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SpirOhNoLactone]

Billionaire speaker in video: cries in $$$

[u/AsYouWishPB]

Intern here.

Had a really good week on floors. Knew all the plans for my patients and generally felt things came together. In the beginning of the year I had a bad case of imposter syndrome and still do have those feelings. One thing I think I've done is to try to use it to identify where I can improve.

I think the feeling of being an imposter is just so common in all walks of life. Case in point the billionaire in the video. Its a feeling we should not fear but embrace as a way to drive us to be better everyday.

Curious what other people think of this video.