Ask Lemmy

It goes like this nowadays: "Hahah, I fooled these suckers into hiring me"

I've seen the work of others.

Success has nothing to do with being smart. All accomplishments are the product of dedication and effort, to varying degrees, in incremental steps. The starting conditions are not equal either.

"Everyone knows something. Nobody knows everything." If you focus on what you don't know, ofc you will not feel smart. But you know something, so focus on that. Even if it's not directly relevant, a lot of advances are made by taking ideas from a similar discipline and applying them to a current problem.

The good news is you don’t have Dunning-Kruger.

You seem to be suffering from imposter syndrome. Step 1 is to understand that we're all just winging it.

Are you getting the job done? Plenty of people you perceive as smarter than you are not getting the job done.

Everyone, including you (and me ofc), is dumb AF but in different ways.

I guess I can answer this, because I work in IT and that gives me the opportunity to feel smarter than people regularly. And despite also feeling like a moron regularly, the curse of competence tells me the imposter syndrome is bullshit.

Wait you guys are having success?

"If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."

Be curious, not comfortable. Never stop learning from those who are smarter than you.

"Success" is relative. Don't believe the lie that you have to have lots of money and stuff to be successful.

Also, I've heard it said, "if you find yourself in a room where you're the smartest person, you're in the wrong room."

I've been very fortunate, at times, to work with people who were incredibly good at their jobs or just wise people in general. I don't think any of those people saw themselves as anything special. They just knew something I didn't and were happy to share. I learned a lot from them. But I have so much more to learn. I'm ok with that. It keeps things interesting.

Why would someone "less smart" not deserve success?

Get out of your stem bubble (Lemmy being one), do some local sport or activity where there is actual social mixing. You will notice the gap between your bubble and people who barely finished highschool. For me the gap is rather having the privilege to be educated to abstraction rather than being smart (~ IQ). Being able to manage abstraction better is often why you are better paid in STEM.

preparation and luck or nepotism

Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration (I think it's like 50% luck, too, but it's not my cliche). Being smart helps, but just being present and putting in the work is the surest path to success. I say this as a relatively smart person who once thought he could coast on just being smart, you have to put in the work.

Christ look at the world around us. It's pretty clear that the most successful members of society are some of the stupidest motherfuckers alive. Successful and smart is practically completely orthogonal.

But I digress. Smart is ... overrated, particularly by smart people. You put in the work, you deserve success. Whether you get it or not is another question, but don't doubt that it's been earned.

Luck.

Your pay check is all the justification you need.

We need to get past this idea of smart being the key, Everyone is smart in their own way. I spent a good few years in stem, everyone says oh your so smart. I am not i am logical and persistent (or as i see it unfortunately obsessive).

Second your schooling likely led to this path, cognitive edu models, alongside problem solving roles amplifys the idea of smart. Reality you leaned to your strength, not everyone gets the means to do that.

Don't feel guilty for doing what you are good at and what your edu pointed you at. If you want to feel grounded again why not try giving back by teaching, mentoring, upskilling, voulenteering to local community projects or running workshops etc.

What does it mean to be smart? Even someone who scores well on an IQ test might be completely unable to be productive for more than a half hour a day.

From what I've seen, success is more about not fucking around than being smart.

luck mostly, my degree has little ( nothing?) to do with it.

born at the right time, the right color, the right country, the right sex etc.

Was it Oppenheimer who said (I paraphrase) they were less concerned with the folds in Einstein 's brain and more upset that many brains like his were forced to do drudge work all over the world.

My own career was undoubtedly determined, not by my own will but by various factors over which I have no control—primarily those mysterious glands in which Nature prepares the very essence of life, our internal secretions.

• Einstein Viereck Interview (1929)

Why do you need to justify it?

Being the smartest person in the room means you have nothing new to learn from those in the room. That sucks.

When you aren't the smartest in the room you should take the opportunity to talk with those smarter people to expand your knowledge and to do some networking. As much as I hate it socialisation works wonders in professional circles.

Hmmm you can try what the other engineers I've met do, belittle and second guess anyone who ever does work for you. Make sure they know that they are below you because they do work and you are way more important than that. Make sure you drop comments about how much money you make and tell them about your ring.

This seems to work for the folks at the nuclear plant near me. Those guys really see themselves as Big Men. Give it a shot!

In STEM specifically? STEM field in particular is somewhat known for fostering Imposter Syndromes... Most people are smart enough, I wouldn't sweat it too much

So many things factor into success besides being smart: effort, discipline, charisma, connections, and sometimes just luck. That’s not to say you aren’t smart. It could be a case of imposter syndrome, or your skills not being applied in the right way. Either way, you don’t need to “justify” success or lack of it. Just do the best with what you were given.

By believing that anyone with enough dedication can learn something, and that many of the greats (like Mozart) just had an early interest or were pressured in something so they had a headstart.

I remember someone said that you shouldn't be disappointed in yourself for learning the speaking/reading ability of a 9 year old in 4 years because it took 9 years for a 9 year old to learn the language lmao

Relentlessnes: I may not have the IQ-eyness I had before my 3rd wave of braindamage, but by being relentless, I keep improving, however sluggishly, while the entitlement-coasting people don't.

Excellence-of-studies: don't waste time studying mediochre means: study the best-of-the-best, from Simon Sinek, to Kegan & Lahey, to the best books in whatever your domain is.

It's 99% perspiration, & only 1% inspiration, except for a very few.

( there are 2 categories of "genius":

• the ones who .. no matter how they explain what they're doing, .. whatever they're doing isn't in your reality, vs
• the ones who do what you do, MUCH quicker, with more tricks & optimizations than you have

Relentlessly earning greater competence improves your standing against the quicker ones, through the years,

but it does nothing in relation to the "wizards" who just are using some dimension that you don't have, to get where they do.

In Gleick's book "Genius" about Richard Feynman, there was a situation where a normal physicist worked for 1/2y, aka 365/2 days, roughly, to earn a theory .. & he presented it.

Feynman wasn't at that lecture .. & only heard about it, but that night, he blasted through the calculus until he got it, then .. the next morning, he hunted-down & accosted the physicist who'd given that lecture, & presented him with his rendition of the work, saying "is that what you got?" .. horrified, the guy discovered that Feynman had taken the theory farther in 1/2-day than he had in 365/2 days .. you can't compete with wizards.

Mlodinow also encountered this, as is in his book about being mentored by Feynman: he & his work-partner earned, in months of work, some .. quantum-optics meaning, iirc.

He got Feynman to consider it, for 1/2h.

In that 1/2h, Feynman got enough understanding that he told them: "publish. you're not making any mistakes, & the established contradicting-your-work theory therefore is likely wrong"..

How he got THAT far, in that-little time, .. normals can't compete against that.

So, simply don't bother!!

Compete against the normal ones!

Leave the "supernatural" skill stuff to the people who've got the synaesthesia, or whatever, to do it, to them.

They're rare, & not the ones who do most of the work, in any domain, right?

All the people working on important stuff, who are grinding-through obstacles, that's important!

The best framing I ever encountered was this:

Airbus's working on a new powerplant-system.

2,000 engineers assigned to that work!!

Can you imagine anything being so hellishly-complicated that it takes THAT much engineering-force to get it to reliably, & certifiably, work??

THEY'RE ALL CONTRIBUTING!!

See?

The woman who solves how to make the turbulences in the 1st-layer of turbine-blades NOT erode the 1st-layer of stator-vanes, if that's all she accomplishes, it was important!

I once spoke with a woman who managed engineers who built an instrument that ended-up on a Viking lander, on Mars, last-century..

The engineers were prone to heading out to the bar, after tough days, to relax, with the work-gang..

.. & then they'd get talking about the problem, again, & when they'd found a new angle to be working on it, again, then they'd head back to work, instead of going home to their families!

There, too, is another "competitive-advantage", but one with high human-cost: being autistic.

You don't need to be either a "wizard" or autistic, to compete: you only need to make your-part of the work important enough for it to make good-enough difference, see? )

Don't bother being what you aren't, & recognize that sociopathy has gained ownership of much of the workplace, so "it ISN'T you" that is the problem, in many cases.

Trust that good work counts, trust that airliners exist, & trust that THE advantage that the Wright Brothers had, was simply in being systematic, methodically eradicating bugs, until they got the photographs of controlled-turning that they needed to prove their system worked.

In STEM, be systematic.

Be methodical.

Eradicate bugs.

https://www.amazon.com/Debugging-Indispensable-Software-Hardware-Problems-ebook/dp/B00PDDKQV2/ is a book which can give you the principles of being more effective in getting results in STEM.

Do well,

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