There’s no mythical person that knows everything you don’t.

Impostor syndrome can happen when we think we we’re not good enough to do a job. We think everyone around us is smarter, faster, more connected. This prevent us from moving ahead, we paralyze and decide not to do anything because it’s not worth it.

It can happen when you first try to learn something, you research what to learn and become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to know. Try to learn about Deep Learning? There’s over 15 good books you “must” read. Try to learn how to program? Too late, you’re too old, or too slow, or there’s thousands of other people that are already doing it, why try.

I’ve found the key to push through is to embrace “imperfectionism” and to cultivate joy and interest in what you do.

Imperfectionism means that your life is finite, you won’t be able to do everything you want. You won’t read all the books or know everything about a subject. Ironically, that same thought means you can learn something, maybe a book or two that you find interesting. You won’t learn everything but you can start somewhere.

Cultivating joy and interest means pulling a thread of some topic you’re curious about. Then taking a step towards it. Once you’re a few steps in, you learn more about the subject. Maybe you want to learn how to program, you build a small Tetris app, then you explore how to use CSS and HTML. Slowly you build confidence in a narrow domain. That confidence can trickle down to other areas.

I found helpful John Carmack’s commencement speech on the value of believing you can learn anything you want.

There are lots of viable paths through engineering. The path that I advocate for is knowledge in depth—for knowing things really deeply. It’s possible that I’m a little bit of a dinosaur here, and this might even be suboptimal advice to listen to. Listen, I mean, it’s true that the modern wizardry of building amazing applications by bashing together a bunch of JavaScript libraries and web services has indeed minted a lot of startup millionaires. But it does remind me of Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia, animating broomsticks with magic that he doesn’t really understand and eventually making a really big mess.

So knowing how to pull the lever of power is rewarding, but there’s a satisfaction in really understanding how they work and knowing things very deeply. There’s also a great confidence you can have when you know that you could build something from scratch, even if you choose not to. Almost everything that we work with has really great depths to explore. You can’t know everything, but you should look at this as you can know anything—anything that you turn your attention to that you choose to focus on. You can understand. Nothing is magic, and you can tear things apart if you need to to find the details.