Find your Level of Incompetence
I have a picture I took in Mother in 2005. It’s of a bunch of the creatives messing about, doing some kind of ridiculous dance to camera. It’s not cool or particularly funny, just a bunch of twenty-somethings being twenty-somethings. Dave doing the robot, Lolly some kind of b-boying thing, Sam frozen in a dad dance. Thing is, each of those lovely loons have gone on to be leaders of our industry. Dave (Kolbusz) is running Orchard in New York, Sam (Walker) is ECD at Uncommon and their go to director. Lolly (Thompson) is Global CCO of M&C Saatchi. And then there’s Caroline Pay ex-CCO of Dentsu, John Cherry ECD of Atomic, Leon Wilson the founder and creative director of Destroy All Monsters and finally my work-wife Ben Middleton CCO of Modern Citizens. So now a bunch of forty somethings being forty-somethings, albeit now adorned with grand titles.
Imposter Syndrome gets far too much publicity. If you want to live a more contented creative existence, I highly recommend entirely rejecting the Imposter Phenomenon (it’s original and more apt title)and getting comfortable with a business theory that unsurprisingly gets significantly fewer LinkedIn inches; that of The Peter Principle. A concept that suggests people in hierarchical systems rise to their level of incompetence.
As you step into any career post school or university, you’ll find yourself looking up to people older than you believing they’ve got it figured all out. And then a funny thing happens. You find yourself becoming older than the teachers who taught you at school – the ones who were ‘old enough’ to have all the answers. Next, you’re older than a policeman, a pilot, a doctor even, people who NEED to know everything to look after you. And then it happens. The Prime bloody Minister of the country is younger than you. And do they all know everything? Hell, do they know anything?
To claim you have suffered fromImposter Syndrome is to claim you’re not a psychopath. There’s nothing admirable in it. If anything, it just offers up another barrier you’ve bravely overcome.What is admirable is to admit you’re constantly questioning whether you deserve the title you’ve been adorned with at all. Constantly questioning exactly what you’re ‘good’ at.
But ultimately, concerning yourself with just how good you are, is futile. It is very literally a life-long mission.You’ll go to your grave with the question tickling you all the way down to the worms. And constantly challenging yourself with the question will just pour fuel on the bugger that is the Imposter Phenomenon. Better to accept your incompetence; what you’re bad at, where your inabilities lie, what you’ll never be fully proficient in.Achieving self-actualisation won’t come about by measuring yourself against the impossible to quantify question of ‘what you can achieve? ’but rather the vastly more realistic one of ‘what you can’t’.
Back to that glorious gaggle of goons up there.‘Peter Principles’, all of them. For the one thing I can be sure they all share is a healthy questioning of whether their knowledge or core capabilities match their job titles. They’ve been promoted up into positions outside of their comfort zones and quite frankly getting away with every minute of it. But then there is another thing they share, a mantra somewhat coincidentally offered up by the double-thumb wielding cheeky-chappy geezer at the back.
We’re Not Making Parachutes
These were Danny Bush’s words to me and Ben when we were stressing in the old Mother kitchen on St John’s Street having not cracked a pitch brief. And they still provide comfort twenty years later.
If all else fails, if every other mantra or piece of advice doesn’t hit the spot, doesn’t set you at ease or give you permission to allow your shoulders to drop…then keep coming back to this undeniable fact. Because, ultimately, whatever you’re trying to crack open, chiseling away at or fine tuning it doesn’t really matter that much. Alright, alright so maybe, just maybe, your essential scribblings might, just might, set box office records, smash through the Sotheby’s record sale or become an Architectural masterpiece, but ultimately lives aren’t on the line. In our game, if we miss a metaphorical stitch or forget to include a figurative rip chord, no one’s going to fall to their death. So, relax; whatever you’re doing really isn’t that important. A fact each of those adorable plonkers up top accept, reliving them of the weight of any of their incompetence’s and freeing them to dance on however they like.
Article appeared in Creative Review
Top image: Shutterstock
