Doubt is the entry fee

The story

In 1966 James A. Davis published a study of how American college men chose their careers. You would expect the students at the best universities to aim the highest. That is not what he found. Their ambitions followed their marks, and marks are a ranking against the people sitting next to you. A capable student in a room full of brilliant ones saw himself as average and trimmed his plans to match. The quality of the college mattered less than where he stood inside it. Davis called the campus a frog pond: a frog judges its size by the other frogs in its own pond, and has no idea how it compares with the frogs in all the others.

Twelve years later Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, both at Georgia State University, wrote up what they had seen in about five years of working with more than 150 high-achieving women. These were students, academics and professionals with the degrees, the recognition and the respect of their colleagues. Privately, many of them were convinced they were not actually bright, that they had fooled everyone, and that their success came down to luck or somebody’s mistake. Clance and Imes named it the impostor phenomenon.

At first it was thought to be something that mainly affected successful women. Later studies found it in men too, and across most professions. A 2020 review pulled together 62 studies covering 14,161 people and found that anywhere between 9% and 82% of them reported it, depending on how it was measured. It is not a medical diagnosis. It is an experience, and a very common one.

Put those two findings next to each other and you get Bloom’s point. How we feel about ourselves depends on where we rank in the room, not on how good we are. So every step up resets the comparison. Your first management job, a bigger company, a seat at a board table, a new industry: on the day you arrive you are the least experienced person there. You have not become worse. The pond has become bigger. The feeling of being about to be found out turns up at exactly the moment you grow, which is why Bloom calls it the cost of entry.

Steven Pressfield makes the same observation about creative work in The War of Art: “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

Here is the part that matters for anyone who leads people. Davis’s students did not fail. They quietly aimed lower. That is the real cost inside a company. The person you have just promoted, who feels like a fraud, will not tell you. They will stop putting their hand up, avoid the stretch project and play it safe, and you will read it as a lack of ambition. Clance and Imes found that one of the things that helped most was simply getting people into a room to hear others describe the same feeling. Once it is said out loud it loses most of its grip.