Impostor Syndrome

October 08, 2013 Watch in 7 minutes 🇺🇸 USA

Ever since I attended my first Barcamp Omaha unconference last year, I wanted to give a talk. For this year, I had planned on recycling the talk I gave at Awesome Camp earlier this year but I was inspired to speak on a different topic.

Side note: Major props to Grain & Mortar for the Barcamp Omaha site. Ridiculously good. Seems like @RWD liked it too.

Running NebraskaJS has been an interesting experience for me. NebraskaJS has always made an effort to encourage new speakers to give lightning talks (and in that vein our next session will attempt to be only lightning talks from new speakers).

I’ve noticed a common thread among people jumping into the deep end of speaking at our meetup. They’d often start their talks with “I’m not the most qualified person to speak on this topic,” or “I’m sure you guys are all smarter than me.”

In response, I decided to give a talk about Impostor Syndrome. This talk is non-technical and short (only 7:01). Watch it below.

Watch on YouTube: Impostor Syndrome

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Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator/maintainer of Eleventy (11ty), an award-winning open source site generator. At one point he became entirely too fixated on web fonts. He has given 84 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Formerly part of CloudCannon, Netlify, Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and NebraskaJS. Learn more about Zach »

8 Comments

Jonas Grumann Disqus
09 Oct 2013

Commenting on this post is my first step to beat impostor syndrome. Yay! Answers from haters is what will drag me down to it. JK, awesome talk!
1. zachleat Disqus
  09 Oct 2013
  
  Thanks Jonas!
Christopher Buecheler Disqus
09 Oct 2013

Enjoyed the talk. I've been developing web pages professionally for 16 years, and assuming people knew waaay more about it than me for ... 16 years. Recently I've started posting some tutorials and the response has been amazing. Turns out I know a bunch of stuff, and there's a whole ton of people who don't know it, and want to know it, and really appreciate when people like me share their knowledge. Maybe soon I'll convince myself to do a talk!
1. zachleat Disqus
  09 Oct 2013
  
  Yeah! Do it!
Sheri Disqus
16 Oct 2013

Awesome talk! :)Someone recently called me out for impostor syndrome for using this meme in a presentation.I <3 the images in your slides—any chance you could link to some of them and/or tell me how to find more?
1. zachleat Disqus
  17 Oct 2013
  
  Wow, so reply was actually me trying to email Disqus to approve your comment.I’ve lost the URLs for a lot of the images, unfortunately. I was not the most professional slidemaker here, sorry :(
Ben Parker Disqus
21 Feb 2014

Great talk (I don't normally comment, but I'm going to participate!), I recently started a new job & am constantly thinking "I'm going to be found out". Now I'm not going to make a concerted effort to give my opinions and ask questions :-) Cheers!
Seth Lachner Disqus
11 Jul 2014

Just watched it again, Zach, after seeing it live at BarCamp. Still a great presentation and good advice.