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How Long Can I Fake This?
Is persistent doubt normal?
While serving as a senior staff engineer at Sun MicroSystems, a colleague entered my office and asked to talk. I offered him a chair and closed the door. I had known him for years as a skilled and accomplished engineer but he was clearly distraught.
“How can I help?” I asked.
He stared at the floor and responded. “I was just promoted to senior staff.”
“Congratulations!”
“No. I don’t deserve to be a senior staff engineer. I was just lucky a few times. Why did they promote me?”
With that I was speechless for a bit. Not only for what he had said, but for what it had stirred in me. I was lucky too. Some off-hand remark triggered a revelation that solved the problem. My whiteboard was covered in squiggles and a friend pointed out two seemingly unrelated notes that pulled the whole thing together. A dream at 2:00 in the morning clarified everything. I was lucky too. We’re all lucky. Things often just have a way of coming together and the problem-solver is often just the fortunate bystander.
Bertrand Russell, in his essay The Triumph of Stupidity, wrote
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
