Be concrete and specific with your impostor syndrome
I sometimes have pretty bad impostor syndrome, in part because I'm often not as productive as I'd like to be.
In these situations, I often find it helpful to step back and think carefully about what, precisely, I think other people are doing successfully that I'm not.
Surprisingly often, the result is a relatively constrained list of concrete things I can work on – e.g. looking for a review article to fill a critical knowledge gap, or brainstorming for a few minutes on systems to prevent a certain failure mode. They're certainly not perfect solutions – I doubt I'll get from me to Jeff Bezos this way – but it's generally a hell of a lot more useful than generalist moping.
Ideally we could tell people "don't have impostor syndrome" and they'd stop, but I doubt that will be very effective. "Be as specific and concrete as possible about what makes you feel like an impostor" might be more tractable, while still getting you a pretty decent benefit.
[CN: Death and suffering. Crossposted from Facebook.]
As the flow of coronavirus death stories in the UK has gradually increased over the past month, I've been trying to make some positive use of the identifiable victim effect: looking at the faces, feeling how sorry I am for those people and their families, and trying to generalise that empathy to the rest of the world.
So many people are already suffering and dying because of this virus. So many more will suffer and die around the world before this is over. The burden of this disease will be vast. The burden of all the things we're doing to reduce that first burden may be vaster still.
I will never know or even vaguely imagine most of the people this crisis will touch. Most of them will be far away from me, in developing countries with fragile healthcare systems and poor reporting. Most will be old, or sick, but even among the young and healthy the number of the dead and (possibly) disabled will be large. And they won't be gentle deaths, either, especially in the absence of modern medical care; there are worse ways to die, but there are also far better ones.
To all the victims of this disaster that I will never meet: I am so, so sorry this happened to you. I am so sorry we, collectively, were too late when you needed us, that we are still so exposed to the boundless viciousness of nature.
I am planning to spend most of my time over the next few months working on things other than the current emergency, because there are other, worse, future emergencies I want to help avert. And even now, in the midst of this crisis, there are still things in the world I suspect cause even more death and suffering than the coronavirus will. But that doesn't make what's happening now any less monstrous.