Hi @MechaShaman
Good subject I struggled with too.
From my experience as someone successful in my career, everybody suffers more or less from imposter syndrome, unless they’re actual psychopaths. I think its purpose is survival, it keeps pushing you to improve all the time. Not everyone shows it the same way, and you can’t tell what’s going on inside someone just by looking at them.
When I say everybody, I mean even the top people in your country or anywhere in the world. Like Obama said: “Once you sit with world leaders, you realise they’re just folks. They’re not smarter than you.”
Each of them does, however, have one thing that’s unique to them and helps them stand out or rise to the top: some have charisma, some have eloquence, some come from money, some are brilliant with numbers, some are great planners. If you look at top performers, they’re rarely good at everything, but they’re exceptional at one thing, each in their own way.
Look at the Epstein files
You see everyone sucking up to Epstein just to get laid. Lots of dorks and nerds who couldn’t get any on their own and had to go through a pimp. Even the Gates, Musks, and other leaders of our world, guys who are exceptional at one thing but are socially awkward. If you read the files, the e-mail, you realise how similar they are to us in their insecurities.
So you don’t need to be good at everything. You just need to identify and perfect that one thing you’re naturally good at, then use it consistently to become better than everyone else in that area.
Besides, do you know the Dunning-Kruger effect? The less you know about something, the more confident you are that you understand it. What the study really shows (and what’s not often said nowadays) is that in the original experiment, the least competent and most confident people performed worse than the more competent but less confident ones. Food for thought, right?
In my experience, there’s usually one key thing that puts someone on a real path of growth. For some it’s a stable income, for others it’s a stable relationship. You may not need everything in your life fixed at once, but if you can identify that one thing that would make a massive difference for you and work towards it, everything else starts falling into place more easily. For me it was landing my “dream job.” For some people it’s finding that right relationship, then everything just clicks. The other areas become less overwhelming, and you can slowly work on them.
About the core of what you described, all your progress vanishing when you stop therapy, subs, or a relationship, that’s very common. A big part of it comes from external attribution: you’ve been trained since childhood to give the credit for your growth and achievements to others (your father’s genes, the therapist, the sub, the woman, etc.). So your mind doesn’t fully register it as your own. Remember that even geniuses never produce genius children, Picasso and Einstein’s kids were miserable because they weren’t as talented as their fathers.
Self-development is like building a muscle, we’re basically hacking ourselves. So this is a lifelong task. Just like I’ve had thousands of women in my life (not healthy I know), so now for every new woman in my life I know exactly which steps I am going through. I wasn’t born like that, I just put in the reps. The more you repeat the new patterns on your own, the more permanent they become and the more they start to feel like they truly belong to you.
