I had presented to CEOs without flinching. I had walked into boardrooms with recommendations that would reshape entire business units, and I had made the case calmly, fielding objections, standing behind my work. I had run innovation workshops for hundreds of senior executives. I had been, by any reasonable professional measure, competent.
Then I started learning magic, and I felt like an absolute fraud.
Not about the magic itself — that was expected, of course I was a beginner. But I mean specifically in the spaces where magic happens: the forums, the online communities, the shops, the magic circles, the rooms where people talked about the craft with the easy fluency of people who had been doing this since childhood. I would walk into a conversation or a discussion and feel something I had not felt in professional settings in over a decade: the visceral certainty that I did not belong there. That I was pretending. That at any moment someone would notice that I had only been doing this for a year or two, that my hands were untrained, that my understanding was shallow, that I was a management consultant playing dress-up as a magician.
Amy Cuddy’s work on impostor syndrome helped me understand what was happening, and more importantly, helped me understand that it was neither unique nor permanent.
What Impostor Syndrome Actually Is
The original research on impostor syndrome — or impostor phenomenon, as the researchers Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes called it when they identified it in 1978 — was done with high-achieving women who, despite their objective accomplishments, believed their success was a result of luck or timing rather than genuine ability. They feared being “found out.” They felt like impostors wearing the mask of competence.
The concept has since expanded considerably. Cuddy’s research in social psychology and behavioral science found that impostor syndrome is nearly universal among people who are entering new domains, especially high-stakes ones where other participants appear more established. And crucially, she found that it affects high-achievers disproportionately — people who have already demonstrated genuine competence in one domain, and who therefore have a baseline expectation of themselves that the new domain immediately demolishes.
This is precisely what happens when a competent adult enters magic.
You have a self-concept built on demonstrated capability. You have earned that self-concept through years of work in your primary domain. Then you enter a new domain in which you know almost nothing, in which children who started at eight years old have twenty years on you, in which the people around you move their hands in ways that seem physically impossible while you are still struggling with the most basic techniques.
The gap between your existing self-concept and your current reality in the new domain is enormous. And your brain, very helpfully, attributes this gap not to the completely normal fact that you are a beginner but to the conclusion that you are somehow fundamentally defective. That other people would pick this up faster. That you do not have what it takes.
The Magic World’s Particular Flavor
The magic community has its own version of this, and it is worth naming directly.
There is a significant portion of the magic world that began very young — teenagers who discovered cards at fourteen, who went to magic conventions at sixteen, who had been performing seriously for five or ten years by the time they turned twenty-five. These people have a fluency and ease with the culture and the craft that is genuinely difficult to acquire later in life. They know the lore. They know who invented what. They have opinions about the rivalries between legendary figures. They use terminology casually that you have to look up.
I remember being in a conversation at an event in London — this was around the period when I was just beginning to get serious about all of this — where two people were debating the relative merits of approaches from two performers I had barely heard of, using shorthand I did not recognize, making references I could not follow. They were not being exclusionary. They were simply talking among themselves in the way people do when they share deep background in something. But I felt as if I were wearing a costume. As if someone were going to ask me something direct and I would have nothing.
What made it worse — and this is the high-achiever’s specific problem — was that in almost any other room I walked into professionally, I was one of the people with the deep background. I was one of the people using the shorthand. The reversal was jarring in a way that was hard to explain to anyone who had not experienced it.
Cuddy’s Key Finding
What Cuddy found, and what changed how I think about this, is that impostor syndrome is not correlated with actual competence. The feeling of being a fraud does not mean you are a fraud. The two are largely independent.
High-achievers — people with demonstrated track records — feel impostor syndrome at roughly comparable rates to people without those track records when they enter new domains. Which means the feeling is not evidence. It is a feeling. A very convincing, very uncomfortable feeling, but not evidence.
She also found something important about the trajectory: impostor syndrome tends to be most acute early in a new domain, when the gap between self-concept and current reality is largest, and it typically decreases as competence and contextual familiarity accumulate. Not always — there are people who remain chronically impostored even after significant achievement — but the general trend is toward resolution as experience accumulates.
The problem is that many people quit before the resolution arrives. They interpret the discomfort of impostor syndrome as evidence that they should not be here, and they leave. When what they are actually experiencing is the normal discomfort of being at the beginning of something that matters to them.
What I Actually Did
I stayed. That is the main thing.
But I also did something practical: I stopped comparing my current capability to other people’s finished capability, and I started comparing myself to myself over time. This sounds obvious, and everyone says it, and it is still harder to actually do than to describe.
The concrete version of it for me was keeping notes. Not progress logs in a formal sense, but just records of what I was working on, what was not working, what suddenly clicked. So that when I was sitting in a hotel room in Graz six months later, unable to get something right, I could look back at what I had been unable to do twelve months before that and see the actual, measurable distance traveled.
The impostor feeling is partly a failure of temporal perspective. You are comparing your current, raw, messy learning self to other people’s polished, public, representative-of-their-best selves. You are also comparing how you feel — which is uncertain and awkward and full of doubt — to how others appear — which is confident and fluid and natural. Neither comparison is fair. Both are constant.
Cuddy talks about the importance of what she calls “small wins” — deliberately recognizing and registering moments of genuine competence rather than dismissing them. The impostor’s habit is to attribute successes to luck or to an easy audience or to circumstances, and to attribute failures to inherent inadequacy. Reversing that attribution pattern — even partially — is genuinely useful.
The Useful Version
There is a version of the impostor feeling that is actually productive, and Cuddy’s research gestures at this too.
The feeling that you do not fully belong yet, that you have not earned your place, that there is a gap between where you are and where you want to be — this is only problematic if you read it as evidence of permanent incapacity. If you read it as a description of your current location on a trajectory, it is not only useful, it is accurate.
I did not belong in certain conversations about magic when I started. I had not read what they had read, done what they had done, performed what they had performed. That was simply true. The impostor syndrome told me I would never belong. The actual situation was that I had arrived recently and needed time.
I have more time in now. The feelings have changed. Not because I have become a magician in the fullest sense — I am still a consultant and entrepreneur who uses magic, still learning, still very aware of everything I do not know. But the acute fraud-feeling has diminished, because the gap between self-concept and current reality has closed somewhat, and because I have accumulated enough evidence of actual learning to make the “you are just pretending” narrative less convincing.
If you are an adult learner who felt something I described here — if you have sat in a magic shop or a convention or an online community and felt like you were wearing someone else’s name badge — I am not going to tell you it is all in your head. Some of it is real. You are a beginner, and beginners know less than the people who started earlier.
But the feeling that you are uniquely, permanently, fraudulently unable to belong? That part is the syndrome talking. And the syndrome, like most chronic discomforts, responds to evidence.
Keep accumulating evidence.