| Recorded at | June 15, 2017 |
|---|---|
| Event | TEDxSydney |
| Duration (min:sec) | 13:29 |
| Video Type | TEDx Talk |
| Words per minute | 213.65 very fast |
| Readability (FK) | 61.2 easy |
| Speaker | Mike Cannon-Brookes |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
Have you ever doubted your abilities, feared you were going to be discovered as a "fraud"? That's called "impostor syndrome," and you're definitely not alone in feeling it, says entrepreneur and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. In this funny, relatable talk, he shares how his own experiences of impostor syndrome helped pave the way to his success -- and shows how you can use it to your advantage, too.
| 1 | 00:13 | So I've experienced a lot of success in my life. | ||
| 2 | 00:17 | Over a decade ago, | ||
| 3 | 00:19 | I started a business straight out of uni with my mate, Scott. | ||
| 4 | 00:24 | Now, having no prior business experience | ||
| 5 | 00:26 | and not really any grand plan -- | ||
| 6 | 00:29 | in fact, our goals when we started were not to have to get a real job | ||
| 7 | 00:32 | (Laughter) | ||
| 8 | 00:33 | and to not have to wear a suit to work every day. | ||
| 9 | 00:36 | Check and check. | ||
| 10 | 00:37 | (Laughter) | ||
| 11 | 00:39 | Today, we have thousands of amazing employees, | ||
| 12 | 00:43 | and millions of people use our software around the planet. | ||
| 13 | 00:47 | And technically, even outside the planet, | ||
| 14 | 00:49 | if you count those that are currently on their way to Mars. | ||
| 15 | 00:52 | So you'd think that I know what I'm doing every day | ||
| 16 | 00:55 | when I go to work. | ||
| 17 | 00:57 | Well, let me let you in on something: | ||
| 18 | 00:59 | most days, I still feel like I often don't know what I'm doing. | ||
| 19 | 01:04 | I've felt that way for 15 years, | ||
| 20 | 01:07 | and I've since learned that feeling is called "impostor syndrome." | ||
| 21 | 01:13 | Have you ever felt out of your depth, | ||
| 22 | 01:15 | like a fraud, | ||
| 23 | 01:17 | and just kind of guessed/bullshitted your way through the situation -- | ||
| 24 | 01:21 | (Laughter) | ||
| 25 | 01:22 | petrified that anytime, | ||
| 26 | 01:24 | someone was going to call you on it? | ||
| 27 | 01:27 | Well, I can think of many examples where I felt like this. | ||
| 28 | 01:31 | Interviewing our first HR manager, | ||
| 29 | 01:33 | having never worked in a company that had an HR department -- | ||
| 30 | 01:36 | (Laughter) | ||
| 31 | 01:38 | terrified as I walked into the interview, | ||
| 32 | 01:41 | thinking, "What am I going to ask this person?" | ||
| 33 | 01:43 | Or attending board meetings in a T-shirt surrounded by suits, | ||
| 34 | 01:47 | and acronyms are flying around, | ||
| 35 | 01:49 | feeling like a five-year-old | ||
| 36 | 01:50 | as I surreptitiously write them down in my notebook, | ||
| 37 | 01:53 | so I can look them up on Wikipedia when I get home later. | ||
| 38 | 01:56 | (Laughter) | ||
| 39 | 01:57 | Or, in the early days, | ||
| 40 | 01:58 | when people would call up and ask for accounts payable, | ||
| 41 | 02:01 | I would freeze and think, "Wait, are they asking for money | ||
| 42 | 02:05 | or giving it to us?" | ||
| 43 | 02:06 | (Laughter) | ||
| 44 | 02:09 | And I would cover the phone, | ||
| 45 | 02:12 | cover the mouthpiece of the phone, | ||
| 46 | 02:14 | and say, "Scott, you're in accounts," | ||
| 47 | 02:16 | and pass it across. | ||
| 48 | 02:17 | (Laughter) | ||
| 49 | 02:18 | We both did a lot of jobs back then. | ||
| 50 | 02:21 | So for me, impostor syndrome is a feeling of being well, well out of your depth, | ||
| 51 | 02:26 | yet already entrenched in the situation. | ||
| 52 | 02:29 | Internally, you know you're not skilled enough, experienced enough | ||
| 53 | 02:32 | or qualified enough to justify being there, | ||
| 54 | 02:35 | yet you are there, | ||
| 55 | 02:37 | and you have to figure a way out, | ||
| 56 | 02:39 | because you can't just get out. | ||
| 57 | 02:41 | It's not a fear of failure, | ||
| 58 | 02:43 | and it's not a fear of being unable to do it. | ||
| 59 | 02:47 | It's more a sensation of getting away with something, | ||
| 60 | 02:50 | a fear of being discovered, | ||
| 61 | 02:52 | that at any time, someone is going to figure this out. | ||
| 62 | 02:55 | And if they did figure it out, | ||
| 63 | 02:57 | you'd honestly think, "Well, that's fair enough, actually." | ||
| 64 | 03:00 | (Laughter) | ||
| 65 | 03:01 | One of my favorite writers, Neil Gaiman, put it so beautifully | ||
| 66 | 03:05 | in a commencement address he gave at a university, called "Make Good Art." | ||
| 67 | 03:09 | I want to make sure I get his quote correct. | ||
| 68 | 03:12 | "I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, | ||
| 69 | 03:16 | and a man with a clipboard would be there to tell me that it was all over, | ||
| 70 | 03:20 | that they'd caught up with me, | ||
| 71 | 03:22 | and that I would now have to go and get a real job." | ||
| 72 | 03:26 | Now, when there's a knock on my door, | ||
| 73 | 03:29 | I still feel like some sort of dark-suited clipboard man is going to be there | ||
| 74 | 03:33 | to tell me that my time is kind of up. | ||
| 75 | 03:36 | And being a crap cook, | ||
| 76 | 03:37 | I'm quite relieved when it's just someone with a pizza for the kids. | ||
| 77 | 03:40 | (Laughter) | ||
| 78 | 03:42 | But it's important to note that it's not all bad. | ||
| 79 | 03:45 | There's a lot of goodness, I think, in those feelings. | ||
| 80 | 03:47 | And this isn't some sort of motivational-poster type talk, | ||
| 81 | 03:53 | a "Begin it now." | ||
| 82 | 03:56 | It's more of an introspection into my own experiences of impostor syndrome, | ||
| 83 | 04:00 | and how I've tried to learn to harness them | ||
| 84 | 04:03 | and turn them into some sort of a force for good. | ||
| 85 | 04:05 | And a great example of those experiences | ||
| 86 | 04:07 | is in the early days of Atlassian's history. | ||
| 87 | 04:09 | We were about four years old, and we had about 70 employees. | ||
| 88 | 04:14 | And at the advice of our auditors -- | ||
| 89 | 04:16 | most good stories start with advice from an auditor -- | ||
| 90 | 04:19 | (Laughter) | ||
| 91 | 04:20 | we entered the New South Wales Entrepreneur of the Year competition. | ||
| 92 | 04:24 | Now, we were surprised when we won | ||
| 93 | 04:26 | the New South Wales Entrepreneur of the Year | ||
| 94 | 04:28 | in the young category for entrepreneurs under 40. | ||
| 95 | 04:31 | There were eight categories. | ||
| 96 | 04:32 | And so surprised, in fact, | ||
| 97 | 04:34 | having looked at the list of people we were up against, | ||
| 98 | 04:37 | I didn't even turn up to the awards ceremony. | ||
| 99 | 04:39 | So Scott collected the gong by himself. | ||
| 100 | 04:42 | And then we traveled off to the national awards. | ||
| 101 | 04:46 | I thought I should probably turn up to those. | ||
| 102 | 04:48 | So we rented some suits, | ||
| 103 | 04:50 | I invited a girl that I had just met -- | ||
| 104 | 04:52 | we'll get to her in a second -- | ||
| 105 | 04:54 | (Laughter) | ||
| 106 | 04:55 | and off we went to the big black-tie gala. | ||
| 107 | 04:58 | Now, our surprise turned to shock | ||
| 108 | 05:01 | in the first award of the night, the young category, | ||
| 109 | 05:03 | when we beat all of the other states | ||
| 110 | 05:05 | and won the Australian Young Entrepreneur of the Year. | ||
| 111 | 05:07 | When the shock had worn off, | ||
| 112 | 05:09 | we got a lot of champagne to the table and the party began, | ||
| 113 | 05:12 | and the night was surely over. | ||
| 114 | 05:13 | We were having a royally great time. | ||
| 115 | 05:15 | Fast-forward to the last award of the night, | ||
| 116 | 05:18 | and our shock turned into everybody's shock | ||
| 117 | 05:20 | when we won the Australian Entrepreneur of the Year | ||
| 118 | 05:23 | against all of the other categories. | ||
| 119 | 05:25 | Now, so shocked was everybody else, in fact, | ||
| 120 | 05:27 | that the announcer, the CEO of Ernst and Young, | ||
| 121 | 05:29 | opened the envelope, | ||
| 122 | 05:30 | and the first words out of his mouth were, "Oh my God." | ||
| 123 | 05:33 | (Laughter) | ||
| 124 | 05:34 | And then he reset himself and announced that we had won. | ||
| 125 | 05:37 | (Laughter) | ||
| 126 | 05:38 | So we knew we were in way too deep. | ||
| 127 | 05:41 | And from there, the water got a lot deeper, | ||
| 128 | 05:43 | because we jetted off to Monte Carlo | ||
| 129 | 05:45 | to represent Australia in the World Entrepreneur of the Year | ||
| 130 | 05:48 | against 40 other different countries. | ||
| 131 | 05:51 | Now, in another rented suit, I was at one of the dinners | ||
| 132 | 05:55 | and sitting next to a lovely man called Belmiro de Azevedo, | ||
| 133 | 05:59 | who was the winner from Portugal. | ||
| 134 | 06:01 | Total champion. | ||
| 135 | 06:02 | At 65, he had been running his business for 40 years. | ||
| 136 | 06:06 | He had 30,000 employees. | ||
| 137 | 06:08 | Don't forget, at the time, we had 70. | ||
| 138 | 06:10 | And he had four billion euro in turnover. | ||
| 139 | 06:13 | And after a couple of wines, | ||
| 140 | 06:15 | I remember admitting to him that I felt that we did not deserve to be there, | ||
| 141 | 06:19 | that we were well out of our depth, | ||
| 142 | 06:21 | and at some time, someone was going to figure this out | ||
| 143 | 06:23 | and send us home to Australia. | ||
| 144 | 06:25 | And he, I remember, just paused and looked at me | ||
| 145 | 06:28 | and said that he felt exactly the same way | ||
| 146 | 06:31 | and that he suspected all the winners were feeling that way, | ||
| 147 | 06:35 | and that despite not knowing Scott or I or really anything about technology, | ||
| 148 | 06:38 | he said that we were obviously doing something right | ||
| 149 | 06:41 | and should probably just keep going. | ||
| 150 | 06:43 | (Laughter) | ||
| 151 | 06:44 | Now, this was a pretty big light bulb moment for me for two reasons. | ||
| 152 | 06:47 | One, I realized that other people felt this as well. | ||
| 153 | 06:50 | And two, I realized it doesn't go away with any form of success. | ||
| 154 | 06:54 | I had assumed that successful people didn't feel like frauds, | ||
| 155 | 06:58 | and I now know that the opposite is more likely to be true. | ||
| 156 | 07:01 | And this isn't just a feeling that I have at work. | ||
| 157 | 07:04 | It happens in my personal life, too. | ||
| 158 | 07:06 | In the early days, | ||
| 159 | 07:07 | I was flying back and forth to San Francisco every week for Atlassian, | ||
| 160 | 07:11 | and I racked up a lot of frequent flyer points | ||
| 161 | 07:13 | and got access to the Qantas business lounge. | ||
| 162 | 07:15 | Now, if there's ever a place that I don't belong ... | ||
| 163 | 07:17 | (Laughter) | ||
| 164 | 07:19 | It doesn't help when I walk in and they generally look at me in shorts and jeans, | ||
| 165 | 07:22 | or jeans and a T-shirt, and say, "Can I help you, son? Are you lost?" | ||
| 166 | 07:26 | But anyway, sometimes life happens in the Qantas lounge | ||
| 167 | 07:30 | when you'd least expect it. | ||
| 168 | 07:31 | One morning, over a decade ago, | ||
| 169 | 07:33 | I was sitting there on my regularly weekly commute, | ||
| 170 | 07:35 | and a beautiful woman from way out of my league | ||
| 171 | 07:38 | walked into the Qantas lounge and continued walking straight up to me | ||
| 172 | 07:43 | in a case of mistaken identity. | ||
| 173 | 07:46 | She thought I was someone else, | ||
| 174 | 07:47 | so in this case, I actually was an impostor. | ||
| 175 | 07:50 | (Laughter) | ||
| 176 | 07:52 | But rather than freeze as I would have historically done | ||
| 177 | 07:56 | or chivalrously maybe informed her of her error, | ||
| 178 | 08:00 | I just tried to keep the conversation going. | ||
| 179 | 08:02 | (Laughter) | ||
| 180 | 08:04 | And classic Australian bullshit became some sort of forward movement | ||
| 181 | 08:07 | and a phone number. | ||
| 182 | 08:08 | And I took that girl to the awards ceremony a couple of months later. | ||
| 183 | 08:15 | And more than a decade later, | ||
| 184 | 08:17 | I'm incredibly happy that she is now my wife, | ||
| 185 | 08:19 | and we have four amazing children together. | ||
| 186 | 08:21 | (Applause) | ||
| 187 | 08:27 | But you'd think that when I wake up every morning, | ||
| 188 | 08:29 | I wouldn't roll over and look at her and think, "She's going to say, | ||
| 189 | 08:33 | 'Who are you, and who gave you that side of the bed?' | ||
| 190 | 08:35 | (Laughter) | ||
| 191 | 08:36 | 'Get out of here.'" | ||
| 192 | 08:38 | But she doesn't. | ||
| 193 | 08:40 | And I think she sometimes feels the same way. | ||
| 194 | 08:43 | And apparently, that's one of the reasons | ||
| 195 | 08:45 | that we'll likely have a successful marriage. | ||
| 196 | 08:47 | You see, in researching this talk, | ||
| 197 | 08:49 | I learned that one of the attributes of the most successful relationships | ||
| 198 | 08:53 | is when both partners feel out of their league. | ||
| 199 | 08:55 | They feel that their partner is out of their league. | ||
| 200 | 08:58 | They feel like impostors. | ||
| 201 | 09:00 | And if they don't freeze, and they're thankful, | ||
| 202 | 09:02 | and they work harder and they stretch to be the best partner they can, | ||
| 203 | 09:06 | it's likely to be a very successful relationship. | ||
| 204 | 09:08 | So if you have this feeling, don't freeze. | ||
| 205 | 09:11 | Try to keep the conversation going, | ||
| 206 | 09:14 | even if she thinks that you're somebody that you're not. | ||
| 207 | 09:18 | Now, feeling like, or people thinking I'm someone I'm not | ||
| 208 | 09:21 | actually happens quite frequently. | ||
| 209 | 09:23 | A great example from my more recent past, | ||
| 210 | 09:26 | a few months ago, I was up late at night with one of my kids, | ||
| 211 | 09:29 | and I saw something on Twitter | ||
| 212 | 09:31 | about Tesla saying that they could solve | ||
| 213 | 09:33 | South Australia's rolling series of power crises | ||
| 214 | 09:36 | with one of their large industrial batteries. | ||
| 215 | 09:39 | Without thinking, I fired off a bunch of tweets, | ||
| 216 | 09:41 | challenging them and saying were they really serious about this. | ||
| 217 | 09:45 | And in doing so, I managed to kick a very small rock | ||
| 218 | 09:48 | off a very big hill | ||
| 219 | 09:50 | that turned into an avalanche that I found myself tumbling in the middle of. | ||
| 220 | 09:54 | Because you see, a few hours later, Elon tweeted me back and said | ||
| 221 | 09:57 | that they were deadly serious, | ||
| 222 | 09:58 | that within a hundred days of contract signing, | ||
| 223 | 10:01 | they could install a 100-megawatt-hour facility, | ||
| 224 | 10:03 | which is a giant battery of a world-class size, | ||
| 225 | 10:06 | one of the biggest ever made on the planet. | ||
| 226 | 10:08 | And that's when all hell really broke loose. | ||
| 227 | 10:11 | Within 24 hours, I had every major media outlet | ||
| 228 | 10:14 | texting and emailing and trying to get in contact with me | ||
| 229 | 10:16 | to get opinion as some sort of "expert" in energy. | ||
| 230 | 10:19 | (Laughter) | ||
| 231 | 10:21 | Now, at the time, I couldn't really have told you the difference | ||
| 232 | 10:26 | between a one-and-a-half-volt AA battery that goes in my kids' toys | ||
| 233 | 10:31 | and a 100-megawatt-hour industrial-scale battery facility | ||
| 234 | 10:34 | that goes in South Australia | ||
| 235 | 10:36 | that could potentially solve their power crisis. | ||
| 236 | 10:38 | I was now feeling a chronic case of impostor syndrome, | ||
| 237 | 10:41 | (Laughter) | ||
| 238 | 10:42 | and it got truly bizarre. | ||
| 239 | 10:44 | And I remember thinking to myself, | ||
| 240 | 10:47 | "Shit. I've kind of started something here and I can't really get out. | ||
| 241 | 10:51 | If I abandon the situation, | ||
| 242 | 10:54 | I'm going to sort of set back renewables in Australia | ||
| 243 | 10:57 | and maybe just look like a complete idiot | ||
| 244 | 10:59 | because of my idiocy on Twitter." | ||
| 245 | 11:02 | So I thought the only thing I could do | ||
| 246 | 11:04 | was to try not to freeze and to try to learn. | ||
| 247 | 11:06 | So I spent a week | ||
| 248 | 11:08 | trying to learn everything I could about industrial-scale batteries | ||
| 249 | 11:11 | and the electricity grid and renewables and the economics of all of this | ||
| 250 | 11:15 | and whether this was even a feasible proposal. | ||
| 251 | 11:17 | I talked to the chief scientist, I talked to the CSIRO, | ||
| 252 | 11:20 | had multiple ministers and premiers trying to give me their side of the story | ||
| 253 | 11:24 | from both sides of the aisle. | ||
| 254 | 11:26 | I managed to exchange tweets with the prime minister. | ||
| 255 | 11:29 | I even managed to pull off a passing impression, let's say, | ||
| 256 | 11:33 | of an energy expert on ABC Lateline. | ||
| 257 | 11:35 | (Laughter) | ||
| 258 | 11:37 | But as a result of all this, | ||
| 259 | 11:39 | South Australia did put out a battery tender, | ||
| 260 | 11:41 | and they had more than 90 applications for that battery tender. | ||
| 261 | 11:45 | And the national conversation over a period of a few months | ||
| 262 | 11:49 | moved from the sort of theatrical lumps of coal in the parliament | ||
| 263 | 11:52 | to discussing kind of which industrial-scale battery chemistry | ||
| 264 | 11:56 | was the best for building large-scale renewable batteries. | ||
| 265 | 11:59 | So I think that the important lesson is by that time in my life, | ||
| 266 | 12:02 | I knew well that I was an impostor. | ||
| 267 | 12:04 | I knew I was miles out of my depth. | ||
| 268 | 12:07 | But instead of freezing, I tried to learn as much as I could, | ||
| 269 | 12:10 | motivated by my fear of generally looking like an idiot, | ||
| 270 | 12:13 | and tried to turn that into some sort of a force for good. | ||
| 271 | 12:18 | So one of the things I've learned | ||
| 272 | 12:20 | is that people think successful people don't feel like frauds. | ||
| 273 | 12:25 | But I think, especially knowing a lot of entrepreneurs, | ||
| 274 | 12:28 | the opposite is more likely to be true. | ||
| 275 | 12:31 | But the most successful people I know don't question themselves, | ||
| 276 | 12:36 | but they do heavily question, regularly question, their ideas | ||
| 277 | 12:40 | and their knowledge. | ||
| 278 | 12:41 | They know when the water is way too deep, | ||
| 279 | 12:45 | and they're not afraid to ask for advice. | ||
| 280 | 12:47 | They don't see that as a bad thing. | ||
| 281 | 12:48 | And they use that advice to hone those ideas, to improve them | ||
| 282 | 12:52 | and to learn. | ||
| 283 | 12:53 | And it's OK to be out of your depth sometimes. | ||
| 284 | 12:56 | I'm frequently out of my depth. | ||
| 285 | 12:57 | It's OK to be out of your depth. | ||
| 286 | 12:59 | It's OK to be in a situation where you just can't push the eject button, | ||
| 287 | 13:03 | so long as you don't freeze, | ||
| 288 | 13:05 | so long as you harness the situation, don't be paralyzed | ||
| 289 | 13:08 | and try to turn it into some sort of a force for good. | ||
| 290 | 13:11 | And it's important that I say "harness" here, | ||
| 291 | 13:13 | because this isn't sort of pop-psychology BS | ||
| 292 | 13:16 | about conquering impostor syndrome for me. | ||
| 293 | 13:18 | It's merely about being aware of it. | ||
| 294 | 13:20 | In fact, I'm extremely aware of feeling like an impostor right now, | ||
| 295 | 13:24 | as I'm up here, some sort of pseudo-expert | ||
| 296 | 13:27 | on a feeling that I couldn't even put a name to a few months ago, | ||
| 297 | 13:30 | when I agreed to do this talk. | ||
| 298 | 13:32 | Which, if you think about it, is kind of the point, isn't it? | ||
| 299 | 13:36 | (Laughter) | ||
| 300 | 13:37 | Thank you. | ||
| 301 | 13:38 | (Applause) |