Moving Ahead Despite Your Head.

I'd gone about sixty of my sixty-five years without ever hearing the phrase "imposter syndrome." 

Now I hear it every day.

It's like finding the start of a pimple before a big date or an important interview. It's coming. It's getting bigger. It's the biggest, ugliest thing in the universe. And suddenly it's all you can think about.

We didn't use the phrase when I was growing up. (I'm still growing up. If you stop growing up, what's the point?) But that doesn't mean the malady wasn't with us.

That horrid feeling that you don't belong. That you're not good enough. That everybody has figured out the fraud that is you. Sometimes life feels like a crowded room full of strangers that you have to enter alone.

My generation might have called it butterflies. Or anxiety. Or a lack of confidence.

Joseph Heller in his great novel "Something Happened" captured it this way:

When I was just 35 or so, I had been made a Group Creative Director and Senior Vice President at a once-prestigious agency. We were pitching a giant German car account and I was leading the way. I was swimming in the deep-end and there were a lot of sharks about.

I bought a suit for the occasion. (People did that in those days.) I had it tailored one or two sizes too large so no one would see my knees wobble when I had to present. 

Anyway, onto the point.

The always point.

How do we deal with all the crap that's in our world, in our lives, in our heads, in our ontology and not let it hinder us? Not let it make us stuck and slow and stupid and second-guessing--all of which are ways of messing with our minds?

How do we move forward and work harder and get more done for more clients and make more money and produce more good ideas without letting our exposed nerve-endings debilitate us?

If you think for a second that because I'm old, quasi-respected and kind-of-a-brand-in-the-essentially-undifferentiated-world-of-advertising-today that all of the above chazerai doesn't affect me, you'd be as wrong as a Wheel of Fortune contestant would be on Jeopardy!

Early last week I had a 12-hour-assignment that I was doing more as a favor than as a way to pay for a new roof for the unramshackleization of our Connecticut beach house. (My new monetary unit is the American Rupee--the Rupee, as in RP for roof part. The pay for this job was two RPs, and a roof costs about 30 RPs.)

It mattered not a whit that it was so few RPs. It had my name on it and people were counting on me and what I had written was of my heart and soul, so I was nervous.

Anytime you show yourself with the scarves, veils, layers, badges and shields that gird and protect the world from seeing yourself, it is nervous-making. Ask Achilles or Patroclus. You don't enter battle with some Hephaestus-made body armor.

That's just a given.

If you're not a psychopath.

There's no way around nerves. The only thing you can do is run through them. To Nunc Fac them.

That's Latin for "do it now." Nunc fac. 

If you spend 30 minutes a day perseverating or panicking, you spend 125 hours a year in a spin. That's more than three 40-hour work weeks.

If you can abbreviate those 30 minutes of craziness and Nunc Fac them down to five, you've cut your personal arrears by 83-percent. Your aggregate panic is now one-sixth what it had been. You've gained about 100-hours, or two-and-a-half weeks, or extra work.

Of course, none of this is easy.

It takes time to learn how to Nunc Fac-erize. And backpedaling makes many appearances. But it's the difference between stepping up to the plate believing you'll strike out versus stepping up to the plate believing you can hit the ball.

If you practice pretending long enough, sooner or later you might actually do it.

You'll still have imposter-syndrome.

We all have it.

Just don't let anyone see your knees wobble.