Here’s a suggestion I just made in Substack’s Office Hours thread, in case it’s useful for anyone over here as well:
🧠 - A tip for battling imposter syndrome:
You know the oft-repeated bit of advice about "writing what you know"? It's wrong - or at least, it's highly misleading, and leads to a lot of misery and paralyzing self-doubt. What it seems to say (and pretty much everyone reads it this way) is "IF YOU'RE NOT A PROPER EXPERT, WHY ARE YOU EVEN TALKING, STEP AWAY, YOU TIMEWASTING LOUDMOUTH."
This leaves the door wide open to the kind of internal imposter syndrome that can have you staring at a flashing cursor for days - even weeks - as the fear of saying something wrong plays merry havoc with your nervous system.
So here's a better bit of advice: WRITE WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN.
There's good science on the power of doing this: psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/how-to-be-b… It will help you learn better, remember things better and be more creatively curious. But it will also protect you from imposter syndrome, because it's admitting that you may get stuff wrong as you go along. Because of course you will. You're a student!
(The trick is to be open to being corrected - which is a great way to build trust and engagement in readers, because if they see you're humble enough to be publicly corrected and own up to your mistakes, they will consider your voice a credible presence in their Inboxes.
Personal case study: I write a newsletter about the science of curiosity - and I'm not a scientist or science journalist, so sometimes I get things a bit wrong. And when I'm corrected by readers - which, to date, has always been respectfully - then I issue a mea culpa, correct the online version of the newsletter, and thank the person who was kind enough to steer me in the right direction. Every single time I do this, I get emails from readers telling me they trust me even more, and I even get a few paid signups. Every time.
The other thing about this is - it lets you invite your readers on a journey with you. A journey of learning. You're guiding them, but you're learning alongside them. That is a really compelling value proposition in a newsletter.
So: write what you want to learn, whether it's something you already know something about, or it's something you're learning from scratch. You don't need to be a world authority. No student ever is. You just need to share the excitement of learning something you're both interested in.
Try it!
