I often had the feeling everybody was an expert or knew a lot more than me. That I was an imposter and had no clue about what I was doing.

Especially when starting a new job at a big company. Big companies have all the knowledge, and their processes are well thought out, you would think. But whenever I started working at such a company, I would notice that they have the same issues as everyone else. And that’s when it hit me: nobody knows what they are doing. Most companies and people are just very good at hiding their dirty laundry. And that’s fine.

When you start something new, like a new job, you probably don’t know what you need to do precisely. And that makes perfect sense, as you have never done it before. It’s new to you. And you are not alone. Not knowing also goes for the most prominent CEO or president of a country when they first start their job. The first day Barack Obama walked into office, he must have looked around and wondered with some anxiety what to do next. And that’s fine.

Most things we do daily are new. Every situation is different because circumstances change. We seem to have a tendency, however, to think that we are the only ones that experience this. We believe that we might be the wrong person for the job if we have never done it before. That’s probably the best of two possible things you can feel. Better than feeling confident at the job you have never done before. Let me explain using two effects from behavioural psychology that I often think of.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

The effect was almost called the X-factor effect because of the television show. In the show, people who are not very proficient at a skill (like singing) seem convinced that they are experts.

How come, people that are bad at something, usually don’t know? The Dunning-Kruger effect theorises that this is because they have too little knowledge of the subject to understand how little they know. They judge their skill using the incomplete level of expertise they have at their exposal. If you know little of playing guitar and can play your first chords, it seems like an easy road to playing full-fledged Spanish guitar. But only when you master a subject, you can see in beginners what they don’t know.

During the study of the Dunning-Kruger effect, students had to predict their performance on a test. Students that did the worst predicted they did very well. They did not know enough to know how little they knew. Students that did very well on the test thought that their performance was not very good compared to the other students. They used their own experience to judge others and thought that everybody had the same level of knowledge as themselves. And with their relatively high level of expertise, they were more aware of their wrong answers than the students that were not experts in the subject.