Imposter syndrome is a thinking trap. A couple of things you can do to help:
Try to separate out 'ruminating' from 'thinking'. What's the difference? For our purposes 'thinking' has a fixed outcome and an end point. Trying to solve a coding problem. Working out how to make dinner. Calculating your taxes. When you reach your goal, you're done and you stop. 'Ruminating' has no end point. There is not end or action associated with it. The tricky part is that it often masquerades as thinking, so you feel like you're solving a problem.
For example, you do a job interview and you go over and over what happened in your mind. "Maybe I should have answered this differently". "Maybe I should've prepared some more of these questions". Of course, you can't change what happened in the past. You're just rolling the ideas around in your head and probably making yourself feel worse and worse. Rumination can be focused on the past, the future or even some hypothetical, imaginary situation ("What if I lost my job", "What if my house burnt down"). Again, actual preparation (Saving an emergency fund. Getting insurance) has an action associated, but rumination never ends, it just keeps going around in your head.
The other thing is to keep an accurate record of your performance. This will be different for everyone, and varies a lot depending on the job. The key thing is to make the record as close in time to the action as possible. For example, you feel like your pull requests aren't as good as other people's. Don't wait until the end of the week and then reflect on the quality of your work. Instead, every time your make a pull request, write down an accurate, objective assessment of the quality.
People who suffer from imposter syndrome tend to forget their wins and remember their losses again and again (there's that rumination!). By having an accurate record that you made yourself you can cut through this and show to yourself your true performance.
People who do lots of work and ship lots of projects tend to have a certain level of mess in their workshops. Creation is repeated cycles of trial, play, reflection and tidying.
For anyone thinking about trying out Obsidian, here are some problems I have solved with it:
- Remembering where I met someone, what we talked about and then connecting up with them at a later date. My ability to remember names is easily 10x because of obsidian.
- Seeing who in my family's birthday is coming up soon and their address so I can send them a card.
- Graphing how far I've run for each day/week and any quick training notes.
- Showing me friend's restaurant suggestions on a map when I've got a free evening and I want to try something new.
And all of this stored locally and synced onto many devices.
If you're curious I highly recommend starting simple. Don't worry about plugins, just write a quick daily note every day about the information that is important to you. When you feel like you're outgrowing that, adopt a structure that fits you and solves your problems.
I use the Tracker plugin [1] to make charts of things like running distances etc.
For maps, I have a folder called Places and each markdown file in there is a place. I add latitude and longitude to the frontmatter and then display them on a map.
if you mean "graphs" as in "plots", you can just use matplotlib with some Markdown parser. the Templates plugin (built-in) helps maintaining cohesive structure that helps both parsing and human comprehension.
for maps, there is an Obsidian Maps plugin. recent addition, built-in as well. I personally don't use it much, but I know the kind of person who would be very happy about it!
and then there is an up-and-coming Obsidian CLI, which is in paid beta. the license is cheap, around $25 for forever access to current and future betas, but it's optional.
I have stub notes for people I've met, and link to them in the journal section of my daily note when I've met them; I can then check the backlinks on that person's note when I want to check where I've seen them before.
I make a new card in a folder called People whenever I meet someone. Then I add information like email address, phone number, connections to other people when relevant.
I find engaging like this helps my memory already on its own, but if I'm ever really stuck with a name I just take a quick look at my phone. The person is usually linked to the event where I first met them or similar.
Not the OP, but I've got a "Names to remember" evergreen note in my Reference folder. Within it, I have a few headings (e.g. neighbours, or locations), and a bullet point for each person, with context that will trigger the memory. That might sound like there's a lot of structure, but it's really the act of writing it down in the first place that helps me remember.
I use Obsidian for the same purpose as the sister comment. I have a long old note where I add the name and a minor info for new acquaintances. Mine is charavterised by the environment of acquaintance, i.e Work/Town/Rave/Hobby/Online. Rarely need to refer back once ive written down.
I like the message but I think it's worth tempering people's expectations. I spent years working with a few different voice teachers and the amount of practice and dedication you need is substantial. Even after the best part of a decade I am unable to belt.
I started using obsidian about a year ago and I have found it to be an invaluable tool.
The key is using it to solve problems you actually have, rather than problems you want to have.
I was losing track of people's contact details --> I made an addressbook in obsidian.
I wanted to track my exercise to find out how much I was running each week --> make graphs
And so on. Your obsidian should get a bit messy before you try to impose order on it. Use it to solve a problem badly (Just writing down how far I run in a daily diary note) then improve (Writing a query to turn all of those notes into a graph).
Personally I don't use any AI with my knowledge base. Good searching tools and a little bit of organization are the most useful thing for me.
Personally, I think keeping lots of notes/links is a kind of digital hoarding. Just like real hoarding, it's an emotional problem not an organizational problem. If you can work out what emotional need hoarding links is fulfilling for you then you're on the way to working out how to get that emotional need fulfilled by something else.
I think this is an underrated point. A lot of “knowledge management” is really anxiety management — saving feels like progress, and deleting feels like losing options.
One thing I’m trying to learn is whether the “fix” is actually less intake / better filters (so you don’t hoard), versus better retrieval/action tooling after the fact.
For you personally: what has helped more — changing the capture habit (rules/quotas/digests), or having a ruthless review/delete loop? And what triggers you to save in the first place (fear of forgetting, future usefulness, perfectionism, etc.)?
For someone who hasn't grown up speaking an language with tones or pitches, the process of learning them can be maddening. I applaud anyone who makes tools like this to try to make the process easier.
My experience in learning Japanese pitch accent was eye-opening. At the start, I couldn't hear any difference. On quizzes I essentially scored the same as random guessing.
The first thing that helped me a lot was noticing how there were things in my native language (English) that used pitch information. For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.
The next part was just doing lots of practice with minimal pairs. Each time I would listen and try my best to work out where the pitch changed. This took quite a lot of time. I feel like massed practice (many hours in a day) helped me more than trying to do 10 minutes regularly. Try to hear them correctly, but don't try too hard. I didn't have any luck with trying harder to 'understand' what was going on. I liken it to trying to learn to see a new color. There isn't much conscious thought.
The final piece of the puzzle was learning phrases, not individual words, that had pitch changes. For example: "yudetamago" could be boiled egg or boiled grandchildren. Somehow my brain just had a much easier time latching on to multi-word phrases instead of single words. Listening to kaki (persimmon) vs kaki (oyster) again and again seemed much harder.
Of course, your mileage may vary with these techniques. I already spoke decent Japanese when I started doing this.
> For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.
Wow… Thanks for making it clear that English also has tones! I hadn’t thought of it this way before. “Uh-huh” sounds similar to Mandarin tones 3 & 2. “Uh-oh” is similar to Cantonese tones 1 & 3.
I’m wondering if we can find good examples to teach the Mandarin tones. I think two or three syllable words are best because it illustrates the contour of the tones.
Pitch levels are important enough in English that native speakers spontaneously develop ways to write them down, even though the standard written language has no way to indicate them.
However, they operate at the level of the sentence rather than the individual word, which sets up a conflict if an English speaker wants to learn Chinese.
The most common uses of pitch in English are to annotate the grammatical structure of a sentence, making it clear which words belong together in larger phrases, and to mark yes/no questions.
English does have one clear example of lexical tone, the "I don't know" word, which is pronounced very similarly to the Mandarin pinyin éēě. (If pronounced with the mouth open. With the mouth closed, it would be more like 嗯嗯嗯 in the same 2-1-3 tone sequence.)
The positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a "photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.
Have you done any work on trying to make the opposite? Injecting English words into Japanese text to make it easier to read?
I find that students of Japanese often have enough grammar to read widely after finishing a couple of beginner textbooks, but they are completely held back by vocabulary.
I have a deep understanding of this point, a lack of vocabulary makes reading Japanese materials very difficult.
For this scenario, we will translate the Japanese text completely into English first, then inject japanese words in to the english text, the translated text with the injected Japanese words is displayed next to the original material.
This is the main feature I've been using myself, you can try it out and see if it's the feature you want.
I can second this, after finishing my intro Japanese classes I was able to parse the grammar of most sentences. Memorizing vocab was the hard part, so I used OCR on manga pages and then Yomitan to hover over and see word definitions (in English).
Cycling in Japan is really interesting. The rules say cycle on the road, following traffic rules, helmets are compulsory.
The average cyclist doesn't wear a helmet, cycles on the pavement and will probably cycle on the incorrect side of the road fairly frequently. Cyclists also routinely ignore stop signs, traffic lights and crossings. I'm over a decade in the road I have only ever seen a cyclist use a hand signal once
Part of the problem is cyclists get almost no infrastructure, while cars get multiple lanes.
It is genuinely shocking how true this is. Also, it's not a gradual thing. I used to be very nervous about public speaking. I did it a lot and one day it just stops. Very sudden, very unexpected.
The "making a sandwich" demo is definitely a classic.
Here's another I like:
Give groups of kids 10 identical looking items and a balance to compare the weights. Pre-teach how a balance works to compare the weight of items. Ask them to put the items in order from lightest to heaviest. You're basically asking them to come up with a sorting algorithm. Usually, after much experimentation, someone will come up with an algorithm that works. You can work together to try to write down the steps of the algorithm. You can also explore more mathematical ideas like transitivity when comparing different sorted sets of items.
Try to separate out 'ruminating' from 'thinking'. What's the difference? For our purposes 'thinking' has a fixed outcome and an end point. Trying to solve a coding problem. Working out how to make dinner. Calculating your taxes. When you reach your goal, you're done and you stop. 'Ruminating' has no end point. There is not end or action associated with it. The tricky part is that it often masquerades as thinking, so you feel like you're solving a problem.
For example, you do a job interview and you go over and over what happened in your mind. "Maybe I should have answered this differently". "Maybe I should've prepared some more of these questions". Of course, you can't change what happened in the past. You're just rolling the ideas around in your head and probably making yourself feel worse and worse. Rumination can be focused on the past, the future or even some hypothetical, imaginary situation ("What if I lost my job", "What if my house burnt down"). Again, actual preparation (Saving an emergency fund. Getting insurance) has an action associated, but rumination never ends, it just keeps going around in your head.
The other thing is to keep an accurate record of your performance. This will be different for everyone, and varies a lot depending on the job. The key thing is to make the record as close in time to the action as possible. For example, you feel like your pull requests aren't as good as other people's. Don't wait until the end of the week and then reflect on the quality of your work. Instead, every time your make a pull request, write down an accurate, objective assessment of the quality.
People who suffer from imposter syndrome tend to forget their wins and remember their losses again and again (there's that rumination!). By having an accurate record that you made yourself you can cut through this and show to yourself your true performance.
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