In confidential conversations, managing directors and board members regularly say the same sentence to me. It comes late, usually after a pause, and it sounds roughly like this: sometimes I think I'm not actually good enough for this role.
I have now heard it so often that I no longer consider it a symptom. It is the rule.
And the people who say it don't know it about one another. Each of them takes their sentence for a personal diagnosis. For proof that something is wrong with them, while the others on the board evidently have no such thoughts.
They do. They just don't say them.
The reason is an asymmetry no one notices, because it is so complete. Of ourselves we know every thought. Of everyone else we know only the behavior. We compare our raw material with other people's finished product — and that is a comparison you can only lose.
I like the Chinese expression for what goes on in there: the mind as a chattering monkey. I picture it more as an overwhelmed sports commentator who narrates everything that comes into view without pause. He's not looking good today. What is that supposed to mean. Why is it raining, they forecast sun.
This organ has never changed its assignment. It was not built to check spreadsheets but to keep us alive — and it does that by looking for danger. Which is why, among the thoughts that make us feel something, the overwhelming share is cautionary and suspicious. That is not a defect. That is the design.
We receive this unfiltered raw stream all day long, including the sentences we would never tell anyone. Of everyone else we see only what survived a filter and was deemed fit to show. That is why a board member sits in a meeting and thinks everyone else has the certainty they lack. They don't have it. They have the same commentator; they just can't hear his.
One objection remains, and it is important: not every uncomfortable thought is noise. Sometimes the commentator is right. You really are unprepared, you really did get something wrong, the role really doesn't fit. The difference can be tested. A useful thought names something concrete and can be translated into an action. A useless one only says what kind of person you supposedly are. The first deserves thinking about. The second belongs in the trash.
Anyone who has grasped this once has an experience that is hard to describe. The commentator does not fall silent. But he moves from the center to the edge. You still hear him, and you are no longer him.
That is the actual point: we are not our thoughts. We are the one who notices them. Between a thought and the person having it there is a distance, and that distance is the whole room for maneuver there is.
For the sorting, though, you need something I cannot skip over. Anyone who wants to decide which thought takes them further and which is only noise needs a measure for it. They have to know what matters to them and who they want to be — a picture of their own best self, concrete enough to decide something when it counts. Whoever has that can throw everything that does not serve it into the mental trash and get back to work. Whoever does not can only listen.
I have never entirely settled this with myself. I have known for a long time that I am worth something and that a great deal is laid down in me — that is not an achievement, it is a basic feeling, and I am grateful for it. It does not make the commentator any quieter. He goes on saying what he has to say. I simply no longer have to believe him.
So if you occasionally think you are not good enough for your role: you are in exactly the company you find impressive. The others just aren't telling you.
The comparison that wears us down is crooked from the start. On one side is everything we think. On the other, only what someone considered fit to show.