Impostor Syndrome and the Taste Gap
Hi everyone,
This week I’m excited to share with you a video that’s taken me the best part of the last week to script, film and edit. It’s a massive step up in quality over the last few videos!
It’s titled My 5 Year Machine Learning Journey and it’s more of a storytelling video than the technical tutorials I’ve been making thus far. I talk a lot about impostor syndrome.
I’ll leave the details of my journey to the video and explore a few ways I’ve been tackling impostor syndrome.
It’s normal to feel “behind”
Check out this post by Zack Kanter that discusses the feeling of thinking we’re “behind”. I found it a good reminder not to be too hard on ourselves. Especially (as everyone reminds you) as we’re in a pandemic.
The “taste gap”
Secondly, it’s worth remembering the “taste gap” - the gap between the content we aspire to be creating and our current ability. It’s easy to feel down about it, but I’ve found the best way to overcome it is to create content that just stretches you a little bit. And then every once in a while, challenge yourself to really push the boundaries!
For example with this channel, incremental growth is through improving the quality of explanations in the technical videos, and then the big breakthroughs are when I up the editing.
In that sense, it feels like this is the first “proper” YouTube video that’s come out of my channel, but I’m hopeful it’s just the first of many more.
As a sneak reveal (probably months in advance!), I’ll talk about this idea of just “stretching a little” each time when I make a video on my Cambridge Computer Science degree. This video is going to be another order of magnitude better, but it’s one I’m spending a lot of time to get right.
Reverse Gap
Finally, the thing I use to re-evaluate my expectations is reflecting on what my previous self would think. Would 18 year old me be happy? It flips the “I’ll be happy when” expectation, hence “reverse gap”.
It is also why I’m documenting the the progress of the channel - so I remember the emotions of just starting out!
Speaking of, we’ve crossed 200 subs!
Till next time,
Mukul