Pave Your Own Path: Lex Fridman on Impostor Syndrome, Envy and Gratitude

Lex Fridman takes several listener questions on impostor syndrome, including one from a robotics engineering student who is doing well but sees a few very bright classmates getting A-pluses in everything and wonders whether they are not smart or not hardworking enough. Fridman responds that he does not see himself as successful or bright, and that he can relate completely.

He says he definitely suffers from impostor syndrome, even if he is not sure he likes the term. The underlying problem with it, and with self-criticism and self-doubt in general, is comparison with others. Such comparison is not fundamentally productive for growth, except in small amounts as fuel.

Envy, he says, is where that comparison leads, and he has felt it as everyone does, especially when first entering a line of work. What changed his view was seeing people like Joe Rogan, whom he admires, teach the comedy world that sharing love and promoting others is better for everyone, including yourself.

Fridman says the path to happiness is being happy for others rather than envious, and that two feelings arise when he sees someone succeed. The first is simple joy: if you stop seeing life as a race, it is fun to watch someone excel at something they are passionate about. This can be harder when the person works in your area, but he says it is still beautiful to appreciate their work.

The second feeling is inspiration, the positive side of envy: the realisation that if something is possible for a human, he is human too. His biggest lesson from the podcast in the past year is that rich, powerful and brilliant people are not very different from anyone else. They have flaws, they procrastinate, and they have impostor syndrome too.

He uses the four-minute mile as an example. Seeing someone reach it should not provoke the thought that they got there first, but the realisation that if four minutes is possible, perhaps 3:50 is, and you push further.

Fridman believes success in life is finding and paving your own path rather than getting further than someone else along a path already laid, even if the newness is only in small ways. He lists academic metrics such as citations, university, faculty rank and grants, and business metrics such as profit and even social media followers, and says all of them measure position in a race.

For a long time getting A's meant success for him, until he realised in college that it was a trap given his skill level and what he wanted to create. He says school can deceive you into thinking it is important to walk someone else's path, though for many people a PhD and deep diving is exactly how they find their art.

What he wants to build is a mix of deep scientific ideas and artistry, with unusual approaches to business and ideas, which requires a nonlinear path. At that point, he says, he stopped caring about grades and cared about diving into the worlds that fascinated him and feeding that passion.

His advice for self-doubt rooted in comparison is to look for a passion irrespective of others, something new and exciting to you. He admits this can be a long and painful process and calls it the beauty and suffering of the creative process. Once you are within your passion, the only comparison that matters is how far you have come down your own road.

He describes his own passion as companionship with artificial intelligence systems and deep human-robot connections, whether in home robotics or semi-autonomous vehicles. He can visualise the world he wants to help create, and this vision pushes him down small paths off the beaten road and lets him ignore comparison metrics.

He still feels like a fraud all the time, and being called a "thought leader" or "expert" seems silly to him because the more he learns the less he feels he knows. But he describes a mix of profound humility about his place in the world and a useful ego, with a deep belief that on the path he is paving he is the best person in the world to do it. It may turn out to be nothing, he says, in which case he will be best at nothing.

He reads Stephen Crane's poem "In the Desert," about a creature eating its own bitter heart because it is his own. To Fridman it means your journey may look like failure by the world's definition but should not be one in your own eyes. As long as you can feed yourself and your family and have shelter, he says, the pursuit of the passion should outweigh money and possessions.

Fridman calls being self-critical both a superpower and a poison, something you have to balance. Self-doubt is the poison, he says, gratitude is the antidote, and the poison is still very useful for growth. He recalls Marvin Minsky saying he hated everything he had ever done and cites Tom Waits liking his town with "a little drop of poison."

After a lecture, a podcast conversation or a paper, he often feels he was inarticulate and failed to offer a clean insight, and he feels something like self-hatred. He does not think that is a problem, because it helps him do better next time. He applies that criticism in moderation to current and recent work.

Alongside it, he feels deep gratitude in every individual moment, for the water in front of him, shelter from the cold, a coffee maker, his health and the people he gets to talk to. That gratitude stays whether he is sleep-deprived, has stubbed his toe or is going through emotional difficulty. The balance of self-criticism and gratitude, he says, keeps him happy with a little fire to improve and leave his comfort zone.

In summary, he says impostor syndrome is a natural feeling that should not lead to envy. When he compares himself to others he is happy for them and uses their success as inspiration, and he uses his own self-doubt as fuel. He adds that if you are deeply grateful for each moment, burnout also becomes less likely, and that being alive to experience the moment is a beautiful gift.