I've had imposter syndrome on and off for the last few years, and I've mostly stopped pretending I haven't. It tends to show up right when something good happens, which is part of what makes it so disorienting. I'll close something I'd been chasing for months, or hit a milestone that took everything to reach, or watch a raise finally come together, and instead of letting myself sit in the fact that I earned it, some part of my brain immediately starts building the case for why it wasn't really me. It was good timing, or the market, or somebody on the other side of the table just not looking too closely, and the work I actually put in along with the resilience it took to stay in it somehow never makes the list.
I know this is common, especially for people who are wired to keep achieving, and knowing that helps a little but not nearly as much as you'd think it would. When you're in it, it doesn't feel like a documented psychological pattern, it feels like the plain truth about your situation. It feels like you've been getting away with something for a while and the bill is eventually going to come due, and everyone else in the room is the real deal while you've just learned how to look the part.
What's strange is that the story is almost always wrong, and some part of you knows that it's wrong, and it still manages to win the argument anyway. I can sit down and look at the actual record if I make myself do it, the years of showing up, the calls that went nowhere, the stretches where I had no real idea what I was doing and figured it out in real time, the skills I didn't have five years ago that I have now only because I built them one hard lesson at a time. None of that happened by luck, because luck doesn't compound steadily for that many years in a row. The problem is that the luck story is sticky in a way the facts never seem to be, and if I'm not paying close attention it quietly rewrites every win into something that happened to me rather than something I did.
If you've felt any version of this, then you already know it isn't only a founder thing, even though founders feel it in a specific way because so much of the identity gets wrapped up in the outcome. It's the person who gets promoted and is quietly convinced the offer was some kind of clerical error…or it's the one who hits a goal they chased for years and then feels like a fraud the moment they actually reach it…or the person interviewing for roles they don’t think they are a fit or qualified for. The people you look at and assume have no doubt at all are usually just a lot better at not showing you theirs, and I've had enough honest conversations with other founders to know that the calm and certain version of them is mostly something they put on for the room.
The thing that has helped me the most is honestly pretty simple, even if it isn't always easy to do in the moment. When the luck story shows up, I make myself actually look at the work behind whatever just happened, not in a self-congratulatory way but just honestly and plainly. I ask whether this came together because the planets happened to align, or whether it came together because I put in years of reps and stayed in something that most reasonable people would have walked away from a long time ago. Almost every single time, when I'm being honest with myself, the answer is the second one. The feeling doesn't disappear completely, but it loses a lot of its grip once you hold it up directly against what actually happened.
Over time I've also come to think that the feeling is more or less the cost of operating a little above the level where you're comfortable. The day I stop feeling any version of it is probably the same day I've stopped reaching for anything genuinely new, and when I think about it that way I'm not sure that's a trade I actually want to make. I'd rather feel like a fraud every so often and keep building toward something that matters than feel completely certain and slowly realize I went small in order to earn that certainty.
If you happen to be in it right now, the one thing I'd want to leave you with is that the good things in your life are not an accident and they are not borrowed time that someone is about to come collect. You built the skills over years, you stayed when it would have been easier to leave, and you developed your resilience the hard way, which as far as I can tell is the only way it ever actually gets developed. The luck story is just a story your brain tells you when things go well…It is not a record of what really happened.
Onward.