We often hold ourselves back from our more courageous ventures by a frightened and stern question: "What if I am — in fact — an idiot?" To which kindly voices will tend to reply that naturally we are far from being any such thing: we’re clever, we work hard, we’re beautiful inside. However — if confidence is the goal — a starkly different yet far more effective route to reassurance is to be recommended. We shouldn’t focus on whether or not we’re idiots. We can take it for granted that of course we are. But the good news is: so is everyone else. We’re on a planet of eight billion idiots. Everyone we see is substantially unreasonable and daft. There go the parents, messing up another generation by failing to understand their own minds; there are the business people, creating money out of unnecessary desires; there are the school teachers, instructing people for a life they haven’t fathomed themselves; there are the scientists, helping people to live longer who haven’t even grasped how to be good right now; there are the lovers, as passionate as they are blind about what love means. To think we have any reason to be scared of our idiocy in such company! If we tried to ask someone have dinner with us and we were rejected, or tried to write a book and no one liked it or started a business and turnover was slow, we’d only be joining a line of idiots that would snake to Jupiter and back. We don’t need to suffer from impostor syndrome; there is no one properly sensible that anyone could in truth grow into. We are all just a collection of clueless over-excited primates. No one is normal; no one is sane. To bolster our strength, we should begin every day by repeating: "I have been an idiot before, I am an idiot now, and I will be an idiot again." Thereafter, we will know to be a lot less frightened of losing our dignity. We — and the other 8 billion — never deserved any of it in the first place.
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