Last quarter I found myself working with some incredible people. Older, disciplined, and with the skills & enthusiasm to bring their big ideas to life. They’re the kind of people you would\u00a0look at and say, “yeah, they have it together.” In other words:\u00a0you want to be in their group for a school project.<\/p>\n
And I was! How exciting.<\/p>\n
But then doubt started to settle in: I was the most junior out of the three. I had no experience. No intuition or previous exposure to the relevant subject. (Meanwhile, they both had years of research and industry experience).\u00a0Intelligence and growth are not static, but I wouldn’t be able to\u00a0match their expertise within a semester, let alone a year. This wasn’t pessimism speaking, just reality.<\/p>\n
At first it felt more comfortable to put the doubt on them.\u00a0Why did they ask me to join their group? They must have made\u00a0a mistake in asking me. \u00a0How long will it take for them to realize that?<\/em>\u00a0All those questions were a way of dodging the underlying fear:\u00a0that I would never measure up to their abilities, and that halfway through the semester,\u00a0they would find out that I’m no good and boot me out of the group.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n That never happened. They were both very sweet and encouraging, but I remember stressing a lot about that.<\/p>\n When you are working with people who are, objectively speaking, out of your league — realize\u00a0that\u00a0there is still something you can offer, even if it is just a different perspective. Get three different people from the same discipline and position in life and you will have three different people offer the same solution to the problem. That’s why you’re in the mix: to\u00a0put some fresh blood into the group.<\/p>\n Work less on judging on yourself, and work more on what you can give to the group and to other people. You’ll find that:<\/p>\n All this from a subtle change in mindset.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last quarter I found myself working with some incredible people. Older, disciplined, and with the skills & enthusiasm to bring their big ideas to life. They’re the kind of people you would\u00a0look at and say, “yeah, they have it together.” In other words:\u00a0you want to be in their group for a school project. And I … Continue reading “what happens when you’re the most clueless person in the group”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,22,28,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-misc","category-self-improvement","category-ucsd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3MSpn-r4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1678"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1847,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678\/revisions\/1847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A better way to look at it:<\/h5>\n
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