I’ve been reading Helen Keller’s autobiography, and have been most interested by the notes of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, at the back of the book.
In case you don’t know the story, Helen Keller was a deaf, blind and completely uneducated six-year-old, until her parents hired Anne Sullivan to teach her. This was back in the 1880’s, so there was little precedent to educating such a child.
But within three months, much to everyone’s surprise, Sullivan had taken Keller’s vocabulary from 0 to 300 words and set her on the path to becoming the first ever deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
And yet, despite her early success, Sullivan was full of self-doubt.
In the same letter in which she reported that Helen had already learned 300 words, she wrote:
If only I were better fitted for the great task! I feel every day more and more inadequate. My mind is full of ideas; but I cannot get them into working shape. You see, my mind is undisciplined, full of skips and jumps, and here and there a lot of things huddled together in dark corners. How I long to put it in order! Oh, if only there were some one to help me! I need a teacher quite as much as Helen.
I don’t know about you, but I find it reassuring to hear that super-successful people also suffer from “imposter syndrome.”
As reported in our Start Earning Online series, other famous names who have reported feeling like an imposter at times include Neil Armstrong, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lopez, Denzel Washington, and Tom Hanks.
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