Video transcript edited for clarity 

I’m going to tell you a little story.

Someone asked me how I deal with feelings of being less than. Feelings of not being as talented as other people. Feelings of inferiority. Maybe even imposter syndrome.

And as I sit here in my house, ten years into making bath bombs by hand, I have to tell you that there are many parts of me that feel inferior right now.

In the ten years that I’ve run The Butters, there have been many people who came into this industry and became wildly successful. Some of them became millionaires. Some of them became billionaires.

Meanwhile I am still, essentially, doing manual labor with a couple administrative tasks.

Now, I don’t struggle with that a lot because I simply choose not to think about it too often. But the feeling exists.

The same thing is true when it comes to being a blogger or a media person. In fact, the feeling can actually be stronger there.

When I went to college, one of my goals was to become a journalist. Later, when I became what I call a sexual psychologist, I wanted to combine those interests. That’s how I became a sex blogger.

But during that time, especially before my skills had matured and compounded, I was living in the era of visible millennial upward mobility. The Instagram era.

Everyone seemed to be skyrocketing.

My contemporaries were getting television shows. They were being interviewed on CNN. They were writing books. They had publicists.

And I was just a guy in his house in Michigan.

Even now there are people I occasionally hate follow online who are more successful than I am at that particular thing. And sometimes it gets in my head. I start wondering why people like them more. Why they seem to be better at it.

But that leads to one of the first truths about feeling inferior.

 

Sometimes you actually are worse at something.

Nobody is perfect at everything.

For example, I am not great with social situations.

You see me sitting in my house alone a lot, and there’s a reason for that. I do play well with others, but social situations are exhausting for me. They require a huge amount of mental energy. Unless people are predictable, reliable, and operate with integrity, they drain me.

That’s not special. That’s normal.

And it’s also true that I am not always the most likeable person.

Even my own family will tell you that.

They might love me, but they do not always like me. They find me annoying. They find me to be a problem maker.

Part of that is cultural. I’m a very forward thinking person. I’m constantly thinking about long-term consequences and what comes next. Most people in the world do not operate that way. So to them I can come across as an annoying person who is always stirring things up.

But here’s an important question for you.

Did you grow up in a family that supported you? Did you have people around you who told you that you were worthwhile?

Even though my family finds me annoying, I still had a lot of support growing up. I had people who told me I could do things. They identified my talents and pointed out my strengths.

And interestingly, the things I was not complimented for as a child are the things I still struggle to develop or fully trust in myself.

Now of course you can’t blame everything on childhood forever. Eventually you grow up. You learn. You develop new skills and compensate for your deficits.

But there is often a disconnect between having skills and actually using them. Between knowing something and integrating it.

That’s where the psychological part begins.

Because yes, sometimes we truly are worse at something. You have to face that honestly.

But once you’ve done that, the next question becomes something different.

What do you need to support yourself while you build confidence?

In other words, how do you fake it until you make it?

And here’s the secret that helped me deal with feelings of inferiority.

Most adults are making it up as they go.

And when I say that, I don’t mean it in a way that makes me superior to anyone. I mean it in a very literal way.

A lot of people stopped developing in high school. A lot of people are learning things for the first time every single day. Some people exaggerate their qualifications. Some people are hungover, tired, stoned, or completely unprepared for what they are doing.

Many people don’t plan. They don’t think ahead. They don’t execute well.

There is a widespread illusion that adults are hypercompetent.

As a kid I remember thinking that idea was ridiculous. I would watch adults make obviously bad decisions and then insist that I was the one who didn’t understand because I was young.

But as I grew older I realized something. Many people really don’t know what they’re doing.

They are improvising.

That realization helped me more than almost anything else.

Another thing that helped me was noticing how certain traits change value over time.

The things that made me feel bad when I was younger often became advantages later.

Those quiet skills. The ones that made you feel separate. The ones that give you enough awareness to even ask the question “Am I inferior?”

Those skills compound.

As you get older they often become more powerful and more valuable.

If they haven’t already, they will.

Think about someone who was extremely social in their youth.

Being social has tradeoffs.

You often have to perform. You have to shape yourself to be liked.

To be liked is to be fake. To be loved is to be authentic.

Some people are comfortable trading authenticity for likability. Others are not.

And that’s fine.

We all have natural benefits and detriments.

If we already had everything we wanted, we wouldn’t bother fixing anything. The real task is simply learning what you have and working with it.

Shake what your mama gave you.

Shake what your mama and your daddy gave you, and what you built from it.

Another thing I’ve realized is that many feelings of inferiority are actually feelings of not belonging.

You feel like you’re not supposed to be there.

This is especially common for people who come from lower class backgrounds.

I did.

And one thing that helped me was that authority never had a strong psychological hold on me.

For example, I sometimes go to church because I enjoy the collective energy of singing.

One day after choir practice I left something in the robe room and the door was locked. The first person I saw was the pastor, so I asked him if he had the key.

He laughed and said something like, “You’re a brave man for asking a pastor that.”

And I remember thinking, why am I brave?

Isn’t this your building? Don’t you have the keys?

If someone left something locked in my garage, wouldn’t they come ask me?

Perhaps that’s just my autistic brain working, but I’ve never felt that intimidated by authority.

What I need instead is to feel like I belong in the room and to understand the language people are speaking.

Right now I’m learning the language of business at a higher level. Not because I want to become a corporate person, but because I have to interact with those systems.

For the last five years my business has been stable. We’ve made money consistently. Growth has been steady.

But stability has tradeoffs.

On the back end it means I personally make less money than I could if I pursued certain opportunities more aggressively.

And part of the reason I didn’t pursue those opportunities earlier was a belief that people didn’t want to see me.

That I wasn’t entertaining enough.

That people didn’t like me.

So I stayed in my house.

Some of that was the pandemic. Some of that was diagnosed mental health issues. But I know myself well enough to know that part of it was simply feeling like I didn’t belong.

And you probably know what’s holding you back too.

Maybe you grew up being rejected by family. Maybe you struggle to see yourself the way others see you.

Maybe you simply assume everyone else knows what they’re doing.

But once you honestly examine your deficits, you may realize something.

You’re actually quite talented.

You’re just different.

You might be worse than other people in some ways. Everyone is. But everyone also has advantages.

For example, I know I’m not the most socially skilled person.

But I also know I’m funny. And when I’m in a good mental space, I have a way of making people feel comfortable around me.

Do I understand exactly what that quality is?

No.

Do I need to?

No.

That’s not my problem.

Just like I don’t need to know what the back of my head looks like. I can’t see it, so it’s not my business.

The same thing is true for how other people perceive you.

What matters is whether you are where you want to be and whether you feel comfortable being there.

Because when people talk about feelings of inferiority, what they are usually describing is something much deeper.

They feel like they don’t belong.

But the truth is this.

You may not actually be worse than everyone else.

You may simply be worse at pretending.

And once you realize that most adults are improvising their way through life, those feelings of inferiority start to lose their power.

Because the people you’re comparing yourself to aren’t perfect.

They’re just performing confidence a little better than you are.