In this letter the real reason you doubt yourself: it's good news In 1978, two professors at Oberlin published a paper that spread like wildfire. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes had spent five years studying high-achieving women, and what they discovered had a name: The Impostor Phenomenon. Citation: "The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention". Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice, 1978. What started as a single study has become a cultural...

In this letter pre-performance nerves | the T-CUP tool I used to think successful musicians didn't get nervous or feel any fear. What I learned is they feel the nerves, just like everyone else. The difference isn't that they've conquered their nerves—it's that they've learned to perform in spite of them. They've made peace with the butterflies. Here's the thing about nerves: our brains become obsessed with catastrophe. We rehearse disaster in our minds—the crack, the memory slip, the...

In this letter Ted's career lesson Are you sitting by the career pond, waiting for the perfect opportunity to bite? It's time to put down that fishing rod and pick up your bow. Hunting vs Fishing I give full credit for this game-changing insight to my coach, Julian Chender of 11A Collaborative. During one of our sessions, as I walked him through some job listings I'd been reviewing, he stopped me mid-sentence: "You realize you're fishing when you need to be hunting, right?" Cue the confused...