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THE IMPOSTOR SYNDROME [A.K.A. "FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT"]: A Case
Study
Working Paper · October 2017
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28055.44963
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THE IMPOSTOR SYNDROME [A.K.A. “FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE
IT”]: A Case Study
Robert W. McGee
Fayetteville State University
WORKING PAPER
October 23, 2017
ABSTRACT
Individuals who have the impostor syndrome have an inability to internalize their
achievements, and live in fear of being exposed as a fraud. This paper provides an
overview of the syndrome and discusses a case study of an individual who has the
syndrome. Portions of this paper will appear in a forthcoming autobiography –
Robert W. McGee: The Autobiography of an Outlier.
Key Words: biography, autobiography, impostor, phenomenon, syndrome, self-esteem, high
achievers, case study, accounting, taxation, consulting
JEL Codes: D01, D87, I12, I19
INTRODUCTION1
Individuals with the Impostor Phenomenon experience intense feelings that their
achievements are undeserved and worry that they are likely to be exposed as a
fraud. (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011)
An impostor might be defined as someone who assumes a false identity with the intent of
deception. Movies such as The Great Impostor (1961, starring Tony Curtis, based on the true story
of Ferdinand Waldo Demara) and Catch Me If You Can (2002, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, based
on the real-life story of Frank Abagnale) have been made that dramatize the lives of some famous
impostors. Books have been written about such people (Abagnale, 2000; Crichton, 1959).
Pauline Rose Clance told me it’s not a “syndrome,” it’s a “phenomenon,” but others have referred to it as a
syndrome (see reference section) and I like that term better, so that’s what I am calling it. Correspondence with
Pauline Rose Clance, September 23, 2017.
1
1
One common feature of all impostors is that the individual portrayed to the general public
or some subset thereof is not the real person. The person portrayed is a mere façade. Actors assume
a false identity whenever they get on stage or in front of a camera. Spies make a career of being
someone they are not.
But actors, spies and charlatans are not the only people who assume false identities. I
suppose we all do it sometimes, whether to impress a girl/boy or a potential employer. There is
even a syndrome named after individuals who engage in such behavior – the Impostor Syndrome.
I first became aware of this syndrome after reading an article that appeared in The Guardian
(Buckland, 2017). According to Buckland, many famous and successful people such as Albert
Einstein, Jodie Foster, John Steinbeck, Maya Angelou, Neil Armstrong and Meryl Streep (Hooper,
2012; Goldhill, 2016; Buckland, 2017; Mishunov, 2017) have suffered from this syndrome, which
was first identified by psychologists in 1978 (Clance & Imes, 1978; Buckland, 2017). Pauline Rose
Clance (2017), an Atlanta psychologist, even developed a test to measure where a person fits on
the impostor scale.
The Impostor Syndrome incorporates self-doubt. Steinbeck thought he was a lousy writer.
Meryl Streep thought she couldn’t act. Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, sometimes wakes
up feeling like a fraud (Goldhill, 2016). According to some estimates, 70 percent of high achievers
have experienced it at some time (Buckland, 2017; Goodhill, 2016; Sakulku & Alexander, 2011).
Many consultants experience such self-doubt on a regular basis. There is a joke within the
consulting profession that consultants will become an expert in whatever field their client will pay
them for. They get hired first, based on convincing their future client that they know what they are
doing, then go out and learn what they need to know to perform the task they have been hired to
perform.
2
Richard Branson (2017), the founder of Virgin Airlines and many other companies, has
said that you should not pass up opportunities just because you aren’t qualified to perform the task.
Accept them, then learn what you need to learn to do the job. Many successful people use this
approach as their modus operandi. They start off being impostors and wind up being experts.
Sakulku and Alexander (2011) have summarized six characteristics first identified by
Clance and Imes (1978) that people suffering from the Impostor Syndrome possess:
1. The Impostor Cycle – confronting an achievement-related task leads to anxiety, self-doubt
and worry, which leads to over-preparation and/or procrastination, followed by
accomplishment, a feeling of relief, the discounting of positive feedback, followed by
perceived fraudulence, increased self-doubt, depression and anxiety.
2. The need to be special, to be the very best.
3. Superwoman/Superman aspects – the urge to be perfect.
4. Fear of failure.
5. Denial of competence and discounting praise.
6. Fear and guilt about success.
I have been an impostor at times, not because I wanted to, but because I had to for some
reason or other. This is my story.
THE CASE STUDY
Music
In high school and college I played in rock bands, mostly for fun, but also to earn money
to blow on hamburgers and Cokes at the local McDonald’s, and later to pay my college tuition. I
didn’t do it to “pick up chicks.” I was an extreme introvert at the time. I had a hard time even
3
approaching a girl at one of the high school dances that were held every Friday night at the local
YMCA. Going to an all-boys Catholic high school probably didn’t help, either. Besides, I soon
learned that the only person in a band who could pick up chicks was the lead singer. The rest of us
were just background noise.
The band I was in during my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college
was called The Electras. In addition to the lead singer and drummer there were four guitar players.
That was too many. Kenny was content to play bass. Joe was content to play rhythm. But Norm
and I both wanted to play lead, and there’s usually only room for one lead guitar player in a band,
so we fought it out at practice each week to see who would play lead on the newest song. In those
days (1960s), we couldn’t just go out and buy the sheet music, and even if we could, the sheet
music in those days only had the basic melody, chords and lyrics, never the guitar licks, and the
sheet music never was published until long after the song had dropped off the charts. So I had to
take my bike and pedal down to The Record Shop on State Street in Erie, Pennsylvania to purchase
the latest 45rpm record, then quickly pedal home, take out my guitar and try to figure out the notes
to the licks before Norm, who was doing basically the same thing.
At practice, we each played the licks and the band chose the winner. That happened
practically every week for about two years. Sometimes Norm would win and sometimes I would
win. It became an obsession for both of us. Then, when we didn’t have a gig, we would go to see
other bands, and often noticed that their lead guitar player played those licks better than we did.
(Usually it was The Bumblebees, which was generally considered to be the best band in Erie in the
late 1960s).
Toward the end of my freshman year in college I got booted out of the band because of an
internal dispute with John, the lead singer. From the secondhand information I received, he
4
threatened to quit the band if I didn’t get the boot, and he offered to replace me with his two Italian
cousins (John was Italian, as were many people on the west side of Erie in the 1960s). Mick, the
drummer, gave me the news over the phone. Guitar players were a dime a dozen, but good lead
singers were more difficult to replace, and John was a good lead singer. (In the interest of fair and
balanced reporting, I should mention that when John and I discussed this incident at our 50 th high
school reunion, he denied that he was the one behind my firing, and that the two guys who replaced
me were not his cousins).
The word spread that I got canned, and sometime during the first few weeks of my
sophomore year in college, I was approached by one of the college bands. Their bass player had
quit and they needed a replacement – fast. It was a Tuesday or Wednesday, as I recall, and they
had a gig that Saturday. I said yes. The problem was, I didn’t know how to play the bass guitar.
All I knew were lead and rhythm guitar, and enough keyboard to play a half dozen songs. But I
said yes anyway. I didn’t even think about saying no. The band that asked me was one of the best
bands in Erie, and they had gigs that paid a lot more than what I had earned in The Electras.
I wasn’t quite in panic mode, but I was close to it. I ran out and bought a bass guitar. I also
needed a new amplifier because the one I had was only good for guitar. I would blow out the
speakers if I tried to run a bass guitar through it. So I did what I had to do. I also bought a book on
how to play the bass guitar. Luckily, I soon learned that a bass guitar is tuned exactly the same as
the last four strings on a regular guitar (which has 6 strings), only one octave lower. Whew! What
a relief that was. I wouldn’t have to learn any chords because the bass guitar was played just one
note at a time.
The bass guitar book I bought wasn’t very helpful beyond that information. The notes for
a bass guitar were written on the bass clef, which was different from the G clef used for guitar,
5
piano and other instruments. I didn’t want to learn the bass clef and I didn’t have time to learn it
anyway. Besides, there was no sheet music to buy for the newer songs anyway. The one thing that
saved me, that got me by those early gigs, was the fact that I knew how to play a regular guitar,
and I knew some music theory, such as the fact that there are at least three notes in every chord,
and if you play any of those three notes on the bass, you wouldn’t be playing the wrong note. For
example, the C chord consists of the C, E and G notes. I knew that if I played any of those notes
when the rest of the band was playing the C chord, I would be safe. I knew the other chords for
each song, too, and what notes were included in them, so I just fumbled along, always hitting the
right notes, even though some of them might not have been the best notes, until I could learn a few
bass runs.
I never told my band mates that I didn’t know how to play the bass. I couldn’t tell them
that before I accepted the offer, and I couldn’t tell them afterwards, either. They just assumed I
could play the bass and I was able to fool them long enough to actually learn how to play it. [Out
of curiosity, I just searched the internet and found a great website –UltimateGuitar.com – that
provides the lyrics, chords and bass patterns to more than one million songs. How times have
changed.]
Was I am impostor? I suppose so. I accepted an offer for a position I was totally unqualified
to fill. I projected the façade of being qualified for the position. My guts were churning inside
because I knew I wasn’t qualified. They were churning at full speed during the first hour or so of
our first gig because I was afraid they would discover I didn’t know what I was doing. We were
on stage, in front of hundreds of people. There was nowhere to hide. After about an hour of faking
it, I calmed down considerably. I was able to always hit an appropriate note, even if it might not
be the note a more experienced bass player would have selected. I was good enough. As time
6
passed, I improved. I learned the bass runs I needed to learn for particular songs when I needed to
learn them.
MUSIC: EPISODE TWO
In addition to playing in a band, I also taught guitar to kids on Saturdays and a few week
nights. I earned $1.50 for a half hour lesson, and I didn’t get paid when students didn’t show up
(gas was 29 cents a gallon in those days, and my tuition at Gannon University was $25 per semester
hour). I taught at Osiecki Brothers Music Company, which was located at 22nd and Parade Street
at the time, on the east side of Erie (the east side was Polish in those days).
One day in early 1969, Harry Osiecki came up to me and told me that two teachers had
planned a trip to Hawaii that summer, and that they wanted to take ukulele lessons before their
trip. They would be in for their first lesson in about a half hour. PANIC! I didn’t know how to play
the ukulele.
I told Harry I didn’t know how to play the ukulele. He didn’t bat an eye. He walked over
to the sheet music section, took out a book on how to play the ukulele and handed it to me. He was
confident that I could do it. I wasn’t.
I picked up a ukulele, walked back to my studio room with the book and opened it. I soon
learned that the ukulele is tuned 5 half-steps higher than the first four strings on a guitar. Instant
relief. I could do it. I would be teaching them just chords, no single notes, and I already knew all
the chord patterns I would be teaching them. They arrived a few minutes later, ready for their first
lesson. I was ready, too. I never told them I didn’t know how to play the ukulele, because I was
able to play it. They took lessons for 6 weeks, went to Hawaii, and I never saw them again. Unless
they read this story, they will never know that I didn’t know how to play the ukulele until minutes
7
before they arrived for their first lesson. I would like to thank Harry Osiecki (1928-2015) for
placing confidence in me that day.
Bank Auditor – Youngstown, Ohio
I started out as an accounting major at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. I liked the
first accounting class and got an A. The second course was only OK. I got a C. The first semester
of intermediate accounting was my downfall. I got an F. Accounting had become boring. I just
couldn’t “get it.”
While I was taking accounting I was also taking economics. I loved those courses, so I
decided to switch my major. Actually, I became a social science major, with a primary
concentration in economics, and minor concentrations in history, philosophy and political science.
I also had to take a lot of theology classes because Gannon had a lot of priests who would teach
for free or next to nothing, so they made theology courses mandatory. Well, that’s what we thought,
anyway. Actually, I don’t know how much the priests got paid, and I don’t know the real reason
why we had to take so many theology classes. We weren’t studying to be priests.
After I graduated, I got a job as a high school math teacher. I hated to get up in the morning.
Although I loved the math, I didn’t like teaching students who didn’t want to learn. So after a year
I landed a job as assistant branch manager of a small bank in Windham, Ohio. I stayed there for
about a year and got itchy to move on. I liked working in banking, but there was no future in that
particular bank, so I applied for a job at the largest bank in Youngstown, Ohio and got it.
How I got it is an interesting story, and how I kept it is what this case study is all about. I
wasn’t totally devoid of knowledge about banking. I had worked in a bank for about a year and I
had an economics background. But this job was assistant bank auditor – at the largest bank in town.
8
I was totally unqualified, but I didn’t know it. I knew I was underqualified, but I didn’t know how
underqualified I was until after I got the job.
The person who interviewed me was the vice president in charge of lending. He had been
an English literature major in college and learned banking by a combination of on-the-job training
and a few courses he took along the way. I think he had been at the bank about 30 years. During
the course of the interview, he said, “You’ve had a lot of accounting courses, haven’t you?” I said
yes, of course, because I wanted the job. I rationalized that he didn’t define a lot of, and I had had
three accounting courses, two of which I managed to pass, so that was plenty for me, and since
plenty and a lot mean basically the same thing, I convinced myself that I wasn’t quite lying. He
didn’t ask to see my transcript and I didn’t offer to show it to him.
Luckily for me, I was able to learn what I needed to know by on-the-job training. When I
was asked to prepare a worksheet, I looked at the prior year worksheet and did the same thing the
last guy did, hoping that nothing had changed. I got away with it. I seldom asked questions for fear
they would find out I didn’t know what I was doing. I started taking graduate classes in economics
at the university in the evening, working toward an MA, which I never completed. I didn’t feel a
need to take any accounting classes because I had learned what I needed to know on the job.
I was making $550 a month at the bank, which was almost enough to live on in 1973, but
I wanted more, so I started answering job ads in the Wall Street Journal.
Auditor – Chicago
One of the companies that placed an ad was for a commodity brokerage firm in Chicago.
They wanted me to fly to Chicago for a job interview. I got the job and made plans to move to
Chicago. I felt like I had made the big-time. Chicago was one of the biggest cities in America, and
9
I would be working downtown, making $15,000 a year, more than twice what I made in
Youngstown. I didn’t mind the cold weather. I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, which was in a snow
belt just south of the Canadian border. I could take the snow. But what I wasn’t sure of was whether
I could survive on the job. I was the auditor for the firm, not just one of several auditors. It was a
partnership and the guy who hired me thought I knew something about auditing because I had
worked as an auditor in the largest bank in Youngstown.
Well, I did know a little about auditing by then, although I had never taken an auditing
course, and the accounting I had learned at the university had little or nothing to do with my
auditing job. But I was able to fake it for 6 weeks. Then the partners in the firm decided to fold the
company. One of the partners wanted to have the main office in New York while the other partner
wanted to have it in Chicago, so they just folded, laid everyone off and went their separate ways.
That left me jobless after just 6 weeks in the position, which meant I had some explaining to do
when I went on interviews for my next job. I had to explain why I was looking for another job
after being at the last one just 6 weeks.
I was able to receive several job offers rather quickly. Jobs were plentiful in those days.
The offer I chose to accept was in the tax department of a Fortune 1,000 company, which was also
in Chicago. I started at $12,000, which was $3,000 less than what I was making at the commodity
brokerage firm, but still about twice what I had made at the bank in Youngstown.
Tax Accountant
I was hired because I had auditing experience. No one asked to see my transcript and no
one asked me if I had any corporate tax experience. Not only did I not have any corporate tax
experience, I had never taken a tax class. The only courses I had passed were the two first-year
10
accounting courses. I would be one of 15 tax accountants and attorneys whose sole task was to fill
out just one tax return every 12 months. But it took 15 of us a full year to do it because it was a
really complicated tax return.
I was scared, needless to say. By then I had a wife, a small child and another one on the
way. I wasn’t really qualified for the job, but I accepted the offer anyway. My modus operandi
was the same as at the bank. Look at last year’s tax return, figure out where the numbers came
from, then duplicate what the last guy did using the current year’s numbers, and hope that nothing
had changed in the tax law in the meantime. I hesitated to ask questions for fear the people in the
office (and my boss) would discover that I didn’t know what I was doing.
Well, they never found out that I was faking it. I was able to do the job without my
incompetence being discovered. After a few months I was no longer in panic mode, although I
realized I probably should learn more about what I was doing, so I enrolled in DePaul University’s
MST [Master of Science in Taxation] program, which was offered in the evening. I took 2 or 3
classes each quarter and eventually earned the degree and felt competent in what I was doing. I
actually became rather good at it. But after a few years of being a tax accountant in Chicago, my
wife and I decided to move back to Ohio, for a variety of reasons.
Accounting Professor – Cleveland
I wanted a job where I could get summers off, so I took a job teaching accounting at a
small, private business college in Cleveland. By the time I left Chicago I had already completed a
year of law school at John Marshall Law School, so I was able to transfer to Cleveland Marshall
College of Law, which was part of Cleveland State University.
11
The person who interviewed me for the job was the president of the college. I don’t recall
what his major was, but it wasn’t business. It was something in the humanities, I think. Although
I only had 2 undergraduate accounting classes and one master’s level managerial accounting class,
I was hired to teach accounting. My DePaul University transcript listed all my tax classes as ACCT
501 or something like that, so a humanities major who knew nothing about accounting might look
at the transcript and conclude that I had taken a lot of accounting classes. But taxation is not
accounting. Although there is a bit of overlap, accounting and taxation are more different than they
are similar.
Most of the students I would be teaching had more accounting than I had. There were only
two accounting professors in the school, me and some guy who had a CPA. We were required to
teach 4 classes a semester, but we could teach two additional classes for extra pay, so that’s what
I did, and because it was a small school, most of the upper division classes were offered only once
a year or once a semester. That meant I taught 6 classes with 5 preps each semester. Over the span
of a couple years I taught every accounting course in the curriculum at least once, and most of
them several times. I learned a lot of accounting that way.
The first semester was traumatic. I was teaching the Intermediate Accounting 1 class, the
same class I had failed in college. Students were asking me questions I couldn’t answer. Most of
the classes I taught the first year were classes I had never actually taken myself. Teaching
Intermediate Accounting 2 was also a traumatic experience. Most of the other classes weren’t too
bad, though. The tax classes were easy for me because I had taken 12 or 14 tax classes at the
master’s degree level and had several years’ experience doing corporate taxes. The managerial
accounting classes were a lot like applied microeconomics, which I had had in grad school.
12
After the first year, I felt much better. I learned accounting by attempting to solve every
exercise and problem at the end of each chapter for each class I taught. I had the solutions manuals,
so I was able to see what the correct answers were, and could figure out why some of my answers
were wrong. After doing that for each class I taught, I felt super qualified. At some point there was
no accounting question I wasn’t able to answer.
I continued to go to law school in the evenings. I took a few more tax classes and as many
business law classes as I could. The law school also allowed me to take 2 graduate business classes
for law school credit, so I took a graduate level auditing class (I never had the undergraduate class,
although by then I had taught auditing once or twice) and a CPA review class.
One day I picked up the mail in my mailbox at the business school and noticed a letter that
was addressed to one of the former accounting professors. Whoever sorted the mail decided to put
it in my mail box for some reason. It’s a good thing they did, because that letter changed my life.
It was from the president of a CPA review company, a subsidiary of Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, the huge New York publishing company. They were looking for someone to assume
the directorship of the Cleveland CPA review course they were planning to start in a few months.
I applied for the job and got it. It was a part-time job. I would be able to continue my teaching and
going to law school. My main tasks were to find students to take the course and instructors to teach
the course. I would also be able to teach some sections of the course for $60 an hour, which was a
huge amount in 1977. But they wouldn’t let me teach anything except the tax and business law
portions of the course because I wasn’t a CPA. In fact, I was the only non-CPA director in the
whole country. The president told me that if I didn’t pass the CPA exam the next time it was
offered, I would be fired as the Cleveland director. It was a good gig and I didn’t want to be fired,
so I decided to take the CPA exam.
13
But when I tried to sign up for the exam I ran into problems. In order to be allowed to sit
for the exam, I had to have a certain number of accounting courses under my belt, and they had to
be certain specific courses, including intermediate accounting. Although I knew that material cold,
I had to get some accounting into my transcript fast. So what I did was enroll in Thomas A. Edison
State College, an accredited external degree college that was part of the New Jersey state system,
and took a gigantic CLEP exam that gave me 18 semester hours of accounting, which went on my
transcript. I took the exam and passed the first time, which was what I needed to do to not get fired.
As it turned out, the Cleveland district had the highest growth rate in the country. Because
of that the president, Martin A Miller, invited me to New York to be part of headquarters. I would
be second in command and would help teach the classes in Manhattan and New Jersey in the
evening, while writing CPA course materials during the day and flying all over the country opening
up new CPA review locations. My base salary would be $25,000, which was pretty good in 1979,
and I would be able to supplement it by teaching the CPA review courses for $60 an hour.
International Consultant
Things went smoothly for me for the next 20 years or so. I eventually left the CPA review
company and taught accounting in the MBA program of Seton Hall University in the evening while
doing a variety of accounting and tax work during the day, including a stint as a tax attorney in
Manhattan. I also picked up a few PhDs and a DSc along the way in my spare time.
After teaching at Seton Hall for a number of years, I was entitled to a sabbatical, which
meant I wouldn’t have to show up at the university for a year, but I would continue to receive 75
percent of full salary. So I decided to go on sabbatical. But I didn’t want to just sit home and collect
75 percent of salary. I wanted to do something to fill in the time. Something different. Maybe even
14
something a little bit exciting. So I started looking at the job ads in the Journal of Accountancy. I
came across an ad for a company that was looking for accountants for Eastern Europe.
I replied to the ad and was asked to come to the company headquarters in Virginia. As it
turned out, the company that placed the ad had won the USAID [United States Agency for
International Development] contract to reform the accounting system in Armenia, which wasn’t
quite in Eastern Europe. Armenia is bordered by Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia. It was part
of the Caucasus, which is in western Asia.
The company that won the USAID Accounting Reform contract for Armenia was in a hurry
to fill the position. They were able to bill USAID only for the number of days worked, so the
sooner they could bring me on board, the sooner they could start billing USAID. I interviewed and
got a job offer shortly thereafter.
A major part of my job would be to help the country convert to International Financial
Reporting Standards (IFRS), the standards that are used in most of the major countries of the world
for financial reporting purposes. The problem was that I didn’t know anything about international
accounting standards. The United States used U.S. standards. Nobody in the United States used
international standards in those days. Companies that prepared their financial statements using
international accounting standards wouldn’t be able to get listed on any U.S. stock exchange. There
was absolutely no demand for IFRS in the United States in those days. As a result, nobody knew
them, and no university taught them. But I had to learn them well enough to help the Finance
Ministry adopt them and spread them throughout the financial community so they could become
a part of the Armenian accounting system. I was also placed in charge of helping all the major
universities in Armenia reform their accounting curriculum to conform to international standards,
and train their professors to teach the new accounting courses.
15
I had accepted the job, not knowing anything about international financial reporting
standards. After conducting a little research, I learned that they were similar to U.S. standards in
many ways, but that they were also significantly different in some other ways. I had to learn them
and learn them fast. But I had trouble finding any books on them because there was no demand for
books on that topic in the United States. Eventually I was able to find a book on the standards that
I could buy, so I bought it a few days before getting on the plane to Armenia. I read it on the plane,
and by the time I arrived in Armenia I knew more about international accounting standards than
anyone else in Armenia. The main reason I knew more than anyone else was because no one in
Armenia knew anything about them, whereas I knew a little bit, which was all I needed to know
to get started.
When I arrived, the standards had not yet been translated into Russian, which was a
language all Armenians could understand, since Armenia had been part of the Soviet Union. So I
worked with the English language version of the standards, which the people in the Finance
Ministry couldn’t read because all they knew were Armenian and Russian. I was able to find
someone who was fluent in English and who had taken one accounting course at the University of
Denver. He became my interpreter. I also assembled a team of translators to translate the standards
into the Armenian language.
I was able to learn the international standards faster than I was able to teach them to the
professors and people in the Finance Ministry, so no one ever found out that I was just barely
qualified. I was qualified enough to do the job they had hired me to do, and by the time I left
Armenia 13 months later I had a good working knowledge of the international standards and could
either answer any question about them or find the answer to any question I wasn’t able to answer
off the top of my head.
16
As a result of the successful Armenian Accounting Reform project, I was invited to do the
same thing in Bosnia, also for 13 months. After Bosnia I was invited to other countries to make
shorter visits to help them with their conversion process. All of these opportunities arose because
I agreed to take a job I was unqualified for.
Accounting Professor – Miami
After my Bosnian experience, I got a job teaching accounting at Barry University. A few
years later I was pirated away by Florida International University, partly because of my
international accounting background and partly because of my tax background, which had gone a
little stale after so many years of teaching and working in the financial accounting area. There had
been several tax reform acts since I practiced as a tax attorney in Manhattan and I hadn’t kept up
with the changes. There was no need to, since I had gone into financial accounting.
Teaching the international accounting class was a breeze. I could talk about the theory and
practice of international accounting and I could tell war stories about my experiences in Armenia,
Bosnia and elsewhere, which the students seemed to like more than the regular lectures.
The problem was with the partnership tax class, which I also had to teach. I knew in
advance I would have to teach it. That was one of the main reasons they hired me. But I had never
practiced in the partnership tax area, it was perhaps the most complicated part of the tax code, and
it was the course where I received my lowest grade in the DePaul MST program. I would be
teaching students who were working in the tax field. Some of them were partners in the local CPA
firms. Some of them had experience in partnership taxation, and they would have technical
questions they would expect me to be able to answer off the top of my head.
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The first time I taught that class was traumatic. Some students asked me questions I wasn’t
able to answer. When that happened, I said I would look up the answer and get back to them, which
I did. But it was traumatic nonetheless. I had to teach that class each semester. It took two or three
semesters before I felt comfortable teaching it. Eventually, I got to the place where I felt more or
less comfortable teaching it, but the first few times were traumatic for me.
Tanzania
I had established a good reputation as an international accounting consultant and I received
offers to teach or help reform accounting systems in various countries after my Armenian and
Bosnian experiences. Because I was teaching full-time, I was only able to accept short-term
assignments, mostly during the summer or during spring or winter break, although I did have a
few Caribbean gigs that I could do on weekends. Most of the assignments were cake walks because
I was teaching topics that I thoroughly understood. But such was not the case in Tanzania.
The African Development Bank was funding a project in Tanzania to help adopt the
proposed insurance accounting standards that were in the process of being promulgated by the
International Accounting Standards Board, the body that issued the International Financial
Reporting Standards. The consulting firm that landed the Asian Development Bank contract was
looking for someone to perform the contract and they chose me.
Insurance accounting was totally new to me. There was no comparable U.S. standard, and
I didn’t have any practical experience in insurance accounting. Although there was an existing
international standard on the topic, it was in the process of being changed, and no one knew what
the new standard would look like. Yet I was viewed as the American expert on the topic. I had to
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learn as much as I could before getting on the plane, and I didn’t have much time. To make matters
worse, not many articles had been published on the insurance standard, so practically all I had was
the standard itself. In a few weeks I would be teaching people who worked in the insurance industry
in Tanzania. Some of them would be from private insurance companies. Others would be
government officials who had the task of regulating the insurance industry. As it turned out, one
of my students was the minister for the ministry that was given the task of regulating the insurance
industry.
I learned what I could before I landed in Tanzania. After I arrived, I had a few days to talk
to some people about the current accounting for insurance in Tanzania, and they conveyed their
concern about some of the problems they were having. They asked me several questions I wasn’t
able to answer, but I was somehow able to slip out of answering them directly without sounding
like a dummy.
I was able to deliver on the contract. They apparently liked my presentation because I got
good reviews, which pleased the consulting company because they had a great deal of difficulty
finding someone to take on the assignment (which I didn’t learn until later).
Martial Arts
I had dabbled in several martial arts since high school but was never very good at them. I
was on the high school wrestling team but wasn’t good enough to win a letter. I was one of Mike
Pistorio’s sparring partners for a while, but he used me mostly for a punching bag. He went on to
fight 56 pro fights. I took a few judo lessons from Richard Adelman but had to drop out because I
couldn’t afford the tuition. During the 1980s I studied taekwondo with Henry Cho in Manhattan
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and Shukokai, a Japanese style, with Shigeru Kimura in Hackensack, New Jersey, but didn’t get a
black belt in either style until decades later.
When I moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina I started taking taekwondo lessons again at
the tender age of 65. I just did it to stay in shape, but after a few months my instructors encouraged
me to compete in a local tournament. I was only a white belt, and an old one at that, so I hesitated,
but agreed to do it because I caved in to their pressure. Although I was supposed to compete in the
60+ ring, there were no 60+ people at the tournament, so they threw me in with a bunch of younger
guys. Somehow I managed to win a bronze medal. In the next tournament, a Class A regional
tournament, I did a little better against people my own age – 2 gold, 2 silver and 1 bronze medal.
Now, five years later, at the age of 70, my career gold medal count is up to 197, which includes 3
gold medals in world championships. But I still experience the same symptoms that other people
with Impostor Syndrome experience - anxiety, depression and fear of failure.
The 2017 world championship in Dublin, Ireland is a good example. In that tournament,
the oldest age group in the tai chi event was 18+, which meant I would have to compete against
men and women who were young enough to be my grandchildren. I got depressed just thinking
about it. I wondered if I was wasting my time and money even going to Ireland. Somehow, I
managed to win a silver medal in that event. The guy who beat me was in his early 30s.
The age differential was not quite as bad for the other events. The oldest age category was
35+ for some events and 55+ for others, which was still a lot younger than 70, but not as much of
an age differential as 18+. The gold medals I won were in taekwondo (55+), karate (35+) and kung
fu (35+). I also won a silver and a bronze in two 55+ events. Before those events I was anxious,
depressed and just waiting to fail. After I won, I didn’t feel elated. I just felt relieved, and perhaps
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a bit numb. I couldn’t believe I had actually won. After being mediocre in martial arts for most of
my life, I finally won 3 world championships, all in the same day.
I came up with a few deprecating comments to discount my wins. Chuck Norris decided
not to compete when he heard I would be there. Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal also
wouldn’t be there, for the same reason. Luckily for me, they all stopped competing years ago (I
read that Steven Seagal never competed in a single tournament. I don’t know if it’s true, and I’m
not about to ask him).
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
Well, that’s my story, or perhaps I should say that’s the case study to put it in more
academic terms. Did I suffer from Impostor Syndrome? Definitely. I knew I wasn’t qualified for
some of those assignments, but nobody else seemed to know. Was I able to cope? Yes, most of the
time, anyway. I was outside my comfort zone many times. I overcompensated, and sometimes it
paid off.
REFERENCES
Abagnale, Frank W. with Stan Redding. 2000. Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real
Fake. New York: Broadway Books.
Branson, Richard. 2017. Richard Branson’s Blog. https://www.virgin.com/in-focus/leadership
Buckland, Fiona (2017). Feeling like an impostor? You can escape this confidence-sapping
syndrome. The Guardian (September 19).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/19/fraud-impostor-syndromeconfidence-self-esteem
Clance, Pauline Rose & Suzanne Imes. 1978. The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving
Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. Psychotherapy Theory, Research and
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Practice 15(3): 241-247.
http://www.paulineroseclance.com/pdf/ip_high_achieving_women.pdf
Clance, Pauline Rose. 2017. http://paulineroseclance.com/impostor_phenomenon.html. Visited
September 22, 2017.
Clance, Pauline Rose. 2017. Correspondence with. September 23.
Crichton, Robert. 1959. The Great Impostor. New York: Random House.
Goodhill, Olivia. 2016. Brilliant “Frauds”: Is impostor syndrome a sign of greatness? Quartz
(February 1). https://qz.com/606727/is-imposter-syndrome-a-sign-of-greatness/
Hendriksen, Helen. 2015. What is Impostor Syndrome? Scientific American. May 27.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-impostor-syndrome/
Hooper, Dennis. 2012. The Impostor Syndrome. Savannah Business Journal (December 31).
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Mishunov, Denys. 2017. Confessions of an Impostor. Smashing Magazine. October 18.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/10/confessions-impostor-syndrome/
Osiecki, Harry Anthony (1928-2015). Obituary.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/ErieTimesNews/obituary.aspx?pid=176950897
Sakulku, Jaruwan and James Alexander. 2011. The Impostor Phenomenon. International Journal
of Behavioral Science 6(1): 73-92. http://bsris.swu.ac.th/journal/i6/6-6_Jaruwan_7392.pdf
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BIO
Robert W. McGee is an accounting professor and best-selling novelist who has published 58
nonfiction books and more than 700 scholarly articles. He is an attorney and CPA who has lectured
or worked in more than 30 countries, and has earned 13 doctorates from universities in the United
States and four European countries. The Social Science Research Network has ranked him as high
as #2 in the world All-Time among accounting professors and #30 in the world All-Time among
all social scientists. Various studies have ranked him #1 in the world for both business ethics and
accounting ethics scholarship. He has won 22 gold medals in Taekwondo National Championship
tournaments (USA), 6 first place trophies in Karate National Championship tournaments (USA),
and is a world champion in taekwondo, karate and kung fu, and a world silver medalist in tai chi.
His career gold medal count is currently 197. He has been inducted into the United States Martial
Arts Hall of Fame. He spends most of his time in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Southeast Asia and
Europe. Information about his novels can be found at http://robertwmcgee.com. Some of his
scholarly papers may be found at http://ssrn.com/author=2139.
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