I’ve been thinking and talking about tech-induced imposter syndrome lately. While my own experience with imposter syndrome has changed over time, I keep trying to get better at spotting and diffusing it both for myself and for my colleagues who struggle with it too.

Picture this: you’re at work meeting or a professional social event and you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who clearly know seemingly endless things – that you don’t know at all – about how to do your profession. This is a good thing. This means you have the opportunity to grow. Being the most knowledgable person in the room is a sign that your learning opportunities may be in peril. But despite that clear logic, emotions will rebel and insist that it doesn’t always feel good to feel like everyone else in the room knows more than you times infinity forever and you’ll never know as much as they do. If the people in the room don’t look like or talk like you do, compound these feelings.

Oh emotions.

I keep coming back to the idea of a patchwork quilt. It helps me to reframe the situation. Instead of seeing a room full of people with perfect knowledge, begin to recognize each person’s knowledge uniquely as a patchwork of experiences. Each one of these people may know more than you on this specific topic right now, but that’s because they’ve had the opportunity to experience learning on this topic while you were learning something else. And they don’t know everything, but they do know this thing, and they can probably teach it to you. Their knowledge is a patchwork of things they’ve encountered just like yours is. All of our patchwork looks different. No one can know all the things. Not only is that assumption unreasonable, it is impossible in the tech industry. Instead, set reasonable milestones and reflect on your growth as you go. Celebrate each little square that you add to your patchwork.

Delightfully impressive things can happen when we confidently show each other our patchwork (including the weird squares, frayed edges, holes, and all) so that we can fill in gaps for each other. We can show each other the burn marks we earned the hard way – reminding each other that even the most impressive-looking person has and will still struggle. When we do that, when we layer all of our patchwork quilts over each other’s, we can create things we could have never even imagined alone.