This week I do an IQ test
A gnawing feeling that we’re big, fat frauds is common to the human experience, I believe. Mostly we’re just waiting for someone to work out that, actually, we have no idea what we’re doing and that we’re crap at what we do. Michelle Pfeiffer once said, “I still think people will find out that I’m really not very talented. I’m really not very good.”
Stephen Fry is the pin-up for fraud complex, and confesses in The Fry Chronicles that behind his mask of ease and assurance he is “chronically overmastered by a sense of failure, underachievement and a terrible knowledge that I have betrayed, abused or neglected the talents that nature bestowed upon me”.
I have another theory: those who seem least fraudulent, determined to never reveal their mask, are in fact the biggest frauds and the most crappy at what they do. They just have more at stake in putting on a convincing front.
For the more transparently fallible among us, though, the question, “am I actually doing what I’m meant to be doing?” can plague us our entire lives. Is there anything more despairing than being an accountant for 45 years when you were actually destined to bake novelty birthday cakes? I don’t think so. As an annoying 16-year-old I tried to avert such a calamity by cold-calling people working in professions I thought might suit me and asking them if they liked their job and did they think it would suit a young person such as myself (cringe!). I rang a bunch of lawyers, local MPs and an architect. (Please, if you’re a teenager thinking of doing the same, can I advise command you don’t. It’ll be clear why in about a decade.) I clearly didn’t heed their responses – I set off and studied law and politics.
Thankfully today there are smoother ways to assess your vocational destiny – Aptitude tests.