I don’t think the self-doubt comes just from being young and black. This passage from DFW’s commencement address has been very clarifying for me because I think it addresses the deeper roots of the problem:

“Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”

I think we both get a tendency to get trapped in the last type of worship he mentions — worship of the intellect. And that breeds self-doubt.

To reduce this self-doubt, I’ve found that it’s very helpful to shift focus from “being” to “doing.” We have no control, really, over how smart we are relative to other people, or how others perceive us. We have no control over the titles or names that people attach to us. So it’s better, I think, not to worry about that.

Instead, I think we should focus our energy on the problems that we want to solve with our intelligence. After all, isn’t this what intelligence is for? As long as our primary focus are these problems — and not our personal involvement with them — then it doesn’t matter how big or small our contribution is. The opportunity to argue for a position in which one has firm conviction is enough to make the truly intellectual mind happy.

This is, I think, one of the few ways to maintain sanity for over-active minds. Because no amount of intelligence will ever expel that self-doubt.

Kunal