On imposter syndrome and Jack London

Every great thinker was once just a regular person like you and me

Here is my desk:

Here is Jack London’s desk:

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Here is Jack London’s office:

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Who is Jack London, you ask?

Jack London was many things: a prolific writer (he wrote The Call of the Wild). He went on a sea voyage to Japan and made it back to tell the story. He owned a farm that eventually was donated to the State of California (Jack London State Historic Park). He even tried to innovate on the feeding of hogs and built the Pig Palace in 1915. He did a lot of things. The photos above are his workspace. I found his multitude of interests and his success inspiring.

I first learned of Jack London by accident. We were on a weekend trip in Northern California, specifically the Glen Ellen area. We stumbled upon a park named after him, and traversed the lands, in a bit of wonder, a bit of near-heat stroke. I knew of Jack London Square in Oakland and vaguely thought I knew the name, perhaps from his literature, but never had sought to understand the person behind the name. Following the curiosity, Jack London taught me a lot.

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Jack London accomplished many things and his workspace doesn’t look all that different from mine or yours.

(Note: Jack London is a controversial figure; for example, he was a proponent of eugenics.)

Impostor syndrome is when we lack self-confidence in who we have become, or aspire to be. Jack London and his workspace remind us that everyone who ever did anything great lived a fairly ordinary life not so removed from ours.

Great writers had a desk and a pen. That pen sometimes ran out of ink or the typewriter broke, and they fixed it.

Great athletes have been cut from teams like Michael Jordan from his high school basketball team.

Great social activists didn’t always possess the qualities that made them great. Supposedly Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once got a C+ in public speaking.

Steve Jobs said everything around us was made by people no smarter than you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled to Europe before writing Nature and was inspired to produce great literature when he realized the English literary giants were no greater men than he was or could be. As School of Life explains:

“...on that tour [of Europe in 1832-1833] was that he met the English Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth – and found them rather ordinary, dry and conservative men. The insight that Emerson drew from this was that if great men could be so ordinary why should not ordinary men be great? As he would write a few years later: ‘Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.’ Emerson had found two ideas that would guide his life’s work: that man and nature are one and that everyone can recognize that they are a uniquely significant human being.”

Ultimately history coronates a few greats. But in our own journeys, we must remember that every great was merely human, no different than you or me.