Explorer's Syndrome

Impostor Syndrome is a well-known and widely discussed idea. It is used to explain the nervousness one feels and as something that can be overcome if consciously acknowledged. It is also used as an excuse when one wants to avoid something. But what if Impostor Syndrome is not the only frame available to us? What if there is another stance altogether, an Explorer Syndrome, which is a different framing that can be learned? To explain what I mean, I need to share what shaped this thought.

Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology, has in recent years popularized the idea of deliberately cultivating awe. His work suggests that awe diminishes cynicism and helps us notice goodness, courage, and beauty in places outside ourselves. This is a modern articulation of an ancient intuition: that there is greatness in the natural world, something almost divine in what is beautiful, and that our curiosity about it changes us. For me, this distinction lies at the very core of the difference between an explorer and an impostor.

As I was hearing about the cultivation of awe on a podcast, what struck me most was that we first have to be open to experiencing things as magical and larger than ourselves in order to feel it. Identifying with impostor syndrome, even if you are openly trying to acknowledge it and overcome it, shuts you off to experiencing awe. Counterintuitively, one would expect someone besotted with impostor syndrome to be always in awe of others. But that is not the case. It is the one who has the openness and curiosity of an explorer that is able to find awe, both within and outside of them.

What I am saying here feels like Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset at first glance, but I feel it is slightly different. When I hear or read about growth mindset, it feels evaluative for me. It is about skill improvement and openness. It rightly says effort matters, failure is informative, and that abilities can be developed. A person with impostor syndrome can have all that and they can still be shut off to the sense of awe and curiosity.

When I think about the Explorer’s Syndrome, I feel that it is a bit more poetic and has an implicit license to chase joy. While growth mindset says “keep improving,” the Explorer’s Syndrome is more about “There is something greater than me that is worth moving towards.” And the other thing about it is that it invites you to break away from autopilot, even for positive habit loops. I will explain why.

As Jonathan Goodman puts it in Unhinged Habits, “Escape from autopilot begins with exploration.” Autopilot happens when someone too easily falls into a routine of things, for both the good habits and the bad. But the autopilot is more insidious. It is the repetition of safe patterns shaped by fear. How many of our habits are shaped by what we want to avoid or what we fear? I suspect many.

Exploration interrupts that loop.

For someone in the grip of an Explorer’s Syndrome, growth is not the goal; curiosity is, along with awe, exploration, and the urge to see what lies beyond the next hill. It is the drive to pursue what is novel, simply because it is new and unexplored. It is also the quiet curiosity to take things apart just to understand how they work—and to put them back together once you do.

There is something deeply productive about believing you can figure something out and not being consumed by what you don’t yet know or might get wrong.

At Davos in 2026, Elon Musk famously said, “I would rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.”

The productivity of optimism lies in this willingness to move. When you assume things might work out, you act; when you obsess over how they might fail, you stall. And stalling, more often than not, proves the pessimism right.

But for most of us, the default setting in modern life seems to tilt in the other direction. The impostor’s attention turns inward, circling perceived gaps—what they lack, what they might mishandle, whether they will measure up.

That inward spiral rarely produces clarity. It narrows attention until action feels risky and visibility feels dangerous. Every new opportunity is weighed less as possibility to explore and more as a test to survive. And because the focus stays fixed on deficiency, the lens through which the world is viewed becomes distorted. It is not that ability is absent—it is that attention is misdirected.

Courage Before Certainty

I have written elsewhere that agonizing over a decision is often worse than the decision itself. Much of that agony comes from trying to pre-decide outcomes in a future none of us can predict. When prediction is impossible, progress comes not from perfect certainty but from movement—act, observe, adjust. Courage, in that sense, beats confidence.

Overthinking keeps us waiting for a perfect answer. This is the posture of the impostor: cautious, self-monitoring, waiting to feel ready. It feels safe, even responsible. But it quietly narrows the world. Exploration moves forward with one that feels interesting and yes, considered, but not obsessed over. Then learns from the experience gained from the exploration.  

In fact, the explorer shifts the axis entirely. Attention leaves the self and moves toward the playground —what can be learned, what can be tested, what might unfold. The unknown stops being a threat and becomes a canvas to paint on. Gaps in knowledge are not evidence of being caught as a fraud, but invitations to inquire. Mistakes are not verdicts on worth, but information gathered along the way.

I have written before about how courage is often found in the embrace of the unknown. In reflecting on writers like Sontag, McCarthy, and even the idea of Fernweh—a longing for the unfamiliar—I realized that what looks like “being lost” is often just a refusal to abandon oneself. To live deeply is to step into uncertainty without betraying who you are.

The Performance Trap

That same stance—the willingness to enter unfamiliar terrain without collapsing inward—plays out in far more ordinary settings than travel or mortality. Let’s take a concrete example from the world of work in 2026. Consider something as commonplace—and revealing—as networking.

In a professional setting, networking often becomes a performance. For the impostor, a networking meeting is less a conversation and more a test. They over-prepare to avoid appearing uninformed, choose environments where they feel in control, and leave measuring whether they impressed rather than whether they learned. If the exchange does not yield visible validation, it feels like failure.

The explorer walks into the same meeting, but with a completely different orientation. They are curious first, strategic second. The goal is not to impress, but to discover—what this person knows, how they think, where their world intersects with yours. There is intention without an agenda; presence without performance. Trust, in that context, emerges not from polish, but from reduced self-orientation.

Let’s zoom out. Networking was only one example; this is about something more fundamental.

Unlearning the Reflex

What I am really arguing is that impostor syndrome is not merely insecurity, but a strategy built around securing validation. It is not something that simply happens to us; it is something we participate in. We structure our actions to avoid confronting weaknesses we do not want to admit—even to ourselves.

Explorer Syndrome, then, is the quiet refusal to live by that logic. And because it is a strategy, it can be unlearned.

The first lever is attention. Validation-seeking trains attention inward; exploration trains it outward.

The second lever is repeated contact with situations that do not guarantee approval. Small acts of outreach without over-preparation begin to loosen the grip.

The third lever is learning to release the outcome and doing so completes the shift.

Over time, outward-directed attention makes awe easier to notice. But awe is not sustained by accident; it is cultivated through repetition and openness. Left unattended, repetition becomes routine, and routine slides back into autopilot. Ritual is repetition done with awareness—an intentional return to outward attention. This is why all ancient religious practices emphasize the importance of rituals in cultivating a sense of awe of the divine.

Across both ancient discipline and modern individualist thought, one idea repeats: action is directed toward a chosen aim. When the aim is validation, disapproval strikes at who you think you are. When the aim is exploration and a surrender to something larger than oneself, disapproval becomes noise rather than threat. Placed in that frame, criticism changes texture. It may still register, but it no longer dictates movement. In practice, this shift is quieter than it sounds.

An Ongoing Apprenticeship

On a personal note, I am beginning to notice how this impacts me in the small things. I used to find myself choosing books, projects, even leisure partly for how they will appear—to myself as much as to anyone else. Reading something “serious,” avoiding something indulgent, rehearsing questions before asking them. Lately, I have been interrupting that reflex. I slow down. I breathe. I deliberately unclench from the need to look curated and intelligent. I ask the obvious question in rooms. I volunteer for work that might be judged as beneath me. Nothing dramatic changes in the moment. But when validation does not arrive, or even when criticism does—either directly said to me or felt indirectly— the impact feels different. It stops meaning so much.

In fact, each instance of the lack of validation stops registering altogether and, if anything, feels like a small exposure—leading to the strengthening of the muscle. If antifragility to judgment means growing steadier each time approval is absent, then this is how I am beginning to train it.

A quiet apprenticeship into Explorer Syndrome.

Note: All images were imagined and created with Gemini.