The Empress Has No Clothes

Preface

Right around the time I first began thinking about writing this book, I heard Cory Booker, the dynamic young mayor of Newark, New Jersey, speak about his vision of what young people need to succeed. I found the speech moving, especially when in summing up, Mayor Booker said: “You’ve got to learn to metabolize your blessings.” It seemed as if he was at once describing my own journey to embracing success and pointing the way for all of us who have faced the kind of self-doubt that has made us feel like impostors.

The inability to recognize and celebrate our own strengths and accomplishments is at the very heart of what is known as the impostor syndrome—that feeling of being a fraud and not deserving of our success. We look at the objective ...