“The impostor state” is a term Raymond Hou (Raymond) used in his 2024 reflection at age thirty to describe a long-term internal tension. On one side is his assessment of his own circumstances: his talent is ordinary, and his background and resources are inferior to those of his peers. On the other is the only way he has found to feel grounded and that he exists: sustained action and accumulated work. Neither force has been eliminated by any one success; they repeatedly coexist. Raymond does not treat this state as a flaw that needs to be overcome. Instead, he defines it as a source of growth. This entry synthesizes public reflections from 2017 to 2026. Family-related details are handled according to the principle of not naming people or amplifying their private matters.
Two Pulls
The first pull comes from a clear-eyed recognition of his ordinariness. Raymond treats his upbringing as a relatively disadvantaged starting condition and says this is not false modesty, but how things actually feel to him: he considers his talent ordinary and his available capital and interpersonal skills inferior to those of peers in the market. The second pull is his way of offsetting this unease: turn passivity into initiative, and use each completed piece of work to gain a sense of “groundedness” and “existence.” Notably, these two forces are not an opposition between “inferiority” and “confidence.” Raymond describes a self-demand that continues to arise from deep within even after becoming self-employed and no longer needing to prove anything to anyone: can this teaching draft make the idea easier to understand? Can this plan help existing members feel they are progressing together? He classifies this demand as an “impostor state,” rather than simply a desire for control.
Origins: A Foundation Shaped by Early Disparity
This state has a clear personal history. Raymond has often reflected on economic differences during his adolescence: in elementary school, he sold CDs and did odd jobs in shops to get things he could trade and share with classmates. He called this kind of group acceptance built through material things “fake connections.” After entering the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University, the greater disparity in his classmates’ circumstances caused those connections to fall apart (background in Childhood and Adolescence). He says that after a family upheaval in junior high and disappointing results on the high-school entrance exam, he became more aware that his “background was inferior to others.” He therefore placed his sense of existence in output that could accumulate and be controlled by himself. This engine that grew out of disparity shares its source with the motivational argument in Resentment Is the Strongest Fuel, but follows a different direction: resentment directs energy outward toward “changing tracks and proving it can be done,” while the impostor state points to an inner echo that can still say “not enough” even after an achievement.
Oscillation: Between Wearing and Removing the Mask
One visible form of this tension is Raymond’s strong vigilance against “pretending to be an expert.” In a 2025 long article about AI creators, he described chasing traffic, putting on an expert mask, and fearing people would no longer like him if he took it off as a slow erosion of passion for creating. He proposed three questions for self-examination: do you enjoy the creative process, are you solving a real problem, and can you honestly face what you “don’t know”?1 He argues that the difference between a real and fake expert lies not in how much they know, but in how they treat what they do not know. This can be read as a dialogue with his own impostor state: turn the anxiety of “being found out” into the discipline of “admitting what you don’t know and speaking through your work” (related approaches in Output Drives Learning and Turn Problems You Have Faced into Shareable Tools). The same force also has a harmful side. He says that two book manuscripts sat unfinished for years. He had thought the obstacle was that he “hadn’t figured everything out yet,” then later saw a more uncomfortable possibility: he wanted to understand everything before writing and became trapped by an internal standard that he had to be “complete enough to deserve to write.”
Significance: Treating Ordinariness as a Workable Premise
Raymond ultimately did not treat the impostor state as an illness to eliminate. Instead, he organized it into a way to live with ordinariness. At the end of his reflection at age thirty, he wrote: “Perhaps growth is gradually discovering our own ordinariness and still doing our best to live an extraordinary life.”2 This marks a temporary point of balance in the tension: acknowledging ordinariness is not giving up, and accumulating work does not eliminate unease; the two coexist and form each other’s conditions. He uses a line by Haruki Murakami to frame this state: “Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.” In his framing, he deliberately “does not care that much” about outside opinions and outcomes. What he truly cares about is continuing to feel that he is getting better through documentation and output. This thread of turning “I consider myself ordinary” into “a reason to keep acting” is also an underlying mindset in his discussion of Writing Is the Best Investment for Ordinary People and the Super Individual path. The impostor state thus remains an unresolved internal tension that he has incorporated as a source of motivation over the long term.
Sources
Footnotes
-
Raymond Hou, “Earn Traffic and Monetize Quickly, but Lose Yourself? A New Beginning for AI Creators,” WordPress article, 2025-07-10. View original ↩
-
Raymond Hou, “About Turning Thirty: What I Learned in Ten Years,” WordPress article, 2024-09-17. View original ↩