Today I'd like to tell you the story of Inès. Inès is 24, has a brand-new master's degree in statistics and, since 1 September, her first permanent contract as a data analyst at an e-commerce company in Paris. On paper, it's the job she wanted: a team of six, a friendly manager, a real salary after five years of odd jobs. In reality, after three weeks, she was mentally drafting her resignation letter every evening on the RER commuter train.
What she was going through, most new graduates will recognize: meetings where everyone speaks a jargon she doesn't master, internal tools with no documentation, a first assignment ("a dashboard, you'll see, it's simple") that took three times longer than planned, and that little voice, growing louder: they're going to realize I can't do anything.
The trap: making up for it with hours
Inès reacted the way many good students do: by doing more. Arriving at 8:30 a.m., leaving at 7:30 p.m., answering every Slack message within the minute, saying yes to every request from every colleague to "prove her worth". In three weeks, she had taken on eleven small side tasks, still hadn't finished her dashboard, and was waking up at 5 a.m. with a knot in her stomach.
On the Friday of the third week, her manager asked her, kindly, how the dashboard was coming along. She burst into tears in the bathroom. That evening, on the RER, she reopened Cobalt, an app she had installed during her studies to brush up on management concepts before an oral exam, and typed "impostor" into the search bar.
Replacing "I don't know" with "I don't know yet"
The first summary she came across was Mindset by Carol Dweck. Dweck distinguishes two ways of seeing yourself: the fixed mindset ("I'm either gifted or I'm not, and every task is a test") and the growth mindset ("I'm learning, and every difficulty is information"). Inès immediately recognized how she operated: she experienced every meeting as an exam she might fail, when no one was grading her. They were onboarding her. The summary: https://www.cobaltapp.io/en/resumes/mindset.
She adopted a small ritual borrowed from the book: every time she thought "I can't do this", she added "yet". It sounds trivial. But it turned a verdict into a step, and it allowed her to do what she hadn't dared to: ask.
Asking for help without apologizing for existing
Asking was precisely her problem. She phrased her questions apologetically ("sorry to bother you, this is probably stupid, but...") or, worse, didn't ask at all and searched on her own for hours. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg gave her a four-step structure: observation, feeling, need, request. The following Monday, instead of a vague "I'm struggling a bit", she said to her manager: "On the dashboard, I spent two days on the database connection, with no documentation. I feel a bit lost. I need to understand the data architecture. Could someone spend thirty minutes on it with me this week?" The NVC summary: https://www.cobaltapp.io/en/resumes/la-communication-non-violente.
Her manager replied: "Of course, I should have offered." Thirty minutes with a senior colleague solved what had cost her two days. And above all, she discovered that asking clearly was not an admission of weakness, but a sign of professionalism.
Protecting two hours a day
The second source of her exhaustion was fragmentation: Slack, emails, meetings, questions on the fly. Inès never had more than twenty minutes in a row to think. Deep Work by Cal Newport gave her both the diagnosis and the cure: quality work requires uninterrupted blocks of concentration, and those blocks are not found, they are booked. The summary: https://www.cobaltapp.io/en/resumes/deep-work.
She blocked out an "analysis" slot from 9 to 11 a.m. in her shared calendar, turned off Slack notifications during that slot and told her team. No one objected. Within a week, the dashboard was delivered. She rounded it off with the rule from Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy: start the day with the hardest task, the one you feel like putting off, before the day runs away with you. The summary: https://www.cobaltapp.io/en/resumes/eat-that-frog.
Learning to say no
That left the problem of the eleven side tasks. Essentialism by Greg McKeown asks a question that hit home for Inès: if it isn't a clear yes, it's a no. She went back over the list of everything she had agreed to, identified the three requests that were genuinely part of her job, and went to see the other colleagues to say, politely, that she wouldn't be able to take care of them until her main assignment was finished. None of them reacted badly. Most had forgotten. The summary: https://www.cobaltapp.io/en/resumes/l-essentialisme.
She also cites Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday, which she listened to one Sunday: the idea that a beginner has to accept being a student, ask questions, and not confuse the need to look competent with actually becoming competent. "I stopped trying to look like I knew. I started learning." The summary: https://www.cobaltapp.io/en/resumes/l-ego-est-l-ennemi.
Three months later
Inès's probation period was confirmed in December, with feedback from her manager that she wrote down word for word: "You ask the right questions and you keep your commitments." She leaves at 6:15 p.m., has joined her company's climbing club and keeps her RER routine: one Cobalt summary in the morning, ten minutes, often on topics from her field, sometimes just for pleasure. The impostor syndrome hasn't gone away. It never quite does. But it has stopped making her decisions for her.
| The symptom | The idea that helped | The book |
|---|---|---|
| "They're going to realize I can't do anything" | Going from "I don't know" to "not yet" | Mindset |
| Not daring to ask | Observation, feeling, need, request | Nonviolent Communication |
| Fragmented days | Blocking two hours of concentration | Deep Work |
| Putting off the hard task | Doing it first | Eat That Frog! |
| Saying yes to everything | If it isn't a clear yes, it's a no | Essentialism |
| Wanting to look competent | Accepting being a student | Ego Is the Enemy |
What Inès's story can do for you
If you're starting your first job this September, you are not a hiring mistake: you are learning, and that is exactly what is expected of you. The ideas that helped Inès each fit into about ten minutes, and that is Cobalt's format: more than 500 summaries of psychology, productivity and management books, to read or listen to on your commute, with a 7-day free trial on iOS and Android: https://www.cobaltapp.io/download.
To understand the mechanics of self-doubt, also read our article on impostor syndrome: https://www.cobaltapp.io/en/blog/impostor-syndrome-understand-and-overcome.
Inès is a fictional character: her situation is a composite of common experiences. The books and ideas mentioned, however, are very real.