Why You Picture Someone Else

On February 19, 2014, three men drove a few blocks from a quiet office in Mountain View, California, to a run-down white building on the other side of the railroad tracks.

One of them was Jan Koum, the 37-year-old co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp. Another was his co-founder, Brian Acton. The third was Jim Goetz, a venture capitalist from Sequoia Capital. They had come to sign the papers selling WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion.

Koum chose the spot on purpose. The building was the former North County Social Services office, the place where he had once stood in line to collect food stamps. He signed the deal on its door.

Koum grew up in a small village outside Kyiv, in Ukraine. When he was 16, he and his mother immigrated to Mountain View and moved into a small two-bedroom apartment through government assistance. His mother had packed their suitcases with pens and a stack of Soviet-issued notebooks so they wouldn't have to pay for school supplies.

She took jobs babysitting, and Koum swept the floor of a grocery store to help make ends meet. After she was diagnosed with cancer, they lived on her disability payments. He didn't own a computer until he was 19, and he taught himself programming from used books. His co-founder, Acton, had applied for a job at Facebook in 2009 and been turned down.

Picture that teenager in the food stamp line. If someone had pointed at him and said that one day he would sell a company for $19 billion, he probably would have laughed. That kind of person was someone else, someone with money, connections, and a different life.

Most people carry a version of that picture. When they think of someone running a company with 100 employees, starting a foundation other people want to be part of, leading a room full of people older and more experienced than them, or buying a $10 million house in Monaco, they can imagine it clearly.

They just can't imagine themselves in it. It's always someone else. Some feel too young: a 29-year-old who still sees himself as a boy, or a 23-year-old who's asked to lead a club of 125 members in their late thirties and says he'd rather stay in the background. Others feel they came from the wrong place, don't have the right background, or simply aren't "that kind of person."

That picture matters more than it seems, because you don't move toward a life you can't see yourself living. This article examines where that picture comes from, why so many capable people leave themselves out of it, what age really has to do with it, and how to start seeing yourself in the roles you've been reserving for someone else. Along the way, we'll follow one person, a 27-year-old named Devon, who has been asked to step into a bigger role than he thinks he's ready for.

Here is the assumption most people never examine: that some people are the kind who build big things, lead others, and live big lives, and they themselves are not. It rarely gets said out loud. It shows up as a feeling when someone describes a big goal and you think, "that's not for me," or when an opportunity comes along and you hear yourself explaining why someone else would be better for it.

Devon manages a small team at a regional logistics company. His boss has asked him to take over the company's largest location, with 40 employees, many of them in their forties and fifties. Devon's first reaction was to say he wasn't ready. When his boss asked what he meant, he couldn't really explain it.

He knows the work well. He's been running his current team for two years, and their numbers are among the best in the company. But when he pictures the person running the big location, it isn't him. It's someone older, with a deeper voice and more gray hair, someone who looks like they belong there.

That's the part worth examining. Devon's hesitation has much more to do with his picture of who gets to do the job than with what he can actually do. And that picture, like most of the ones we carry, was never something he decided on. It was formed by what he saw growing up, who he saw in those roles, and what he was told about people like him. The rest of this article looks at where those pictures come from and how to change them.

In 1986, the psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius gave this kind of picture a name: possible selves. A possible self is your idea of who you might become in the future, whether that's who you hope to be, who you expect to be, or who you're afraid of becoming.

The successful business owner, the respected leader, the parent you want to be, and the person you're afraid of turning into are all possible selves.

Markus and Nurius argued that possible selves do real work. They act as a link between who you are now and what you do next. The futures you can picture for yourself become the ones you work toward, and the ones you're afraid of become the ones you work to avoid.

A future that never shows up on your list of possible selves never gets worked toward at all. You can admire it, but you won't move toward it, because it doesn't feel like something that could be yours.

The psychologist Daphna Oyserman spent years testing whether changing people's possible selves could change what they actually do. She focused on middle school students in low-income neighborhoods who wanted to do well in school but often didn't, and who often doubted whether school was for people like them.

With her colleagues Deborah Bybee and Kathy Terry, she developed a short program called School-to-Jobs, in which students met twice a week for a few weeks to connect who they were now with who they wanted to become, and to map out the steps between the two, including the obstacles they'd face and how to handle them.

The results were striking for something so short. Students were randomly assigned to the program or to regular school, so researchers could see whether the program itself made the difference.

Over the following year, students who went through School-to-Jobs had better grades and test scores, attended school more, and had fewer behavior problems and less depression than the students who didn't. The benefits lasted into their first year of high school.

One detail from Oyserman's research matters a lot for anyone trying to see themselves in a bigger role. Her work found that possible selves change behavior most when they're connected to specific strategies for getting there.

A vague dream of being successful doesn't do much. A picture of who you could become, connected to a path you can actually see yourself walking, does. That's why the practices at the end of this article focus on both: widening the picture, and building the road to it.

If possible selves shape what we work toward, the next question is where they come from. A large part of the answer is simple: we picture ourselves in the roles we've seen people like us fill.

One of the clearest pieces of evidence comes from a study of inventors. In 2019, the economists Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen linked patent records for about 1.2 million American inventors to tax records, so they could see what kind of families and neighborhoods inventors grew up in.

Children from families in the top 1 percent of income were ten times as likely to become inventors as children from families below the median. Some of that gap had to do with differences in school performance, but much of it didn't. Among children with very high math test scores in third grade, those from high-income families were still more likely to become inventors than equally talented children from low-income families.

The researchers found that a big part of the difference was exposure. Children whose families moved to an area with more inventors when they were young were more likely to become inventors themselves. The effect was surprisingly specific.

Children who grew up around people inventing in a particular field, like medical devices or computers, were more likely to invent in exactly that field. And girls were more likely to invent in a field if they grew up in an area with more women inventing in it, but not if the inventors around them were men.

The researchers concluded that the most likely explanation was role models and connections, not better schools. They called the people who would have made important inventions if they'd been exposed to innovation as children "lost Einsteins."

That finding goes far beyond patents. If you grew up around people who started businesses, starting one feels like a normal thing to do. If nobody you knew ever ran a company, led a large group, or bought a house worth more than a few hundred thousand dollars, those things feel like they belong to a different world. The picture you carry of who does big things was mostly shaped by who you happened to see.

Seeing successful people doesn't always help, though. In 1997, the psychologists Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda studied how people react to "superstars," people who are extremely successful in a field.

They found that a superstar can inspire you, but only when their success seems attainable to you. When their success seemed out of reach, people felt worse about themselves after hearing about the superstar, not better.

That explains why reading about billionaires often does so little for people. The person in the Monaco mansion feels like they're from a different planet.

What tends to work better is seeing someone a few steps ahead of you, from a background like yours, who got there by a path you can actually picture yourself walking. Jan Koum's story works for many people because it starts somewhere ordinary, in a food stamp line, and you can see each step from there.

Devon realized he had never seen anyone his age, from a background like his, running a location as big as the one he'd been offered. Every manager he'd ever worked under had been at least 15 years older. Of course he couldn't picture himself there. He had never seen it done by anyone who looked like him.

Even when people do step into bigger roles, the picture often doesn't change right away. Many capable people get the job, the title, or the success, and still feel like someone else should be there.

In 1978, the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described this in a group of highly successful women: professionals with degrees, honors, and respected positions who still believed they weren't really intelligent and that they had fooled everyone who thought otherwise. They called it the impostor phenomenon.

Researchers have since found it in men and women across many professions. A 2020 review of 62 studies found that how common it was depended a great deal on the group and how it was measured, with estimates ranging from 9 percent to 82 percent of people studied.

The impostor feeling is worth knowing about for two reasons. First, it shows that the feeling of not belonging is not reliable evidence that you don't belong. Many of the people who feel it most strongly are highly qualified.

Second, it shows that waiting for the feeling to go away before stepping into a bigger role doesn't work, because for many people, the feeling shows up after they're already in it. If you wait until you feel like the kind of person who runs a company, you may wait forever.

When the picture is about wealth, like the $10 million house in Monaco, there's often another layer underneath it: what you believe about money itself.

Most people grew up hearing things about money long before they earned any. "Rich people are greedy." "Money changes people." "People like us don't have that kind of money." "It's wrong to want too much."

Nobody sat down and taught these as lessons. They came from overheard conversations, from how parents reacted to bills, and from how wealthy people were talked about at the dinner table. And they tend to stick without ever being examined.

The financial psychologist Brad Klontz calls these beliefs money scripts. In 2011, Klontz, Sonya Britt, and their colleagues developed a way to measure them and identified four common patterns.

• Money avoidance: believing money is bad, that rich people are greedy, that money corrupts people, or that you don't deserve it.
• Money worship: believing that more money will solve all your problems and finally make you happy.
• Money status: believing your self-worth equals your net worth.
• Money vigilance: being careful, watchful, and private about money.

In their research, the first three patterns, avoidance, worship, and status, were linked to lower income and lower net worth. Money vigilance was the one pattern associated with better financial health. These studies show that the beliefs go along with worse financial outcomes, though they can't prove the beliefs alone cause them.

Money avoidance matters most for this article. If part of you believes rich people are greedy or that money corrupts, then a picture of yourself with a lot of money is a picture of yourself becoming someone you don't respect. Of course you'll leave yourself out of it.

It's worth noticing, too, that swinging to the opposite belief doesn't help. Money worship, the idea that wealth will fix everything, was also linked to worse outcomes. The healthier position looks more like vigilance: taking money seriously, being careful with it, and seeing it as a tool for the life and the impact you want, without believing it's evil or that it will make you whole.

When Devon thought about why the idea of earning a lot of money made him uneasy, he remembered his father saying, more than once, that the people at the top "got there by stepping on people." He had never questioned it. Writing it down, he realized his own boss, who had treated him well for years and was now promoting him, was one of the people at the top. The script didn't hold up once he looked at it.

For many people, the reason they leave themselves out of the picture is age. They feel too young to lead, too young to be taken seriously, or too young to be the one in charge. And many people well past their twenties still feel like a kid wearing an adult's clothes. It's worth looking closely at what the research says, because some of what people believe about age is true, and some of it isn't.

The psychologist Jeffrey Arnett has spent more than two decades studying people between about 18 and 29, a stage he named emerging adulthood. One of his most consistent findings is that many people in this stage don't feel fully adult, even when they're legally adults with jobs and apartments.

When he asked people what actually makes someone an adult, the answers were remarkably consistent across ages, genders, social classes, and ethnic groups. They didn't name milestones like getting married or buying a house. The top three, which Arnett calls the "big three," were accepting responsibility for yourself, making independent decisions, and becoming financially independent.

That's useful to know, because it means being an adult isn't something that happens to you at a certain age. It's something you do. Someone who takes responsibility for their own life, makes their own decisions, and supports themselves is an adult in the way that matters most to people, whether they're 22 or 42.

There's another reason not to wait until you feel grown up. In 2006, the psychologists David Rubin and Dorthe Berntsen asked 1,470 Danish adults between 20 and 97 how old they felt. On average, people younger than 25 felt older than their age, and people older than 25 felt younger than their age. By 40, people on average felt about 20 percent younger than they actually were, and that gap held steady from then on.

In other words, the 29-year-old who still feels like a boy is completely normal, and so is the 45-year-old who doesn't feel old enough to be the boss. For most people, the inner sense of being "grown up enough" never quite catches up to their actual age. If you're waiting for that feeling before you take on the big role, the research suggests it may not come on its own.

Nearly two thousand years ago, the Stoic teacher Epictetus told his students the same thing. People kept putting off becoming who they knew they should be, waiting for some future day, some better teacher, some moment when they'd finally feel ready. He told them:

There's a popular belief that big success comes young, from the twenty-something founder in a hoodie. The data says otherwise. In 2020, the economists Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda used U.S. Census data to study the founders of new companies.

For the 1 in 1,000 fastest-growing startups, the average age of the founder when they started the company was 45. They also found that prior experience in the same industry strongly predicted success.

That cuts two ways, and both matter. If you're older, it means you haven't missed your chance. Many of the most successful businesses are started by people in their forties. If you're younger, it doesn't mean you have to wait 20 years. It means the experience you build now is what makes later success possible.

The 23-year-old who steps up to run a club, or the 27-year-old who takes on a bigger location, is building exactly the kind of experience that the research says leads to bigger things later. Stepping back from those chances because you feel too young means building less of it.

It's also worth being truthful about the hard part. Leading people older than you comes with real challenges. In a 2017 study of companies, the researchers Florian Kunze and Jochen Menges found that when supervisors were, on average, much younger than the people they managed, the older employees more often experienced negative emotions at work, and those companies tended to perform worse. Some older employees find it hard to report to someone younger, and that's a real cost to plan for.

It doesn't have to be the end of the story, though. There are things a younger leader can do that make the gap easier for everyone. Listen more than you talk at first. Ask the more experienced people for their advice, and use it. Be open about what you don't know. Earn respect by being competent and fair, instead of demanding it because of your title. Many people have led others older than themselves successfully by doing exactly that.

When Devon talked it through with his boss, he admitted that his biggest fear was standing in front of people who'd been doing the job longer than he'd been alive and having them think, "Who is this kid?" His boss said he'd thought about that too, and had picked Devon anyway because his team's results were among the best in the company, and because he listened to people. "They'll respect you if you're good at the job and you treat them well," his boss told him, "and you already do both."

If you can't see yourself in a role, the natural thing to do is wait until you can, and then step in. Research on how people actually grow into bigger roles suggests it usually happens in the opposite order.

Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior who has studied how people make big career and leadership transitions, describes this in her book Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader. Her argument, built on years of research with managers and executives, is that people rarely think their way into a new identity. They act their way into it.

You change how you see yourself by doing new things, working with new people, and trying on new roles, and the new way of seeing yourself follows from the experience. She calls this changing from the outside in. People who wait to feel like a leader before taking on leadership often wait a very long time, because the feeling mostly comes from doing it.

That fits everything else in this article. Possible selves change most when they're tied to a path you can walk. Role models help most when you can see yourself in their steps. The impostor feeling and the "too young" feeling often don't go away on their own. What changes the picture is experience: taking a step into the role, then another, until the person in the picture starts to look like you.

Jan Koum didn't start out seeing himself as a billionaire founder. He started by teaching himself to program from used books, then spent years as an engineer at Yahoo, then built a small app with a friend. Each step made the next one easier to picture. By the time he signed the deal on the door of the old welfare office, the person in the picture had been him for a long time.