The goal I couldn’t picture

On abstract goals, impostor syndrome and what cognitive science has to say to anyone who feels incompetent without understanding why.

Versão em Português

It came up in one of those performance reviews: “you need to be a reference point for the team.” Then came its siblings: “you need to be closer to the business,” “you need to engage more with the market.” Everyone nodded like it was obvious. I wrote it down, agreed and only later, rereading my notes, saw the problem: I had no idea what any of those phrases meant in practice.

And I want to be precise here, because the distinction matters. It wasn’t disagreement. It wasn’t laziness. I literally could not form a mental image of the end state. If you asked me to draw “closer to the business,” I’d be staring at a blank page. The goal existed as a word, not as a destination.

The reasonable move that didn’t work

I did what any methodical person would do: I asked for concrete examples. What does someone who already is a reference point do in a normal week that I don’t? How would I know I’d arrived? What’s the criterion?

And here’s the detail whose weight took me years to grasp: my managers didn’t have the answer. It wasn’t an answer being withheld, one I had to earn. It was an absent answer. They couldn’t describe the destination, nor the path to it. The goal was sincere, but it had never been translated into anything observable.

I left those conversations assuming the failure was mine. Everyone else seemed to get it; I must be slow. It’s an easy conclusion to reach when you’re the only person in the room admitting you don’t understand.

The quiet spiral

Without a visible target, every day is a guess. You don’t know where to go and, worse, you don’t know how to know whether you’re doing well. The absence of a criterion isn’t a neutral void; it’s fertile ground for anxiety. You work hard, but without a compass, and the constant feeling is of being about to be found out.

Over the cycles, the accumulated guesses got read as low performance. And the private conclusion formed, quietly: “maybe I’m simply not cut out for this level.”

That conclusion has a name. In 1978, psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described what they called the impostor phenomenon: competent people who can’t internalize their own competence and live with the sense of being frauds about to be exposed. The cruel part, in my case, is that the impostor feeds precisely on ambiguity. When there’s no clear criterion, there’s nothing that can disprove the fear. The doubt has no wall to bounce off.

Slowly, the right names

The turning point wasn’t a result. It was discovering that what I’d been living as a personal defect was actually a crossing of well-studied phenomena, and that none of them is called “incompetence.”

The first has to do with why the abstract stalls action. Construal Level Theory (Trope and Liberman) shows that the more distant or abstract something is, the more our mind represents it in terms of “why” and essence, erasing the “how”: the steps, the logistics, the next move. “Be a reference point” is abstract construal in its purest form: it states a direction and deletes the route. Acting on it requires a translation step that, for some people, simply doesn’t happen automatically.

The second is the most to the point. Goal-Setting Theory, from Locke and Latham, built on hundreds of studies, shows that specific and challenging goals produce higher performance than the classic “do your best.” Vague exhortations sound motivating, but they don’t engage any of the mechanisms that make a goal work: directing attention, mobilizing effort, sustaining persistence, prompting strategy. That feeling that the goal “gave me nothing to grab onto” wasn’t a weakness of mine. It was the very nature of a vague goal: there’s nothing to grab.

There’s still a useful twist for more complex roles. Seijts and Latham distinguish learning goals from performance goals and show that, in novel or ambiguous work, chasing a result you can’t even picture yet can make things worse: the focus on your own adequacy consumes the attention that should be going to discovering strategy. That’s exactly what happened to me: in trying to perform “being a reference point,” the ambiguity turned into anxiety about my own worth. The literature predicted it.

And the third name closes the loop with my life outside work. I’ve always had trouble “reading between the lines.” What we call subtext, linguistics calls implicatures: meaning that isn’t in the words and that the listener has to reconstruct by inference (Sperber and Wilson). I realized it’s the same cognitive machine. Filling in what wasn’t said in a conversation and filling in what wasn’t specified in a goal are the same operation. Some people process the explicit very well and under-generate the implicit. And that same tilt (an attraction to explicit, rule-bound, predictable systems) tends to be exactly why we’re good at technical work. These aren’t two separate problems: it’s a single trait, with a strong side and a costly one. (To be honest: this is an area of cognitive style still debated in the literature, not a settled verdict.)

The shift that changed more

Up to here, all of it could still be read as “the problem is how my brain handles the abstract.” But the piece that rebalanced the account was missing.

There’s a whole construct, in organizational psychology, for “the organization never made clear what it expects of me”: it’s called role ambiguity (Rizzo, House and Lirtzman, 1970). And it’s not a minor detail: meta-analyses link role ambiguity to lower performance and more distress at work (Tubre and Collins). The more complex the role, in fact, the greater the ambiguity tends to be, because the work is less formalized and the evaluation criteria less explicit.

Rereading my own scene through that lens changes everything. When I asked for criteria and got silence, that wasn’t me failing to decode a hidden answer. Often there was no answer to decode. I was reverse-engineering a specification that had never been written, and blaming myself for not managing it. A substantial part of what I’d charged to my own account was, in fact, a structural condition being demanded of me in silence.

The assumption no one examines

I’m not writing this looking for a villain, because I don’t think there is one. I think there’s an assumption, and it goes unnoticed precisely because it looks obvious.

We assume that the move from “doing the work well” to “being a reference point” and “owning the business context” is a natural progression, that everyone simply understands abstract mandates and grows into them. And because that assumption goes unquestioned, when someone stumbles, the stumble gets read through the only lens left on the table: competence. No one thinks “this transition has documented difficulties.” No one thinks “this goal was never operationalized.” People just think “he isn’t cutting it.”

The problem is that the person who stumbled also has only that lens. So they absorb the verdict, and the verdict becomes impostor fuel. The distance between “I don’t know how to make this transition” and “the difficulties of this transition are known and aren’t about my worth” is enormous, and almost no one has the information to cross it.

Where I am now

I’m not going to sell you a tidy ending, because I don’t have one. I’ve been figuring all of this out for a short time. I don’t have a “before and after,” I don’t have a metric that turned around, I don’t have the redemption arc with a bow on top.

What changed first was the story I tell myself: from “I’m broken” to “this has a name, and part of it was never mine alone to fix.” In practice, I’m testing small things: asking for observable criteria instead of trying to guess them; turning abstract mandates into learning goals and into “when X happens, I do Y” plans; treating a vague expectation as a spec bug to be clarified, not a test to be passed. Some of these help. I won’t pretend they’ve solved it.

If you recognized yourself here

I’ll leave you with the one thing I wish someone had told me in the middle of that cycle: the impostor feeling may not be a verdict on your worth. It may be pointing at two real things at once: a cognitive style that processes the explicit better than the implicit, and an environment that never translated what it was asking for.

Recognizing that isn’t making an excuse. It’s the first time the problem sits at the right size: one part is yours, to work on; the other part, honestly, never was. And, at least for me, learning to separate the two was the first thing in a long while that gave me some ground to stand on.

I still don’t have the ending. But I’ve stopped believing the ending is “I’m not good enough.” And, for now, that’s plenty.

The goal I couldn't picture