I have a picture I took at Mother ad agency in 2005. It’s of a bunch of the creatives messing about, doing some kind of ridiculous dance to camera. It’s not cool or particularly funny, just a bunch of 20-somethings being 20-somethings. Dave doing the robot, Lolly some kind of b-boying thing, Sam frozen in a dad dance. Thing is, each of those lovely loons have gone on to be leaders of our industry.

Dave (Kolbusz) is running Orchard in New York, Sam (Walker) is ECD at Uncommon and also their go-to director. Lolly (Thompson) is global CCO of M&C Saatchi. And then there’s Caroline Pay, ex-CCO of Dentsu; John Cherry, ECD of Atomic; Leon Wilson, the founder and creative director of Destroy All Monsters; and finally my work-wife, Ben Middleton, CCO of Modern Citizens. So now a bunch of 40-somethings being 40-somethings, albeit adorned with grand titles.

Imposter Syndrome gets far too much publicity. If you want to live a more contented creative existence, I highly recommend entirely rejecting the Imposter Phenomenon (it’s original and more apt title) and getting comfortable with a business theory that unsurprisingly gets significantly fewer LinkedIn inches: that of the Peter Principle. A concept that suggests people in hierarchical systems rise to their level of incompetence.