Failure

"Daddy?"

"Yes, dear." Rick's breathing stopped for a moment. He had a good idea what was coming.

"How do birds fly?" It was indeed coming.

"They have wings."

"So, if I have wings, can I also fly?"

"No dear, the wings of birds are special. They are made out feathers."

"So, if I make a wing out of feathers, can I also fly?"

"No dear, because...ehm..." Rick reached the limit of his knowledge on birds, and on the physics of their flying abilities. Even worse, Rick knew he reached the limit of his knowledge on birds, and on the physics of their flying abilities. Their bloody flying abilities. "Because birds are made that way. Now go play outside."

Asking why

Young children sometimes seem to have an endless supply of curiosity, much to the desperation of some parents. The children fight the lack of knowledge about the world by firing endless questions, and the poor parents are expected to know all the answers. In a way, scientists are very much like children: they have to keep asking 'why' until they can't answer the question anymore. It's only at that point that we can learn something totally new: science is, trying to move the edge of humanity's knowledge a tiny bit further.

Given the similar mind-set of children and scientists, you would think it would be easy to have the mind-set of a scientist. Yet, at least for me, this is something I had to re-learn when I became a scientist. Somewhere along the way, we move from learning by asking questions to learning by reproducing things we are told. Somewhere along the way, not knowing something moves from being an opportunity to learn something new to being a source of shame and lower test scores. This sense of shame often persists throughout later life, making it hard to see and admit your own mistakes and ignorance.

Not being good enough

It's easy to see scientists as unimaginably smart people that are the rational keepers of human knowledge. Such a view is cultivated by TV series, the media, and sometimes even by scientists themselves, but it is quite far from my own experience of scientists. Scientists are very much human beings. They are often not so much driven by rational thinking, but by a deep passion, which keep them going when things get tough (a career in science is often accompanied by some level of sacrifice).  Scientists can be very irrational, and they can be as nasty as any other person. The power structure of academia might even favour nastiness to some extent.  

Many scientists are also deeply insecure and have a real fear that they will be exposed to be useless dimwits any minute now. This insecurity is also quite irrational, because most of these people are pretty awesome. A lot of this has to do with comparing yourself to others, which is made especially easy in academia, since we are keen to count papers, number of citations, journal impact factors, and h-indices. The ingrained image of scientists as unimaginably smart people is not helping either. The rat race of academia is also a fight for a very limited number of permanent positions, making the whole thing a big competition in which you have to shine and sell yourself. The limited number of jobs, grants, and fellowships means there will be many rejections to deal with. I'm not sure there are many career paths where rejections are quite so numerous and explicit.

Another thing that's not helping your insecurity is that being a scientist requires you to be very critical about your work. In that sense, being insecure can be a good thing, and I do find myself trusting insecure scientists more than the self-confident ones (if you won't be critical about yourself, I will have to be more critical about you). Being self-critical will make your work better, but it's easy to confuse mistakes in your work with mistakes in your own self. Here again is that idea that making mistakes and not knowing things is something to be ashamed of.  And even if you are critical about your own work, an anonymous reviewer of your paper, or a senior professor at a conference, will have no problem finding something that they think is wrong with your work, and they will surely let you know.

Doing better

These are some of the things that can make it easy to feel, unrightfully, like you're not good enough to be a scientist. It is very hard to be critical about your work, and yet be kind to yourself, to not confuse ignorance with incompetence. It may also take some effort to be critical about other people's work without being a jerk about it. However, in many situations, I think being kind to yourself and others will improve science, if only because no one should feel miserable doing their job. Scientists do make mistakes and they don't know everything, but science is still the best way we have to learn about the universe. We can only move on constructively if we accept our mistakes and see them as something positive, instead of something that affects your reputation. This is very hard to achieve and I think starting young might be good. So, instead of: "Because that's the way it is, now go and play", let's do a bit more of: "I don't know, let's try and find out, shall we?"