Why Did It Take Us So Long?

On Credentials, Capability, and the Man You Kept Meaning to Meet

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A few weeks ago, I left a comment on a Medium article written by a man who had spent sixty years becoming someone — collecting degrees, titles, board memberships, and the quiet relief of being introduced correctly at dinner parties. He wrote beautifully about the moment he realized the someone he'd built might not actually be him.

I recognized every word.

And it sparked a question I haven't been able to put down since.

Why does it take men like us so long?

Not men in general. Men like us specifically. Educated. Capable. Adaptable. The kind of men who stepped forward when nobody else did — who picked the team, called the play, led the room — and somehow still went home wondering if they'd fooled everyone again. The kind of men who did everything they were supposed to do and watched the world respond on its own timeline, not theirs. Who got the degree and waited for the promotion that took two years longer than it should have? Who added another credential when the first one didn't quiet the noise? And another. And another.

Smart men. Accomplished men. Men who spent decades becoming someone, then arrived at sixty-something, and are still waiting to meet themselves properly.

That question is what this article is about. Not a clean answer — I'm not sure one exists. But an honest excavation of why the delay happens, what it costs, and what finally — after enough painful catalysts accumulate — makes the scales fall.

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The Signs Were There the Whole Time

There is a line from an old film I watched recently that stopped me mid-scene.

"Signs. There are signs everywhere."

Blah, blah, blah.

Except — not blah. Because looking back across sixty-five years, the signs were embarrassingly obvious. As a third grader, I won the state spelling bee — not against kids my own age, but against older ones who had every reasonable advantage over me. I didn't fully understand what had happened. I just knew I hadn't quit under pressure. Years later, I was discovered as a quarterback almost by accident — my coach caught me in an informal game, not because I was the biggest or the most obvious choice, but because I was the one who stayed calm in the huddle. The one the other players looked to when someone needed to believe in the play. The fact that I could also throw the ball 70 yards probably didn't hurt. I called that a fluke, too. And later still, as the only first-level manager in my company invited to lead a committee of C-suite executives — people with board memberships, advanced degrees, and leverage I hadn't accumulated yet — I sat at that table wondering when someone would notice I didn't belong there.

The one people called when they needed someone to step forward.

I called it a fluke. Every single time.

That's the thing about Imposter Phenomenon that doesn't get said plainly enough. It isn't the absence of evidence. It's the systematic rejection of it. The evidence was piling up my entire life — external validation arriving consistently, reliably, from sources with no reason to lie — and somewhere in the internal processing, it kept getting filed under luck, serendipity, and they don't know what they're doing choosing me.

Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first identified this pattern in 1978 — originally in high-achieving women, though subsequent research has made clear it doesn't discriminate by gender. What they described was a persistent internalized belief that one's success is undeserved and will eventually be exposed as fraudulent — regardless of evidence to the contrary.

Regardless of evidence to the contrary.

That phrase is worth sitting with. Because it means the credential chase that followed wasn't irrational. It was the only logical response available to someone who had decided, somewhere below conscious awareness, that the evidence couldn't be trusted.

If the signs can't be believed, then you go looking for proof.

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The Pursuit of Proof

After a career-ending injury ended my college football aspirations and an incomplete first attempt at college, I went to work. It was not the plan. But it was the reality. And somewhere in the back of my mind — nagging, persistent, unfinished — was the knowledge that I had left something on the table academically.

So I went back. Ten years later. Completed the bachelor's degree I should have finished the first time. And almost immediately enrolled in an MBA program — not because I was burning with passion for business strategy, but because I believed it would finally deliver the thing the signs never quite convinced me I deserved.

Credibility. Proof. Permission to take up space in rooms I had already been leading for years.

The MBA did eventually produce two promotions. Real ones. Hard-earned. And still — somewhere underneath the titles and the expanded responsibilities — the internal voice remained largely unconvinced. If anything, each promotion quietly raised the stakes.

See? Now there's even more to lose when they figure it out. Keep going.

So I kept going.

A position in higher education opened something in me I hadn't anticipated — teaching turned out to be the thing I was actually built for. The passion was real. The calling was genuine. And Imposter Phenomenon (IP), recognizing an opportunity, promptly doubled down.

By this point, IP was nagging me like an ex-wife seeking spousal support — figuratively, of course — relentless, persistent, and completely unmoved by the fact that I had already paid considerably more than seemed reasonable.

Because here is what IP does in the presence of genuine calling: it raises the stakes. When something finally matters — truly matters — the fear of being exposed as a fraud becomes proportionally more acute. The voice that called the spelling bee a fluke and the quarterback discovery an accident now had something real to protect against.

So the pursuit intensified. Another master's degree in a different discipline. Doctoral research and work. Multiple certifications. Each one chasing the same thing the MBA had promised and not quite delivered — the internal sensation that enough proof had finally accumulated to silence the voice.

It hadn't. It didn't. It never does.

Because here is the thing about using credentials to treat Imposter Phenomenon — and I say this as someone with a curriculum vitae that should have figured this out earlier — credentials are an external solution to an internal problem. They address the symptom while leaving the source entirely untouched.

Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory helps explain why. When extrinsic motivation — external validation, titles, degrees, promotions — substitutes for intrinsic self-knowledge, the result is a perpetual deficit. You can keep filling the bucket. But if the hole at the bottom hasn't been addressed, the bucket never actually fills.

IP was the hole. The credentials were the water.

I had a very impressive bucket — on the outside.

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Why Men Like Us. Why So Long?

Before going further, I want to acknowledge something directly.

Ladies — you navigate this terrain more so than we do. Research suggests you carry the Imposter Phenomenon burden at rates that exceed our own. Clance and Imes identified it first in high-achieving women for a reason. The additional weight of cultural expectation, systemic barrier, and emotional labor that you carry alongside IP makes your version of this journey simultaneously more common and more complex than mine.

This piece is addressed to one room. The door is open to everyone.

But I want to stay in my lane here — because the specific question nagging at me is about men like us. Educated. Capable. Adaptable. Men who led rooms, earned credentials, and built lives that looked from the outside like evidence of someone who had figured it out.

So why hadn't we?

Part of the answer lives in what researchers call normative male alexithymia — a term that sounds clinical until you translate it into plain English. Alexithymia is the difficulty in identifying and expressing emotions. And for men of our generation — raised inside a cultural framework that treated emotional literacy as optional at best and suspicious at worst — it became so normalized it stopped feeling like a limitation at all.

And yes — this is where the ladies say, DUH.

Ronald Levant's research on this phenomenon is worth sitting with. He found that many men don't simply choose not to express emotions — they genuinely struggle to identify what they're feeling in the first place. The internal landscape gets crowded out by performance, achievement, and forward motion. Not because men are emotionally deficient — I see you smiling with rolled eyes, ladies — but because an entire generation was systematically undertrained in the one skill that self-knowledge requires most.

You cannot meet yourself if you cannot read yourself.

And for men like us — intelligent, adaptable, high-functioning — there was an additional layer of complexity. Our capability became its own obstacle. We were good enough at performing to make the performance sustainable indefinitely. Good enough at adapting to make the adaptation look like genuine self-possession. Good enough at leading others to avoid the uncomfortable question of whether we actually knew who was doing the leading.

Adaptation is a survival skill. It is not the same thing as self-knowledge.

Here is the particular irony that I keep returning to: the very qualities that made us effective — the calm in the huddle, the capacity to step forward, the ability to figure it out under pressure — are the same qualities that made the delay possible. We were too competent to collapse. Too adaptable to be forced by circumstance into the excavation that less capable men sometimes get pushed into earlier.

Suffering, it turns out, can be clarifying. But competence delays the suffering.

Which means the men most equipped to do the inner work are often the last ones circumstances force into doing it.

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The Thing That Finally Moved

I want to be honest about what finally cracked this open — because it wasn't a therapist's couch, a men's retreat, or a carefully curated mindfulness practice. It was a bucket list item.

I wrote a book.

Not because I had fully figured anything out. Not because I felt qualified — IP was still very much operational, thank you very much. But because something in me knew that an unwritten book was one more unfinished thing, I wasn't willing to leave on the table. The same feeling that sent me back to complete the bachelor's degree ten years after I should have finished it.

Something was left undone. And that particular itch, I have learned, is one I cannot leave unscratched.

What I did not anticipate was what the writing would do to me.

There is something that happens when you sit down and try to articulate — honestly, on the page, for other people to read — what you actually believe about human struggle, psychological capacity, and the accumulated weight of a life lived mostly forward without looking inward. The writing has a way of turning around and looking at you.

I started writing about the pile — the accumulated habits, unresolved history, and quiet dysfunction most people manage around rather than through — and somewhere in the middle of it realized I was also writing about myself. Not as a case study. As the evidence.

The more I wrote, the more I began to understand things I had spent decades either not seeing or actively avoiding. The thing I had sometimes hidden. Sometimes let out of its cage. Sometimes it was lost entirely and assumed to be gone for good.

It wasn't gone. It had just been waiting with considerably more patience than I deserved.

Writing the book was part excavation, part confession, and part self-therapy — wrapped in the language of positive psychology and Psychological Capital because that was the framework I had spent years studying. Hope. Efficacy. Resilience. Optimism. The internal resources that determine not just how people feel about difficulty but how they actually respond to it.

I had been teaching these concepts for years.

It turns out I had also been needing them.

And then I published it. Which — for someone whose Imposter Phenomenon had been running at full operational capacity for six decades — was its own particular act of audacity. Putting your name on something. Sending it out into the world. Waiting for the exposure that IP had been promising was coming since the third-grade spelling bee.

It didn't come.

What came instead was something quieter and considerably more disorienting. A gradual recognition that the voice — the one that had been filing everything under luck and serendipity and they don't know what they're doing, choosing me — had gotten measurably quieter.

Not silent. Let's not get dramatic.

But quieter. For the first time in sixty-something years, measurably, undeniably quieter.

The scales hadn't fallen yet. But they had started to loosen.

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The Diagnosis That Explained the Map

I was sixty-four years old when someone finally handed me a piece of paper that explained a significant portion of my entire life.

High-IQ ADHD. Combined type.

I want to be careful about how I say what comes next — because it would be easy to frame this as a revelation that explained away decades of struggle, or as a tragedy about time lost, or as an indictment of a system that should have caught it earlier. All of those framings contain some truth. None of them is the whole truth.

The whole truth is more interesting.

For sixty-four years, I had been adapting. Not because I had consciously developed a strategy — but because adaptation was simply what my nervous system did in the absence of any other available option. The ADHD was always there. The executive dysfunction was always there. The hyperfocus that made me formidable in certain rooms and completely unreliable in others — always there.

I just didn't have a name for any of it.

And here is the thing about being a high-IQ individual with undiagnosed ADHD — the intelligence and the neurodivergence enter into a complicated negotiation that can run for decades without either party fully revealing itself. The intelligence compensates. The ADHD adapts. The result is a person who functions well enough on the outside that nobody — including the person himself — thinks to look more carefully at what's running underneath.

The research on late ADHD diagnosis in high-functioning adults is consistent on this point. Cognitive ability masks symptom presentation. The very brightness that makes these individuals capable also makes them invisible to standard diagnostic criteria — because they've developed sophisticated enough compensatory strategies to perform adequately despite the neurological difference underneath.

Adequately. Not optimally. Not without cost.

The cost, it turns out, had been accumulating my entire life quietly — in the exhaustion of constant compensation, in the self-sabotage that looked like bad luck, in the credential chase that was partly IP and partly a nervous system looking for external structure to replace the internal regulation it couldn't reliably generate on its own.

The diagnosis didn't change who I was. But it changed how I read the story of who I had been.

Suddenly, the dismissals made more sense. The adaptation that looked like capability — and was capability, genuinely — also had a shadow side I hadn't been able to see clearly. The imposter voice had a neurological component I hadn't accounted for. The unfinished things that nagged at me — the incomplete degree, the unwritten book — were partly the pile and partly a brain that struggles with completion in ways I now understand rather than simply judge.

I am not interested in using a diagnosis as an excuse. I never have been. The pile doesn't move itself regardless of what's causing the weight.

But understanding the mechanism — finally, at sixty-four, with the scales falling completely — changed something fundamental about the way I carry it.

Not lighter exactly. But differently. With considerably less self-indictment than before.

And maybe that is what self-knowledge actually delivers — not the absence of the weight, but the ability to carry it without mistaking it for evidence of who you are.

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The Man Who Was Waiting

I asked the question that sparked this article in a comment section — to a writer reflecting honestly on sixty years of becoming someone before asking who he actually was. It was a genuine question. I wasn't sure I had the answer myself.

I still don't. Not completely.

But here is the most honest answer I can offer — not as a psychologist, not as a professor with a curriculum vitae longer than seems entirely necessary, but as a sixty-five-year-old man who spent most of his life being chosen to lead rooms he wasn't sure he deserved to be in:

We took so long because we were too busy becoming someone to stop and ask who we already were.

The credentials were real. The achievements were earned. The leadership was genuine. None of it was a fluke — even when we filed it under luck and moved on. But somewhere in the accumulation of proof, the man we were actually becoming got crowded out by the man we were performing.

And performance, sustained long enough, starts to feel like identity.

For men of our generation — raised inside a cultural framework that rewarded achievement and treated introspection as something between indulgent and suspicious — the inner architecture got neglected not out of laziness or cowardice but out of a kind of relentless forward motion that looked, from the outside, exactly like strength.

It was strength. It was also avoidance. Both things were true simultaneously.

What I know now — at sixty-five, post-diagnosis, post-book, post-enough-painful-catalysts-to-finally-pay-attention — is that the man I kept meaning to meet was never actually missing. He was just waiting. Patiently. Persistently. With considerably more grace than I had shown him.

He was there in the third-grade spelling bee. He was there in the huddle. He was there in the committee room full of C-suite executives, wondering when someone would notice he didn't belong — not knowing that his belonging was never in question. Only his belief in it.

He has been here the whole time.

And if you are reading this as a man of a certain age — educated, capable, adaptable, accomplished, and still somehow not entirely sure the evidence can be trusted — I want to say something directly to you:

The signs were not flukes. The rooms were not mistakes. The people who chose you — and the ones you chose — were not wrong.

You were not wrong.

The credential chase made sense given what you believed at the time. The adaptation was genuinely impressive. The forward motion kept a lot of important things alive that needed to be kept alive. Honor all of it.

But at some point — and I would gently suggest that point is now — it is worth asking the question I avoided for sixty-five years:

Who is the man who has been doing all of this?

Not the titles. Not the degrees. Not the curriculum vitae or the committee memberships or the carefully maintained evidence of someone who has figured it out.

The man underneath all of that.

He has been waiting a long time. And unlike the promotion that took two years longer than it should have, this one is entirely within your power to grant.

Psychological Capital — the Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism that determine not just how we feel about difficulty but how we actually respond to it — is not a personality trait you either have or don't have. It is buildable. Trainable. Practicable. Even now. Especially now.

The pile doesn't move itself. But it does move.

And the man who finally picks up the shovel — the one who has been waiting patiently for sixty-five years to become someone — turns out to be exactly who you suspected he might be all along.

Worth meeting. Worth the wait. Worth every painful catalyst it took to get here.

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Gary L. Keck is an Associate Professor of Management, Marketing, and Psychology and the author of Everyone Has Their Own Pile of S#!t: How to Turn Life's Mess Into Psychological Strength. His work focuses on Psychological Capital, applied positive psychology, and the intersection of psychological strength and human performance.