I Never Felt Qualified, So I Learned to Speak Anyway

By the time I was invited to speak at Google’s MP7 building in Silicon Valley, I was already a Google Developer Expert.

Nobody had confused my name with another name and carried the administrative error all the way to an invitation. There was evidence that I knew something about the subject. Public, specific evidence.

I explained it away.

The invitation felt like the beginning of the examination that would finally reveal I did not belong there. I decided to speak about self-supervised learning with JAX and Flax, a subject I had studied, implemented and taught. But as I prepared, what I knew became less visible to me than everything I imagined the audience knew.

Every explanation began to look obvious. Every slide seemed introductory. I could picture someone noticing a simplification and thinking, This is what he came all the way here to tell us?

So I added depth. Then I looked again and thought it was still not advanced enough.

I was afraid of a precise technical question. One person would notice the edge of what I knew, and everything inside it would somehow stop counting. I kept preparing for that moment.

I gave the talk. Afterward, some of the other experts told me it was too advanced.

We had apparently attended two different presentations. They had heard a talk that assumed too much. I had heard a talk that still failed to prove I knew enough.

The people in the actual room had different specialties, questions and limits. The people in my head shared one enormous intelligence. Between them, they knew every paper, every derivation, every implementation detail and every objection I had missed. I had given that imaginary audience complete knowledge, then compared it with everything I could still find unfinished in myself.

That was the audience I had prepared for.

I had spent more time asking what would keep somebody from calling the talk basic than asking what a listener needed in order to follow it. I left out steps I assumed everyone knew. I put technical material in before giving people a reason to care about it. A simpler explanation felt dangerous because somebody might think the subject was simple, and then what had I come to offer?

The actual audience paid the price for an attack that never came.

That was the part I had not understood about feeling unqualified. It could make me harder to learn from. I was so busy trying to make the invitation defensible that I had made the explanation less useful.

I grew up in a small town near Agadir. Silicon Valley reached me through screens, products, company names and the lives of people who seemed to have begun much closer to it. Research arrived in English. Parts of my university education arrived in French. Advanced knowledge kept appearing to come from somewhere else.

Distance began to look like hierarchy.

The people around me had intelligence, craft, memory and humor. What I could not see was a path from that life to the places I watched through a screen. Years later, I could get an invitation to one of those places and still feel that the people inside must know something I did not.

A title had not repaired that picture. I had already tried waiting for the next achievement to do it. Something I made, something people used, teaching, recognition. Each one could reassure me briefly before becoming the minimum I ought to have managed anyway. There was always something else I could not yet explain.

Then I would try to explain what I did know, and the checking would begin before the first sentence was finished. Had I named the exception? Should I give the mathematical version so they knew I knew it? Was that too obvious? Had I pronounced it properly?

Part of my mind spoke. Another part watched me speak.

I could interrupt my own explanation to answer an objection nobody had made, then add a condition, then try to return to a sentence the listener had been waiting for me to finish. Every branch made sense to me because I knew the tree. The listener received branches without a trunk.

There was already enough to do in moving between languages. An idea might arrive in English, connect to mathematics I had studied in Arabic or French, become clearer to me in Darija, and have to come back into English for a talk. I valued what those crossings let me see. But speaking required me to bring them together. I was adding the question of whether I deserved to speak to the work of finding the words.

The feedback at MP7 did not cure this. I could discount “too advanced” as easily as I had discounted the invitation. Perhaps I had simply misjudged the level. Perhaps the next audience would expose what this one had missed.

Still, it gave me a mistake I could actually work on. I had prepared for people I had invented. The people listening had to follow the talk I gave them.

I began trying to prepare with their understanding in mind. What should somebody be able to see by the end? Where did the notation need an intuition first? Which derivation belonged in the main explanation, and which could wait for a question?

In practice, that meant stating the idea before qualifying it. Leaving enough space for someone to follow. Letting a pause happen without immediately filling it with more proof that I knew the subject.

And saying “I don’t know” when I did not know.

Somebody in the room would know something I did not. I could guide people through one subject and ask a basic question about another. I found that easier to accept in the abstract than while standing in front of them.

But when someone was trying to understand, I had something more immediate to do than settle what kind of person I was. I could listen to the question, explain the next step, and notice whether it helped. Their need could pull my attention away from the person I imagined they were judging.

That responsibility was more useful than confidence.

I kept accepting invitations while uncertain. I prepared while afraid. Some talks went badly. Sometimes I was fast, defensive or difficult to follow. Sometimes I left replaying one weak answer and forgot how much else had happened.

I still have to study the things I do not understand. Speaking did not make those gaps disappear. It gave other people a chance to hear what I did understand, and gave me a chance to find out whether the explanation reached them.

At MP7, I had been afraid the talk would reveal how little I knew. The feedback showed me how little I had understood about the audience. I had work to do, but it was different work from the examination I had been preparing for.

My life reached some rooms before my self-image did. So I learned to speak while waiting for it to arrive.