In an early appearance before the NBA players, as the New York Times described it,288 Michele told the athletes that the prospect of dealing with male athletes, male agents, male owners, and male reporters didn’t daunt her. “My past,” she said, “is littered with the bones of men who were foolish enough to think I was someone they could sleep on.”

Michele represents another prevalent attitude among the people I interviewed: if you can’t join ’em, their thinking seemed to be, beat ’em. Though not all minorities and nonconformists are underestimated, those who are often become driven to demolish stereotypes about themselves and their identities. Success, to them, looks not only like proving they’re as good as everyone else, but that they’re actually better.

This is not always a voluntary choice. A sickening relic of America’s structural racism is that many black parents are still forced to advise their children to be “twice as good” as their white peers. Until society starts to see racial minorities, people with disabilities, and other historically marginalized groups as equal to the norm—white men—this cycle of discrimination and striving will likely continue.

This extreme diligence is therefore somewhat bittersweet. Working harder than everyone else is a trick other people can borrow from people like Michele. But for marginalized groups, it’s more of a survival strategy. True progress will come when people of color are no longer forced to rely on it. Until then, it allows some people, including Michele, to accomplish remarkable things.

Michele’s superhuman effort is commendable, but there can be a point at which this kind of nonstop toil is a sign of a problem. Though this description does not seem to apply to Michele, overwork can also be a symptom of impostor syndrome, or the internalized fear that one has not really earned one’s accomplishments, and thus will soon be exposed as a fraud.

Feeling like you don’t quite belong is a common trigger of impostor syndrome. Women—who are underrepresented in boardrooms and corner offices—seem to be especially prone to this phenomenon. As Valerie Young writes in her book on the topic, The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, 90 percent of all PhD dissertations on impostor syndrome are by women.289

Many people of color, low-income men and women, and others who have historically been locked out of prestigious positions may also feel like impostors once they do break through to the top. Young cites one study that showed that nearly 86 percent of foreign medical residents in Canada had high levels of impostor feelings—perhaps because they felt different, and therefore inadequate. As another woman from the Bronx, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, put it, she felt like “a visitor landing in an alien country” when she arrived at Princeton.290 (This is one argument for women’s and historically black colleges—they offer a sense of strength in numbers.)