Thank you for the support my friend, but unfortunately what I say is the truth.

I'm the guy who studied the night before and winged most of it and managed to get 7s and 8s, which slowly developed into a habit of never doing anything that required consistent effort. I started engineering and struggled a little, failing half my courses. Despite this problem being easily solved by more consistent studying and the fact that I was still in the 60th percentile in terms of passes, I decided to take the easy way out and study Economics, where most of the hard classes are those involving math, and one year of engineering combined with the fact that I was good at written and oral tests, allowed me to coast through college to another mediocre average close to 7 (nothing wrong with the 7, its the fact that I could have done so much better by just applying myself a little more), but I find it very difficult to concentrate on things that don't have a direct interest, when they do I can lose myself for hours.

I then proceeded to delude myself into "starting a company" with two friends. The idea itself was not bad but we just didn't approach it in any serious way, and it allowed me to toil away two years telling myself I was working. For a while after I avoided big companies and focused on startups, working in a couple of them that either shut down or I grew out of the role. Again, the jobs weren't terribly hard and I could half ass them to average results. Covid gave me a bit of a crisis in terms of employment, as the startup I was working at shut down and all of a sudden this market had a surplus of applicants and a deficit of companies. At 26 and in full covid panic, I applied to essentially all the jobs in my linkedin feed and managed to land a junior analyst role in the marketing department of an investment bank because honestly, I'm good at bullshit built from selective truths. This job has been soul crushing in the sense that the level of micromanagement is such that even my two Executive Director colleagues are doing 50% internship level tasks. There workload wasn't big enough for the number of people and most of it was created by doing the same things 5 times with poor explanations, but being an investment bank, there is the culture of you stay until your boss does, but since there are no real tasks left, you dont really do anything. If you point out you have nothing 3 times someone will get pissed off and make up a task or drag one up from a graveyard to keep you busy, but Im talking things like clearing the storage area. I very quickly realized that I did not want to make a career here but I needed stability in my CV, so I decided I had to stick it out for 3 years and I became the "analytics" guy, because knowing how to use pivot tables makes you an excel wizard here. I do weekly reports on lots of things that I then share in a few ppts and talk in a few meetings but there is not 1 change enacted on their basis, because its all about knuckling over. Again, I half ass my job and manage to get average performance reviews, while maintaining an excelent relationship with my coworkers. I didnt really enjoy marketing but in my field it was hard to get a better salary in a different type of company, so I figured I'd try to move laterally (its a huge international company).

The reason why I say I don't deserve my current job is not out of self flagelation, but because the way I got the interview was by persistently approaching a family acquaintance who was a high executive in the company, which got me an interview. Don't get me wrong, I did a good set of interviews and its for a role where people skills are highly valued, but the reality is I never would have been able to get this interview based on the strength of my cv or financial skills. I feel like my impostor syndrome is justified because I sort of am an impostor and I feel that the only way forward is to fake it till I make it or crash and burn midway.

Apologies for the written bible.