Michelle Obama has been speaking a lot lately, between promoting her memoir and a slew of speaking engagements, from turning up on podcasts to being interviewed by Oprah. She may not always say things that her fans and supporters want to hear (like how she still claims to have no interest in running for office), but she often offers something worth chewing on.

In a Monday appearance in London, where she was interviewed onstage by the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the former First Lady addressed her own impostor syndrome and spoke of how it's often inseparable from her being a black woman in white, male-dominated spaces. "The size of our hips, our style, our swag, it becomes co-opted, but then we are demonized," she said, adding, "My advice to young women is that you have to start by getting those demons out of your head. The questions I ask myself—'Am I good enough?'—that haunts us, because the messages that are sent from the time we are little is: Maybe you are not, don't reach too high, don't talk too loud."

Obama's not just talking as someone who's become comfortable in positions of prestige and power—she's also talking as someone who's spent years around other people deeply enmeshed in and used to that power. And she's gained useful insight into dealing with world and business leaders.

"Here is the secret," she added. "I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of, I have worked at nonprofits, I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the UN; they are not that smart."

One of the myths of "meritocracy" is that people gain money, power, and influence because they're inherently smarter or work harder than everyone else. There's been plenty of evidence that this isn't true, and now we have Michelle Obama to confirm it.