[no_wave]

That list made think about what would make you feel impostor syndrome. I think it often happens when the rewards you get are disproportionately large compared to the amount of effort you've put in.

No doubt Tom Hanks put in a lot of effort, but fifteen years into his career he was being paid tens of millions of dollars and getting nationally feted to go onto a movie set and do his thing. All of those people, simply because of the scale of the US and how the economic/legal structure operate, were at some point just way more rich or influential than it's natural for anyone to be, often too soon.

The people I've personally known most subject to impostor syndrome are programmers early in their career who slacked off a bit in college who are suddenly making close to or more than a hundred thousand dollars a year to do something they didn't have to work all that hard to be able to do. The sort of people who put in 70 hour weeks even in college never seem to feel it. (Neither do cooks)