#growth > Impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud". -- [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome) Impostor syndrome is one of the most common feelings people get when they start to produce their own work. And this is for good reason, the K-college education system ingrains this mentality into us. In school, everything you do has a correct answer. There is always someone there to evaluate whether or not our work is right or wrong, who holds the knowledge to make that decision and proclaim it as the truth. In school, we have very little agency over the decision about whether our work is valuable. That decision is simply left for someone else to make. This dynamic implicitly creates a situation where we doubt our own work until someone else evaluates it. This bleeds into our post-school life, especially as we first enter the workforce and start producing our own work for the first time. But there comes a point and time when _you_ get to decide if your own work is valuable. You get to explain why you think your work is important, and *you* get to proclaim that it is valuable. Others can disagree with your explanation, but it's still your work and that matters. Impostor syndrome is one of those things that we all go through, and at some point we simply decide that our work is [[I Am Enough|good enough]]. It's a decision that we have to make by ourselves for ourselves, or we will forever be relying on the validation of someone else before we can take pride in our own work.