In the movie Catch Me if You Can, Leonardo DiCaprio plays the ultimate impostor. The movie is described as “[a] true story about Frank Abagnale Jr., who, before his 19th birthday, successfully conned millions of dollars' worth of checks as a Pan Am pilot, doctor, and legal prosecutor” (IMDb, 2025). Although the story's veracity has been challenged (Desta, 2021), there’s no denying that the movie was a commercial and critical success for director Steven Spielberg.

If you’d like to better understand your own real-life impostor syndrome, it’s important to understand why people were so fascinated by this story.

Catch Me if You Can isn’t the story of an industrious 18-year-old working hard and excelling at his studies, precociously attaining his qualifications as a pilot, or a doctor, or a lawyer. As remarkable as such an accomplishment might be, it’s no news to the moviegoing public that there are many gifted people in the world. Even just taking the top one-tenth of one percent, we’re still talking about millions of people. But this movie isn’t about any of them.

So, to take one example, this isn’t a tale about a man........

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