The phrase “Fake it till you make it” has been around forever and tossed as advice to countless people. The question is whether the idea is sound, or even an ethical one. Many defend it fervently, while others hesitate due to the negative connotation carried already by its very first word.

The most famous discussion on this topic came from Amy Cuddy in her TED Talks in 2012 with over 29 million views. She spoke about a lot of things, but notably on the “power pose”. How striking a powerful posture helps us internalize genuine confidence and even alter our hormones. Unfortunately, that talk has also been in a lot of fire with people “debunking” the claims especially the hormones ones.

So what should be our take in the topic?

The unfortunate truth is, the phrase “Fake it till you make it” is very old. All the advice that have been given through it have vastly different meaning. It ranges from moving your body in a certain way to feel more confident, tricking yourself into believing that you are an expert, to even trying to lie or build a wrong impression of what other people will think about you. When we ask, “What is our take?”, we first have to address: which one?

In an attempt to make this clear, I split the fake it till you make it advice into two categories:

  1. Image management
  2. Pushing through insecurities

Image Management

Fake it till you make it in terms of image management is when we try to change how others view us so we can create a certain impression advantageous to us.

If you are building a product, then you fake the impression that you already have lots of customers, because nobody wants to be the first customer. If you are making a big sale, you better dress up nicely, rent a nice car if you have none, so that you project a convincing impression. After all, negotiation is a transfer of conviction. Never show weakness, otherwise you will be taken advantage of. As the saying goes: Never admit anything, never apologize, never show weakness.

Needless to say, this version of fake it till you make it is not a good one. When we put fake customer logos on a website, it is borderline or plain fraud. Stretch it further and we have a non working or non existing products advertised as functional, like the notorious cases of Theranos Blood Testing and Nikola Electric Truck, where both founders were convicted guilty of fraud or over statements.

But what about the “lesser” case of image management? Renting cars, not showing weakness, refusing to apologize or admit wrong doings to not lose leverage? These tactics probably won’t land us into prison, but a deal instead. Still, I would argue that it’s not right. Obviously, we don’t need to proclaim every weakness proactively to everyone, but refusing to apologize, inflating our image to manipulate others into decision is still rooted in lies and deception. We draw the line at the intention. Putting on a clean suit out of respect is vastly different than buying a €10,000 suit to create a false impression to rope people into making a deal, it would have crossed into manipulation.

Even the new generation have a beef with this, and they call it out regularly as “inauthenticity”, but the Bible goes deeper into the heart and call it “hypocrisy”. It is a symptom of living for a human rather than God. The Pharisees in the Bible were the ultimate image managers, curating an image of righteousness and authority. They stood on the street offering long elaborate eloquent prayers, giving money while making public spectacle of it, fasting with a deliberate neglected look, all to secure human respect and social power. Jesus didn’t have kind words for these things:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence… You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” Matthew 23:25-28

Jesus never came wrapped in a suit, nor in royal robes. He didn’t cling to his high status nor project artificial dominance. He didn’t hide his human limits to look strong, he wept openly and expressed deep anguish. He didn’t flatter influential people nor gain any favour to close any “deal”, even when it cost Him His life. I think this is the true definition of being authentic, and it is a liberating one.

Ironically, even being authentic is faked today as well. People wear hoodies instead of suits, imitate a poor (arm) aesthetic to match the hip cities vibe, force talks about failures and learnings to appear relatable, or follow certain political idea in order to have the right image. In a way, these lesser forms of “image management” are more dangerous, as they seem harmless when we start out.

Pushing Through Insecurities

What if we didn’t lie in our CV, interviewed honestly, and landed a great job,- but which we now feel unqualified to do. We didn’t manage our image deceptively. We just tried our best, and now after landing the job, we struggle with internal insecurities such as:

It must be luck that I got this position.

They misunderstood something, otherwise they wouldn’t have picked me.

Why are they trusting me with this? I’m really not the right person.

This is the infamous “impostor syndrome”: a self doubt in one’s abilities and accomplishments despite evidence to the contrary. It can stem from a perfectionist tendency, a feeling of never being enough, or attributing success purely to luck, etc.

Fake it until you make it is frequently offered as the fix here, especially early in a career. You’ll feel not enough for a long time, so just fake it until you’re comfortable. There is even data to back this up. While the often circulated statistic about “70% of people experienced impostor syndrome at some point in their life” is a widely requoted myth, other studies such as this one shows that severe self-doubt is highest when we are young and naturally fades as we age. The message is clear: self doubt is normal, we will outgrow it, so work hard and fake it until we make it. The term faking it gets the credit for what is actually just time, practice, and experience doing the work.

To make the advice more palatable, there were countless attempts to rebrand it more positively such as “learn until you make it”, “face it until you make it”, “trust that you can make it”, “mistake it till you make it” etc. It’s even often mixed with Christian messages such as “pray until you pray” or C.S. Lewis’ famous words: “Do not waste time bothering whether you ’love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.”

Even though the advice seems to be proven working and can be given as an advice, I would argue that it still has a severe weakness and I would like to offer another perspective on it. The main critique is that fake it till you make it advice puts too much emphasis on ourselves. “Do xxx until you make it”. There is always the you, and the it, and we remain anxious whenever we feel we haven’t reached the it. We picture this often as something akin to low self-esteem, but I would argue that the real problem is high self-focus. We are too obsessed with ourselves. This is perhaps why people with impostor syndrome reject evidence of their competence,- the attention is locked into the internal self criticism rather than the external.

The cure for high self-focus, have to go to a direction of self forgetfulness. It’s not about deciding how high or low we are, or how close we are to the it, but simply thinking of ourselves less.

When the impostor syndrome comes, we direct a lot of our thoughts and energy inwards: “Will I fail?”, “Why are they trusting me with this?”, “Am I really qualified?”. Self-forgetfulness turns the question outward: “How can I serve the people around me at our work?”, “How can we build a good product for the end customer?”, “How can I deliver real value here?”. We focus less on ourselves and more on how we can serve others. This is where C.S. Lewis’s advice and phrase like pray until you pray are often misunderstood. They are not telling us to fake an emotion until we can manufacture it. It’s telling us to not dwell on our internal feelings. Stop worrying about how we feel, take the spotlight off ourselves, and go do it or serve others.

But then how do we free ourselves from these inward thoughts when we can’t strictly control what appears in our heads? C.S. Lewis captured this paradox well in Mere Christianity when describing a truly humble person: if we meet a humble person, he won’t be thinking about humility at all-, in fact, he won’t be thinking about himself at all. We can’t think less of ourselves by constantly monitoring whether we are thinking less of ourselves. We stop dwelling on our inward thoughts. We direct our attention toward a problem that compels us, a craft we enjoy, or a problem at hand. This is not to be confused with escapism. Escapism runs away from reality using work or hobbies and numb our feeling, but here we engage with the actual responsibility and person in front of us. We don’t silence the feeling, we immerse ourselves in doing good work. The self doubt is not suddenly cured, it starves from lack of attention.

There is a reversal I find interesting in the life of Jesus. Jesus the night before he was crucified, was faced with a big emotional distress compared to a human standard, but he didn’t try to project any confidence or tried to fake it in any way. He didn’t play strong, he asked the disciples to keep watch with him, and he prayed to God about this burden, and ended it with “Not my will, but yours be done.”. The further irony is that, Jesus, who was real and without pretense, was actually the one executed as an impostor and fraud by people who were full of pretense and fakeness. He was mocked with a fake purple royal robe, given a crown of thorns, and crucified under the charge of being a counterfeit King. He absorbed the ultimate humiliation of being treated as a fraud, so that people who believe in Him are accepted to the kingdom of God. It’s not anymore a court where our worth is on trial, because he has taken that part to himself. Yet we are often still too busy in thinking about ourselves and worried about acceptance from others instead of doing what we ought to do.