Fake it till you make it: The ideology of fools

Even if you win in a rat race, you will still be considered a rat and not a racer. Same way, if you fake it till you make it, “making it” will just be a consolidation of the various layers of your fakeness. Of what use is that?

The idea behind “fake it till you make it” is to emulate confidence, competence, an optimistic mindset, or any other thing one wants to “be like” until these attributes become ingrained realities.

The concept suggests that by pretending to have qualities you don’t yet possess; you can actually develop them over time.

I am not sure if there is data anywhere that shows how many people have made real successes in life by faking someone else. At best, you can only be a photocopy of the original. How does that help you or anyone else?

I do have my own thoughts about the concept.

I think I will prefer to “create it until I make it”.

What this means is, that life is about choices, decisions, lessons, changes, and processes. And all of these attributes of life are the various ingredients needed to mold or form the person we want to be.

This means that by consciously making the right decisions and right choices, learning with every opportunity, and following the process through, I am involved in the daily building or the creating of the me that I want to see. So, when others see me as having made it, in whatever way they define “made it” to mean, I see myself as one who went through the daily process that created that me they see as made.

Our world is currently bashed daily with all manner of falsehoods and pretenses and even outright deception, just for social media likes, comments or to make a sale online. Many people have lost their original self on the premise of fakeness and whatever making it means to them will only be sustained by more falsehood and fakeness.

But this is the reality we now have all over the world. People pose to take selfies beside cars that they don’t own just so they brag online. Celebrities wear clothes and ride in cars that they hire while making everyone think they have money. Students buy certificates and degrees so they are counted among the intelligent and educated class. But in real life, it’s not the certificate that does the job but what you know on the inside.

But life should not be lived like this.

I mean, of what use really is living a life of falsehood just so you appear or sound in a certain way to people who really don’t care?

Or of what use is living your life to impress those who won’t blink an eyelid if you die today?

It’s like buying what you don’t need with the money you don’t have just so you impress the people who don’t even know you exist. Makes no sense.

Real people want to interact with and relate to real people with real stories, challenges, lives, heartbreaks, successes, and even failures.

The goal of every human on earth is to get to the pinnacle of their true abilities and purpose. But the road to that pinnacle is loaded with twists and turns and no one is exempted from this reality. So, if we all are faced with the same challenges, although at various levels and intensity, why then do we embrace the falsehood called “fake it till you make it” as an ideology that makes us sound like there are those exempted from the pain of life, so we need to impress them.

Faking a reality that we all are aware of is not wisdom but a grand idiocy.

So, instead of spending so much energy and even money in creating a false appearance so that someone else will think we have arrived, why not spend the same energy and money to truly walk the path that takes you to your goals, irrespective of the twists and turns? There is no shame in doing that.

Create it, don’t fake it

Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones. And such moments do not need to be faked to make them valid. In fact, the validity of your success is found in the validity of the process. And because imagination is the beginning of creation, you can imagine what you desire, not fake it, will what you imagine by taking conscious and real actions, and at last, you create what you will. You create the YOU that others will refer to as MADE.

So, keep learning, keep being real, keep being you, keep creating, and in no time, you will rise to be the you that you have imagined…not faked.