Fake It Until You Make It: An Error of Consumer Pride

I first heard the expression “fake it until you make it” from a Human Resources professional who pitched it as a strategy for success. “If you don’t feel like you deserve it,” she said, “just fake it.”

It was a wild admission. I was early in my career—the age where self-doubt follows you like a shadow—but even then something about that advice rang hollow. It didn’t just sound dishonest. It sounded dangerous.

As I understand it, the idea behind fake it is straightforward enough: imitate confidence or competence long enough and eventually the imitation becomes reality. For some people, this is a way of pushing through self-doubt. For others, it’s simply a way of hiding—of wearing a mask to avoid meeting the person underneath it.

The problem is that we are never just ourselves to ourselves. We are who we are in relation to someone else.

I may call myself a writer, but if no one ever reads the words—am I truly fulfilling what “writer” means? Is a writer simply someone who writes, or is there something about the relationship between writer and reader that makes the identity real?

Is who I am just a private declaration, or is it shaped through the affirmations of others?

Am I a writer because I write?

Or because you read?

Just as you cannot speak and listen at the same time, you cannot write and read at the same time. They are separate acts that depend on the other for meaning. A symbiosis. Each negates the other in its doing, yet neither is anything worth something without the other.

Our identity is always born in relationship.

And this is what’s so insidious about the “fake it until you make it” ethos:

you enter the relationship with another person while denying your relationship with yourself.

You seek their affirmation for something you do not actually believe. You tell yourself it’s a “noble lie,” but it doesn’t feel noble—because the lie begins at home.

Masquerading as something does not make you that thing.

Yes, you can buy the outfit, the car, the vacation, the condo, the curated lifestyle with the photos to prove it. But you cannot buy away self-doubt. You cannot finance authenticity.

You cannot fake it until you make happiness.

That feeling of being an imposter—of standing somewhere you feel unworthy to stand—is not a defect. It’s part of being human. It’s gratitude dressed up as anxiety. And you don’t need to be ashamed of it.

Fumble. Struggle. Apologize.

Ask for help. Offer help.

Let yourself be human—a flawed but genuine human—not a performer pantomiming what you think a human should be.

Because the cost of “faking it” is a quiet kind of alienation: the slow widening of the gap between how you present yourself and who you actually are. And that gap fills itself with emptiness, dissatisfaction, burnout.

But honesty—both with yourself and with others—creates the opposite.

It builds trust.

It builds competence.

It builds a grounded sense of self that doesn’t require an audience to maintain.

And in that grounding, something simple happens:

you become who you actually are, not who you are pretending to be.

And the community around you—those who see you, support you, challenge you—helps make that identity real.

Not by faking.

By being.