When I started out studying music, my voice teacher was trying to get me to step out of myself and into a new role — something less self-conscious and more… self-confidence. So he said to me, “Sing like you’re a famous opera singer. Just pretend and sing like you think you would sing — if you were that person.”
He was introducing me to the concept of faking it. You know — “fake it till you make it”?
Vocal pedagogy aside, faking it has a lot of interesting applications (and a few not so great ones). Depending on the thing you’re faking, it can be brilliantly successful or horrifyingly detrimental. I have experienced both in living color.
Let’s do a fer-instance.
I used to fake being a big business with old school, traditional business values. I used to try to be a little bit vague about how the company was run, who worked for it, and so on and so forth. I had a virtual receptionist and everything. People always made the mistake of thinking we were one of those “less than 500 employees” small businesses, and I continued to struggle to live up to it.
It fucked me up. It took me years to pull out of that awful emotional nosedive, because that really wasn’t what I was about — and pretending it was didn’t make it true.
But I also used to fake self-confidence. Sometimes, I still fake self-confidence. And over the course of I-don’t-know-how-many years, that faked self-confidence has turned into a hell of a lot of real self-confidence. It’s allowed me to do things I would have been too afraid, or too down on myself, to even bother with. It’s given me a truly decent belief in myself and my ability to accomplish great things, and I didn’t have that before. If that’s the result of faking it, faking it is fantastic. If that’s the result of faking it, faking it has taken me pretty damn far.
My theory has to do with paths. If you’re faking self-confidence, you’re learning what it feels like, the same way faking passion can teach you how to feel passionate. I’ve come across reference after reference to “pretend” emotions being awfully similar to real emotions, depending on the circumstances. (Obviously bottling something up or not giving yourself a chance to work through something difficult is a bit of a different situation.) If you’re faking your path, though — being a big business, or a great stylist, or a badass programmer, the faking it part doesn’t work too well unless you really have the pieces you need to be that thing. It needs to be right for you. You need to have some strength in it, some skill, and a willingness to put a lot of effort into getting there. Try to fake something like that, and most times, it just doesn’t work out.
But fake the certainty that your blogging isn’t utter crap, for instance, and at least you’ve got a blog. Fake the certainty of knowing that book you wrote isn’t utter crap, again, and at least you’ve got a book. Then, you’ll find out whether it’s crap or not — but that little voice in your head can’t keep you from getting it out there. That pointless, useless anxiety is… well… yeah.
There’s a funny balance there. In fact, the more I think about it… the more I think that “faking it” really isn’t the thing to focus on. You fake some things, it works. You fake other things, you crash and burn. It’s the belief in yourself that really floats you, and we know that’s worth faking for awhile.
The rest you can make up as you go along — the way we all do. That’s creative. That’s daring. Sometimes, it means “faking it”. But there’s a better way to describe all of this. What is it?
What do we say, rather than “faking it”, that describes how important it is to be willing to create in courageous, uncertain, even uninformed ways? To step out and do a thing without knowing if it will work? To believe you can accomplish something even if you don’t have 5 years of prior experience (whatever)?
Is it bending the truth? Or is it the ability to really see the truth, rather than obscuring it with facts?
Tell me what you think.
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