Fake It 'Til You Make It

There seems to be a continued shift towards a 'fake it 'til you make it' mentality in our culture when it comes to success and happiness.

This is exacerbated by the fact that our 'personal brand' is becoming more and more visible, and platforms are being created that facilitate our visibility to the public. But it's shifting our focus towards spending a disproportionate amount of time on our image rather than the natural source that this image should come from.

Faking it 'til you make it is an important initial seed for success: we need to portray an image of success to attract more prospects for success in the future.

As well as this, we also need to focus on our image to some extent as it's our way of communicating our lives to people. But just like at work: we can either spend all our time creating presentations & attending meetings for the work we should be doing, or we can focus our time on actually doing the work. We can only ever do one of the two activities at any one time. We need to get the balance right. There's no point spending all our time planning & communicating, leaving no time to actually carry out the plans and the tasks we've so eloquently described. In the same way, we need to develop our image, but this should only be a small part of our time.

It takes time and effort to fake things. Instead of focusing on creating an image of success or an image of happiness, focus on developing the tools of actually achieving success or happiness. The image is just a symptom.

In the same way when starting a business: focus on creating a good product or service. If you've really made a solution to someone's problem, and you set up your company to align with a capitalist system, the money will just be a symptom. And in the same way as being careful not to spend all our time on our image rather than the cause of our image: we need financiers to understand how the flow of money operates in our companies, but when the CFOs start becoming CEOs, the company is doomed, in my opinion. The directionality of cause and symptom gets confused: the slave becomes the master.