Why Fakers Are Unhappy

Vishal: There’s an expression: “Fake it till you make it.” Can someone really fake it till they make it? 

Bill: It depends on what “making it” amounts to. Suppose you’re in a domain in which success depends on having and using real abilities. In that case, faking it can’t make it. Think of sports. If you don’t have the relevant abilities, you don’t succeed. Even if you initially con people into believing you have those abilities, success doesn’t depend on what people believe. It depends on excelling in the athletic contest itself, and that requires having and using the relevant abilities. The same is true of any domain in which success depends on having ability instead of merely getting people to believe you have ability.

Vishal: Does the point about sports translate to life as a whole? In Ask Aristotle, you talk about the analogy between complex activities like sports and human life as a whole. Aristotle thinks that living is a complex activity, so you can apply some of the same reasoning both to sports and to life. Is that true when it comes to faking it?

Bill: It is. Faking it doesn’t make it in sports, and it doesn’t make it in life either. You’ve just touched on the reason why: life is a complex activity. Doing that activity well requires having and using certain abilities: the virtues. If you don’t have those abilities, then you aren’t going to live well, just as you aren’t going to play a sport well if you don’t have the relevant skills. 

Vishal: So what happens when you don’t have the abilities you need to play the game of life well?

Bill: If you don’t have those abilities, you won’t live well. The same thing happens if you try to play a sport without having the relevant skills: you don’t play well. The difference is that you can choose not to play a sport. When people are really bad at a sport, and don’t want to play, they can just quit. But you can’t just quit the game of life. You’re forced to play. So imagine what it would be like if you were forced to play a sport you didn’t have the skills to play well. You’d end up failing and failing and failing, but you couldn’t just quit. You’d have to go on playing really badly, never getting better, and deriving very little enjoyment from it. Something like that happens to people who don’t have the virtues. 

One of the really sad things about fakers is that they set themselves up for this kind of failure. They doom themselves to self-frustration. They want to be fulfilled in life just like everyone else, but they prevent themselves from achieving fulfillment. Being fulfilled in life requires a lot of humble, patient work. Yet fakers avoid that kind of work for reasons we talked about before (what’s real not fake). 

Vishal: So you’ve been talking about domains like sports in which success depends on having and using abilities. And life as a whole is like that too. But what about domains in which success doesn’t depend on that. I’m thinking of situations like the politician or the sales person who lies to get what they want. Can they fake it till they make it?

Bill: Politics and sales are confidence games. The goal is to convince people to believe something and to give you something because of that belief: your money, your vote—something. If that’s what success in that domain is—if that’s the kind of game you’re playing—then maybe you can fake your way to success because in that case, you just have to persuade people of something. There might be no reckoning beyond that goal the way there would be in, say, sports. 

Vishal: What do you mean by “reckoning”?

Bill: I mean some further measure of success beyond just people believing something. If I convince you that I’m a good basketball player, there’s a way of determining whether I really am a good player that has nothing to do with whether or not you believe it. It instead has everything to do with whether I have the relevant skills. But in games like politics or sales, there might not be any further measure of success. I just have to convince people to vote for me, or write me a check, or buy my product. It doesn't matter whether I deliver on something further after that. It doesn't matter whether I'm lying. It doesn't matter whether I have no intention of delivering something further. All I'm trying to do is get money or a vote from you over the short term. If that short-term goal is the only one that matters to me, then yeah, I can fake it in order to make it.  

Vishal: But if people follow-up with you… I mean, they might expect to see some further results in the longer term, and they're going to be disappointed if you don’t deliver. 

Bill: Right. The thing is many fakers don’t care about that. They think short term, just like many scammers do. The con man just goes for short-term successes, and then moves from one town to the next to avoid crossing paths with people who will hold him accountable. Fakers do something similar. Many politicians, for instance, fake it in order to get elected. Once they’re elected, they try to move on to another position. They don’t care about making good on any promises. They just care about advancing from one position to the next.

Vishal: But going back to what we were saying before: if you’re successful at these short-term confidence games, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful at life as a whole? I’m reminded of Aristotle’s quote, “One swallow does not make a spring.” Fulfillment in life is a long-term thing.

Bill: Yes, it’s a long-term thing that requires constant practice, like a sport. It’s just that the abilities you’re practicing aren’t skills but virtues.