Fake it ’til you make it

Hi Reader,

Years ago, I worked for a startup. We had an app that promised to algorithmically recommend new things for you to learn next based on what you’d been learning. So you’d in put in what you’d been reading, studying, or discussing, and the app would put all that through a mathematical formula that was constantly self-updating via machine learning, and it would spit out other stuff you were likely to be interested in.

Kind of like social media, but for your own learning journey.

It was a decent enough idea. The problem was that the software we actually had didn’t do anything close to what the company promised. There was no machine learning, there wasn’t even an algorithm. All we had was a bunch of stuff we’d recommend essentially randomly.

I recall a conversation I had with one of the VPs, when I pointed to the gap between what we were selling and what we had built. I’ll never forget his response. He said…

“Fake it ’til you make it, right?”

I remember being deeply uncomfortable with this. But I shied away from confronting him about it, or even from looking at it too closely—from getting really clear on what was happening.

I was reminded of that conversation by my toddler the other day. She’s started saying “oh no!” when someone drops something. She doesn’t say it immediately, and it doesn’t come out naturally. It has an awkward intonation, and usually a level of distress that doesn’t match the situation. It feels like she’s practicing, or even performing. And I suppose that’s exactly what she’s doing.

The has a completely different feel to me than the startup did. How else would a toddler learn to use an expression of dismay like “oh no!” without practicing?

Now that my toddler taught me this difference, I see something about myself. I’m afraid that I’m doing the first kind of “fake it ’til you make it,” that I’m expressing some aspect of myself that doesn’t exist and is just a flat-out lie.

I want to say I aspire to what my toddler is doing. That all of my “world no longer divided by religions” and “coming homes” are practice for something that’s authentically of me.

But I’m afraid I’m lying to myself, and you. And so I write a bunch of words to try to justify myself, my thoughts, my actions, to make them “right,” when really that’s just my attempt to build a defense against the truth that I don’t trust myself.

But if that’s the uncomfortable truth—if I really don’t trust myself—then that’s precisely the place to look for growth. I’ve done enough of this work to know that discomfort is the leading edge of growth. I used to flinch away from discomfort, as we saw with the startup example I shared earlier. Now I’m trying to lean into it, even though I’m worried I’ll fall flat on my face.

But let’s look at those two examples a little closer before we wrap up today’s email:

What am I doing when I express dismay with an “oh no!”? I started saying that the same way my toddler does now, back when I was so young I no longer remember. It started as practice, a performance, for me, too. I might call it my natural way of expressing myself today, but is it really? When I look at it this way, it seems inevitable that I’m still performing. I’ve just forgotten that’s what I’m doing. What I call “natural” is really just “a lot more polished” than what a toddler does.

I think feeling dismay is probably natural, but “oh no” isn’t. And things get really cloudy when you realize that saying “oh no” might make you feel more dismay than you otherwise would. Maybe we’re all consummate method actors down to the level of our emotions.

There’s more to dig into there, but let’s move on for now. What about the startup?

As I’ve thought about that conversation over the years, I’ve softened my judgement a bit. It’s not entirely gone, but consider this: a lot of the problems humanity has solved in the past ten thousand years have been solved because someone committed themselves to solving them before they knew how to do so. I recall a TED talk I watched several years ago given by a woman who was committing herself and her company to curing a certain kind of cancer. They didn’t know how to do it, but they were setting out to do it anyway.

There’s a power in that kind of commitment that doesn’t exist anywhere else in nature. Nature does what it does, and solves the problems it solves, by happenstance. Humanity is different. We have the unique ability to carve up reality in our imaginations, to artificially segment it into things like “cancer” and “learning profiles” and then iteratively seek solutions to those problems, learning from our failures how to get ever closer to what might work. This process is really quite remarkable.

So in a way “fake it ’til you make it” seems like a decent strategy for getting oneself past the failures. They can still be very demoralizing, after all.

Still, I think there’s a difference between saying “we’re going to figure out a way to do such-and-such that no one knows how to do” and “we are doing such-and-such that no one has done before (but actually we don’t know how yet and are just pretending)”.

In other words, some performance aren’t just pretend. Airplanes don’t fly because we pretend they do.

One more thing to keep in mind. (Oh no!)