When it comes to career advice, there is a popular saying that you should “fake it till you make it”. For those of you who have never heard of this, faking it till you make it is the idea that even if you aren’t so confident about completing a task, sometimes the best thing to do is to just power through and do it anyway. The wisdom behind this idea is that eventually you’ll actually become more confident about the task—thus faking it till you make it. But is this a realistic thing in practice?
Yes and No
On one hand, yes, it’s incredibly realistic. The reason is that sometimes our fears have a lot to do with imposter syndrome, and fear of the unknown. So even when we think we’re not good at something, we’re actually a lot better than we realize—and thus faking it till we make it is really just forcing ourselves to do something and gain experience in it. Once we get more experience, we’re a lot more confident in our ability to complete a task.
However, on the other hand, it’s important to not get too ahead of ourselves with this idea. It’s important to also be realistic about our skills from a technical standpoint. This sometimes requires no small amount of intuition. You need to be able to know which situation is right to fake it and which situation you truly don’t have the necessary skills to move move forward.
