I Faked It Until I Made It!

What’s your take on “fake it till you make it”? I sense a lot of people look at this as a negative thing, but is it really?

I will admit that in some professions it could be a bad thing. Do you really want your surgeon or pilot to be faking it? No, not really.

So, for the sake of this post, let’s stick to the Online Marketing niche and other online businesses. Let’s set a few ground rules as well, publishing an earnings screenshot that isn’t genuine is just plain fraud. Telling people your marketing method earns $100 a day when in fact you make all your income from selling that product is plain and simple fraud.

So now that we have that out of the way, let’s get on with faking it.

I personally think in a lot of situations there is a positive side to it. I landed my very first job as an IT contractor by telling downright lies.

I was working as a motorcycle courier in London at the time, trying to make ends meet. I had been building my own computers for a while and was genuinely interested in server technology. In fact, I carried a book on Managing Microsoft Servers with me that I studied between jobs.

One day in the Evening Standard (the evening newspaper in London) I saw an ad for a short-term job for someone to install servers at a bank in the city, (Via a tech recruitment agency), so I thought, why not…

I applied, got an immediate reply, and was asked to go along at 11 am the next day for an interview. So I went home, downloaded a pirate copy of Microsoft server software and set up a server… it was up and running in around an hour.

I arrived for my interview, and the guy who met me at reception took me for a coffee as “They are running behind schedule” with the interviews.

So over coffee we had a nice chat about my time in the Army, what I was doing now and what I had done with servers and computers.

I was asked if I had experience building servers. I answered, “yes, I’ve done lots of builds.” That was a lie, I’d only built one the night before the interview.

It turned out that the chat over the coffee was my interview and the guy who met me was my new boss. I started work immediatly, and there was nothing to worry about, everything I needed to do was documented.

That short-term job turned into the best 5 years of my life and resulted in me working for one of Europe's most important banks. Within 18 months, I was solely in charge of all their servers and was helping to manage their Y2K project

I faked it. Because of faking it, I went from a motorcycle courier with the life expectancy of a Spitfire pilot to an IT contractor overnight. I landed a job that led to a lifestyle I couldn’t have imagined when I was tearing around London on a motorcycle delivering packages 12 hours a day.

To be faking it till you make it, you need to be taking action, getting out there and actually trying to make something of your online business. It’s not about lying, it’s about actually doing the work and believing in yourself. You can do this

To fake it, you have to know what you are talking about, you have to put in effort and not just assume you know what you are talking about. I would much rather talk to someone who comes across as an expert in SEO who has invested time and effort in learning the subject than someone who has an opinion based on nothing but their own prejudices and ideas.

The actual philosophy behind fake it till you make it is a positive one of self-belief. It’s not really about faking it in front of other people, it’s more about pretending you can do it until you believe you can do it.

You Can Do Anything You Want If You Take Action And Believe

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