The concept of faking it til you make it is all around us. Sometimes it takes the shape of summoning charisma at a party, finally asking someone out, or bolstering a resume. Other times it blooms into a full-fledged series of lies that you have to surf on until you finally spin the lies back into truth.
Assuming you're not putting others in danger, faking it til you make it can be an inspiring feat, and in a cut-throat economy it can also be a necessary one. The language of faking it comes more naturally to some than others, so it can be helpful to take notes from the pros.
In a popular Reddit thread, people shared their "fake it til you make it" stories and they prove that a little bit of strategic delusion can go a long way.
1. kadno pulled a George Costanza.
I George Costanza'd my way into a job in high school.
I was looking for a new job and went to apply at a local movie theater. The general manager asked to interview me on the spot, which I wasn't at all prepared for, but went with it anyway. This was like a Wednesday or Thursday night. The interview went well, and she told me she was going to be out of town this weekend, but she would let me know on Monday.
I didn't want to wait, so the next day at school I got my work permit filled out and took it back. I dropped it off to another manager and told them she told me to bring this crap in. They asked if I could start the next day.
I ended up working there for over three years.
2. yoshismaster didn't take no for an answer.
Not me, but my cousin applied for a brand new restaurant job and didn’t get it. Her friend got the job and she was pissed she didn’t get hired. So her friend told her where/when orientation was, and she decided to “fake” getting hired til she “made it”. She went to orientation, all the training, introduced herself to all the staff, management, and made her presence known. After a couple of weeks working, everyone got their paychecks, except her...
She went up to management, and was like “wth, everyone got paid but me...you’ve seen me working for the last two weeks!”
Management goes into the computer system and checks “that’s so weird you’re not in the system...I’m so sorry... must be a clerical error...we will get you in the system, and paid right away!”
And that’s how my cousin fake got hired til she made it. I wanna be like her when I grow up.
3. DoctorFincher faked their way into a programming job.
My first job as a programmer I didn't know how to write a single line of code.
Was about 12 years ago.
I wanted to learn programming and I chose a hot new programming language - Ruby. I did a tutorial for Ruby on Rails(remember the one where you create an ecommerce store with a few lines, ehh?) but I had some problems running it on Windows so after I figured it out I documented it on some forum. A guy messaged me that writing a guide shows initiative and they are looking for a Ruby guy. I never say no to anything. We Skyped, the guy liked me, and I got the job the next day. Remote. The salary shocked my 19-year-old self.
The company was a mess at first. It was a new project. I was pretending to work for the first 3 weeks while in reality I was learning for 12+ hours a day using books and tutorials.
Somehow I fucking winged it and stayed with them for 3 years. I actually became proficient with Ruby, Python, and JS along the way.
4. Sticknpucker got in the grip game by necessity.
I'm an artist who works in the film industry. Some years ago my wife got pregnant (purposefully) and I had to try to find a way to make more reliable income while she was on Matt leave and for the foreseeable future, as we knew we weren't only having one. I also wanted to stay in film.
I got work as a Grip. Grunt work lugging things around set and building/setting up large bits of lighting gear. No clue what I was doing. I started off on big shows like the flash and arrow.
A friend got me work on a small set and only 13 days in to working as a grip, which I didn't tell them, they made me the Key grip. Key is film talk for Manager. I was in charge of a whole department which is one half of the lighting team. Faked it until I made it!
Fast forward over 5 years. I have over 30 credits to my name as a key grip. I own an entire 5 ton trucks worth of gear that I rent out, which makes as much money per show as my wage did. My wife is back at work after having 2 kids and I'm a stay at home dad with consistent passive income and the time to continue to write and audition whenever I need.
5. appothecary is thankful for the unexpected pregnancy
I'd always been interested in programming. As a kid I tried to teach myself C and Java with mild success. Fast forward to the time I'm 24. I'm working as a piercing apprentice at a tattoo shop making $20/day a few days per week. I meet a girl, fall for said girl, girl ends up pregnant...
A few hours after the pregnancy test I'm applying for jobs on Craigslist and I find a PHP job a few minutes up the road. I've worked with PHP for maybe a few hours in my entire life time but it was a tiny company and the interview wasn't technical. I lied through my teeth the entire time and get hired.
After being hired I tried to start learning PHP on the job. The owner of the company created his own PHP framework which was GOD AWFUL so I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. I got fired two weeks later.
In those two weeks on the job I made an honest effort to learn more about web design and development so I offered my "design" services to a local web design company for free so that I could learn. Walking home after being fired I called up the web design company and they ended up hiring me. I would learn on the job for a year or so and then take my skills to get more money somewhere else.
10 years later I'm the lead software engineer on a big project making just over 6 figures. If a pregnancy test hadn't scared me to death that day I would still be working dead end jobs to scrape up enough money for weed and booze.
6. picksandchooses was barely ahead of their class.
I taught a class on a specialty software program. I was learning the software myself and I was literally 1 class ahead of the people I was teaching.
7. Raukaris finally had to stop the ruse.
I started at a big ol’ multinational in retail as a college dropout. I started at the lowest rung of customer service in a store.
Now retail has lots and lots of staff turnover. And a multinational has a sh*tton of rules, or you’d expect them to have. Also, I’m not the dumbest around (never mind the college dropout that’s another story) and well to be fair not everyone in retail is supersmart.
So there was a consistent lack of management (or they didn’t care) and all the rules and regulations had gaps in them. So people start asking questions: How do I solve this? What should I do next? Etc.
Nobody had an answer to this questions, so I started answering them using common sense or what I’d think should work. Just filling the gaps which probably made me look a lot smarter than I am. Just faking that I knew what I was doing.
So I started climbing the ladders and I am now the Senior Finance and Operations Director for a store with a gross turnover of over 160million euro.
HOWEVER, cracks are starting to show. The company got a lot more serious and I’m surrounded by smart people with high degrees where I can’t bluff my way through problems and meetings as easily. So, I’m thinking of taking a step back and relaxing a bit more on lower position. I was a lot happier then and had way less stress and way less hours.
TLDR, faking works until it doesn’t.
8. Back2Bach got help from the customers.
During college, I worked part-time as a deli clerk in a grocery store.
I had zero experience with deli items - didn't know head cheese from salami, or provolone from muenster.
So, I'd explain to customers that I was new and ask them to point to items in the case that they wanted and what the sign indicated for the price per pound.
They always seemed happy to help out - especially when I gave them "free samples" from the slicing machine.
9. -Fapologist- wrote a masterful resume.
I was desperate for a job several years back so I wrote up this resume that was utter horsesh*t on a whim granted some of it was legit but a good 80% was me bullshitting. Amazingly enough I got a call for an interview and by some miracle they ended up hiring me and I worked for the place for 7 years before something I was actually qualified for opened up at another work place. That bullsh*t resume saved me from ruin though so I always will look back in that crazy situation fondly.
10. EnnuiDeBlase's brother-in-law is a scammer at heart.
My piece of sh*t druggy brother in law used to lie and said he had heavy equipment operator experience. He'd get the job, and get fired w/in a day or 2 but pick up something small. Did that 15 or 20 times and kept moving around until he learned enough to not get fired.
11. ClownfishSoup's coworker has pushed through the fog.
My coworker has a degree in mechanical engineering in another country but was lucky to get a job in the US helping to fix the Y2K bug. He was told to search for year codes in software and edit it a certain way. He was so out of his league that when he made a mistake that he couldn’t just backspace to fix he would “accidentally” ... turn off the computer to restart it... just because he didn’t know how to undo edits. He’s now our lead Java Developer.
12. happygolucky85 faked it til they made a business.
My business started by me just saying yes I can do that , I can supply that for you. I had no idea that they would be willing to hear me out. 5 years later and I'm now supplying desks and office equipment to over 120 offices in London. You really can go far if you just say yes.
13. PeelGal made up a whole dance on the spot.
Last weekend I was at a wedding dance and they played "The Git Up". No one knew the dance, including myself, but liquid encouragement kicked in and I lead the entire wedding dance (50+ people) in a dance that I completely made up on the spot.
Everyone was so impressed after that I "knew all of the moves", that I didn't tell anyone any different.
14. StarsCanScream pushed through the social anxiety until they became a social butterfly.
Social Anxiety. I was always the quiet guy up until a few years ago. I decided I was tired of not having friends and I started faking confidence and talking to everyone. In the beginning I was dying inside and felt like I was walking on glass. Now I don’t know when to shut up and can talk to just about anyone.
Not even going to lie, I used to trace other people’s art SO OFTEN as a young artist (like 8-10) but now, I have that guidance of technique with me when I create my own pieces.
16. Suuperdad is healing the land.
A while ago I decided to stop complaining about environmental destruction, climate change, etc, and ACT. So I started planting trees.
Keep in mind I had no training in this, I never even gardened before. I considered myself a "brown thumb". I researched how to do it and it seemed pretty easy. But everything died. I'd plant a tree exactly how they said, but it wouldn't survive. I had to baby them so much, just to get them through their first year, and maybe half would make it. But I just kept planting and planting and "faking" I knew what I was doing.
Then I came across stuff by Dr. Elaine Ingham on soil science and it kind of changed everything for me. It made a whole lot of sense. Ecosystems transition from deadland, to weed pit, to grass land, to brushland to forest. As they do, the soil microbiology changes from dead soil to bacterial dominated soil, to fungal dominated soil. So the correct way to plant trees is actually to transition the soil to forest soil as fast as possible.
Nature takes thousands of years of weeds dying, and then grasses dying and soil life building and building, to a small woody shrub, which then eventually dies, and NOW it changes. NOW everything changes. Woody material on the ground means FUNGUS can move in. It's game over at this point, and you will transition to a forest now. So the correct way to plant a tree is to speed yourself to this point by dropping woodchips on the ground and letting the soil chemistry change. After a few months (or even better, a year), NOW plant your trees into the environment they want to live in.
Well that changed everything, and now I go around planting mini starting forests everywhere on my land, in wild places, abandoned lots, etc. I've seen little pockets of life I've planted turn from a few trees to a small thicket. At this point, it's unstoppable and the land heals.
It's an incredibly rewarding hobby, but one you must take very seriously. Anytime you plant something, you set in motion wheels of change, so you must know what you are planting. For this reason I stick to local native trees, shrubs, herbs, flowers. Things that exist all around me. That's good for many reasons, the least of which isn't free genetic material (seeds) to make this hobby 100% free.
What is really rewarding though is driving to work and seeing a bird perched on an apple tree that I planted, in a cluster of life with bees buzzing around the apple, haskap and lovage and borage and strawberries and asparagus, clover, fruit tree guild. Looking and seeing apple sapplings bursting up through the sweet cicely. The ecosystem has it's foothold in now, and will replicate itself, sequestering carbon and healing the soil LONG after I'm gone.
So I started as someone who considered themself a "brown thumb", and with a little action and knowledge seeking, I now have pockets of life all around my community that are expanding and growing, that I was the catalyst for creating. That's a legacy right there. And that's how we reverse climate change and give our children a world worth living in.
17. ToxicHeather has always been hustling to stay at their job level.
Honestly, I felt like this for most of my jobs in the IT industry. I work on Cisco voice systems and it always seemed like I was getting jobs that were just a bit higher technical level than I was at. So I was constantly working hard to learn what I didn't know to get to the level that I was supposed to be at, or they would have one of the Cisco voice platforms that I wasn't familiar with but expected me to troubleshoot and work on, such as my current job which has UCCE (call center stuff) and I'd never worked on anything but UCCX, which is the very slimmed down version of UCCE and is very different. So now I'm working hard to learn UCCE but I'm always feeling like at any time they'll realize they can get someone better and replace me.
18. folekel saved their own life with a fake fear of needles.
Almost a decade ago, I was banging drugs and ended up in an induced coma, to save my heart. After coming out of a coma, I was still addicted to the drugs and needles but deadly afraid of doing it again, for fear of finally dying.
I asked doctors, family, anyone who visited me, how I could overcome the addiction because I didn’t want to go back to that lifestyle.
One buddy just said “fake it until you make it”. It just clicked and resonated with me. I lied to myself and everyone that I was afraid of needles and hated the drug I was doing. I kept on until one day I woke up legitimately afraid of needles. (I was still in the hospital for all of this though, I was mostly lucky to be held and detoxed before release).
The phrase has continued to help anytime I’m at a low though. 9 years sober in 3 weeks.
19. veRGe1421 has faked it through grad school.
Graduate school (doctoral program). Anyone who has endured this pain understands that the transition from undergraduate to graduate training can be very much intimidating and elicit imposter syndrome. Everyone in my cohort was faking it till making it, but in that process of stress and class and practica and comps and writing and research and teaching and learning - you eventually make it. But it's a b*tch getting there. And everyday early on feels pretty fake.
Just gotta' get your mental health right, get your physical health right, get your social support right, make sure to keep your hobbies up, try to research something you're marginally actually interested in, establish good relationships with faculty, your cohort, your PI, etc., trust in your self-efficacy, keep grinding, faking it, and doing the best you can...until you come out the other side all the wiser for it. The competency and confidence will come, but not without the sacrifice of anxiety and time put in.
A lot of people think doctoral programs are about intelligence. Sure, to some extent, but not nearly as much as people think. It's really about persistence, determination, commitment, resilience, and grit. The process will test you, and break you. But you will grow, and you can succeed.
20. NYCGreatness19 faked their way into a CMO position.
I dropped out of high school in 10th grade. I hated school with a passion. I did get a GED.
I started working retail and found I really liked managing projects and eventually people. I ended up leaving retail for a call center job in a fairly large company.
Within 4 years I was running a marketing division. I had no F’ING clue what marketing was or anything. I’m just good at getting people to trust me and I’m very creative.
I got bored there and somehow got myself into another marketing role at an even bigger company.
5 years later I’m the CMO.
I still really don’t know shit about “traditional” school taught marketing. I literally faked it till I made it. I’m very good at what I do.