"Fake it until you make it" is probably one of the most repeated and least understood pieces of advice of all time.
You find it everywhere. In self-help books, in motivational speeches, in thirty-second reels on Instagram. It's said with an almost embarrassing lightness, as if pretending to be something you're not were a strategy without consequences. Yet if we stop for a moment and look at history with a minimum of attention, we notice something interesting: some of the most important people and companies in the world did exactly this. They faked it. And it worked.
But not for everyone. For others it meant prison.
So the real question is not whether it works or not, because the facts show that it does. The question is: where is the line between those who fake it and build and those who fake it and collapse?
Let's start with the facts. In 1980, Bill Gates sold IBM an operating system he didn't have. He didn't own the software, he hadn't developed it, yet he closed the deal. Then he bought a system called QDOS for 50,000 dollars, adapted it and delivered it. Today Microsoft is worth over 3 trillion dollars.
In 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto the Macworld stage and presented the iPhone as if it were a finished product. It wasn't even close. The prototype had 128 megabytes of memory and crashed if you tried to do too many things in sequence. Apple engineers had built what they called a "golden path," a precise sequence of actions that Jobs had to follow to the letter to prevent the phone from freezing on stage. [1] AT&T had installed a portable cell tower inside the Moscone Center to simulate a perfect signal. The signal bars were hardcoded at five regardless of actual reception. Engineer Andy Grignon brought a flask of whisky to the presentation and the team took a shot after each segment that went off without a hitch. [2] Six months later the iPhone was a real product, and the rest is history.
In 2008, the founders of Airbnb were buried in debt. The platform didn't work, users were practically zero. To survive they created cereal boxes themed around the presidential election (they called them "Obama O's"), bought cereal for 4 dollars and resold it for 40. They made about 30,000 dollars that kept the company alive. [3] They went door to door in New York personally photographing hosts' apartments, manually doing what they told investors was an automated process handled by their platform. Paul Graham admitted them to Y Combinator not for the business plan but because, in his own words, if you can convince someone to pay 40 dollars for a 4-dollar box of cereal, maybe you can convince strangers to sleep at other strangers' homes. [4] Airbnb went public in 2020 at a 100 billion dollar valuation.
Drew Houston in 2007 published a three-minute video showing Dropbox working perfectly. The product barely functioned and didn't even have Mac support. But that video made the waitlist explode from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight. [5] Houston didn't have the product but he had proven that people wanted it, and that gave him the time and resources to actually build it.
There's also a lesser-known case worth telling. In 1968, an Australian car salesman named George Lazenby decided he wanted to become the next James Bond. He had zero acting experience. Not even a class. He bought a Rolex Submariner, went to Sean Connery's barber, had a suit made by Connery's tailor, and during the taxi ride to the audition he invented an entire acting résumé. [6] When director Peter Hunt found out it was all fake, he told him: "You've fooled two of the most ruthless people I've ever met. Stick to your story and I'll make you the next James Bond." Today On Her Majesty's Secret Service is cited by Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh as their favorite Bond film. [7]
All these cases have something in common: the people involved promised something that didn't exist yet. They said "we have it" when in reality they were still building. And the world rewarded them.
But now let's look at the other side.
Elizabeth Holmes with Theranos promised the world a device capable of running hundreds of blood tests from a single drop. The problem is that device didn't work and she knew it. It wasn't a matter of time or resources, it was a matter of physics: the necessary technology simply didn't exist. It wasn't in development, it wasn't almost ready, there was no credible path to get there. She was convicted of fraud.
Trevor Milton founded Nikola Motors promising revolutionary hydrogen-electric trucks. In 2018 he published a video showing his truck, the Nikola One, apparently moving on a road under its own power. In reality the truck had no working motors: it had been towed to the top of a hill and left to roll downhill. [8] Hindenburg Research exposed the fraud in 2020. Convicted, four years in prison, 168 million dollars in restitution. Nikola filed for bankruptcy in February 2025.
Billy McFarland sold tickets up to 100,000 dollars for the Fyre Festival, a luxury festival in the Bahamas promoted by Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid. Guests arrived to find emergency tents and sandwiches with a slice of cheese. He had defrauded investors of over 26 million dollars with falsified financial statements. [9] While out on bail, he launched another scheme selling fake tickets to the Met Gala. Six years in federal prison.
Carlos Watson with Ozy Media told investors his media company was thriving. In reality it had 19,000 dollars in the bank. His chief operating officer went as far as impersonating a YouTube executive on a phone call with Goldman Sachs, with Watson feeding him answers via text in real time. [10] The judge called the level of dishonesty in the case "exceptional." Nearly ten years in prison.
At this point the picture is clear. On one side we have people who faked it and became among the most influential and wealthy in the world. On the other, people who faked it and ended up in prison. The starting mechanism is identical: promising something that doesn't exist yet. The outcomes are opposite.
Instinctively you'd say the difference comes down to the result. If you manage to deliver what you promised you're a visionary. If you don't you're a fraud. And in part that's true, history judges the winners. But stopping here would be a dangerous oversimplification because it would mean saying that ethics depend on the outcome, and that can't work as a principle. If we accept that everything depends on the result, then any lie is justifiable as long as it works. And we all know that's not the case.
The real difference is visible before the result, not after.
Gates knew how to program. He knew an operating system could be bought and adapted. He didn't have the product but he had the skills and the time to build it. Jobs didn't have the finished iPhone but he had hundreds of engineers and the technical ability to complete it in six months. The Airbnb founders didn't have the platform but they knew how to build it and were already proving the idea worked, one door at a time.
Holmes didn't. The technology she promised didn't exist and couldn't exist with the means available. Milton didn't. The truck didn't work and he had no means to make it work. McFarland didn't. He had neither the infrastructure nor the skills nor the money to organize a festival of that scale. Watson didn't. He had no users, no revenue, and to cover the void he literally had to impersonate other people.
The line that separates the visionary from the fraud is not the result. It's the distance between what you promise and what you're actually able to build.
If that distance can be closed with your skills, your work and the time available, you're making a bet on yourself. If it can't be closed, you're lying.
But between Gates and Holmes there's an entire world of normal people who every day find themselves in this gray zone without even realizing it.
The freelancer who takes on a project they've never done before, convinced they can learn along the way. The candidate who at a job interview says "yes, I know this tool" when in reality they've barely touched it. The entrepreneur who puts growth projections in their pitch deck that they know are optimistic. The consultant who presents themselves as an expert in a field where they've worked only six months.
None of these people think they're committing fraud. In most cases they're not. They're doing something far more common and far less discussed: they're betting on their own ability to grow fast enough to justify what they promised.
The working world operates this way far more than we're willing to admit. If we waited to have 100% of the skills before applying for a role or taking on a project, we'd never start anything. There's a frequently cited internal Hewlett-Packard study according to which women tend to apply for a position only when they meet 100% of the requirements, while men do it at 60%. [11] Regardless of the gender nuances, the data tells us something universal: those who put themselves out there before being fully ready have a better chance of advancing than those who wait for perfection.
And this brings me to a personal matter.
At the beginning of my career I found myself in a technical interview for a position at a company. I had basic computer science skills. I understood the logic, I knew the fundamentals, I had already worked on personal projects and I knew my way around the development world. But the advanced and specific skills they were asking for that role, I didn't have them. Not all of them, not at that level. Not at that moment.
I knew it perfectly well. Yet during the interview I demonstrated verbally that I could do what they needed. I spoke with confidence about things I knew on the surface. I didn't lie about what I was, but I presented a version of myself that was one step ahead of where I actually stood. I passed the selection.
What happened next is the part nobody talks about when they bring up "fake it until you make it." The following months were among the most intense of my life. I studied in the evenings after work. On weekends. During lunch breaks. Every time I hit a problem I didn't know how to solve, instead of panicking I used it as a guide to figure out what I needed to learn. The gap narrowed week by week. After a few months the work was getting done and it was getting done well. Nobody ever noticed that at the beginning I wasn't at the level I had claimed, simply because in the meantime I had become it.
Does that make me a fraud? No. And the reason is exactly what I'm talking about. I knew that the distance between what I had promised and what I could do was closeable. I wasn't selling something impossible. I was buying time. But I was buying it with a real guarantee: I was willing to work twice as hard to pay back that debt.
It's the same thing Gates, Jobs and the Airbnb founders did. They bought time. Holmes, Milton and McFarland bought trust on a lie.
Psychology confirms this principle in a surprising way and from multiple angles.
Albert Bandura in 1977 demonstrated that self-efficacy, the belief in one's ability to do something, creates a virtuous cycle: behaving as if you're capable leads to attempting more, attempting more leads to gaining experience, and experience builds real competence. [12] It's among the most replicated theories in the entire history of psychology. In practice, acting "as if" genuinely works. But it only works if behind it there's a real foundation to build on. Bandura never said that believing is enough. He said that believing pushes you to act, and action builds competence. Without action, belief is empty.
Cameron Anderson at UC Berkeley added an even more uncomfortable piece to the puzzle. His studies show that people who display confidence in excess of their actual abilities attain higher social status because others mistakenly perceive them as more competent. [13] The mechanism is almost banal: those who speak with confidence, with a decisive tone, without hesitations, providing more information than others, are judged as more capable. Even when they're not. More surprisingly, overconfident people aren't perceived as arrogant, they're perceived as the most likeable in the group. The world rewards confidence before competence. It's an uncomfortable fact but a real one, and ignoring it doesn't make it disappear.
There's also a mechanism that few people know about but that perfectly explains why faking it in front of others can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1968, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted an experiment in an elementary school. They told teachers that certain students, actually selected at random, had been identified as "intellectual bloomers" with superior potential. By year's end, those students had gained an average of 12.2 IQ points versus 8.4 for the others. [14] Not because they were smarter, but because the teachers' expectations had changed the way they treated them. More attention, more stimuli, more trust. Expectations create reality. When you present yourself as someone who can make it, the people around you start treating you as someone who can make it. And that treatment, in turn, gives you access to resources and opportunities that allow you to actually make it.
Another piece of the puzzle comes from Robert Cialdini and his commitment and consistency principle. When we make a public commitment, our brain creates internal pressure to behave consistently with that commitment. [15] Saying "I can do this" in front of someone is not just a declaration to the outside, it's a pact with ourselves. The effect is strongest when the commitment is active, public and freely chosen. In practice, "faking" in front of others forces us to become what we declared ourselves to be. Not by magic, but by internal pressure. You said you could do it, now you have to prove it, and that pressure pushes you to study, to work, to close the gap much faster than you would without that public commitment.
And then there's an evolutionary aspect that puts everything in perspective. Johnson and Fowler in 2011 published a mathematical model in Nature showing that overconfidence, excessive self-assurance, is an evolutionary advantage. [16] In simple terms: in a competitive environment, those who overestimate their abilities tend to compete for more resources than those who assess themselves accurately, and on balance this behavior produces more benefits than costs. Overconfidence has remained in our species because it works. Not always, not for everyone, but often enough to have been selected by evolution itself. Which explains why "fake it until you make it" exists as instinct before it exists as advice.
Locke and Latham's research on goals confirms the boundary with very precise data. They analyzed about 400 studies with over 40,000 participants over the span of 35 years. When goals are ambitious but achievable, the correlation with performance is very high (r = 0.82). But when goals become impossible, the correlation drops to r = 0.11. [17] There's a precise point beyond which raising the bar stops being motivating and becomes destructive. Promising something difficult pushes you to give your best. Promising something impossible paralyzes you.
Ward Cunningham, the programmer who invented the concept of technical debt, put it in a way that fits perfectly: "Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly." [18] Fake it until you make it works exactly like this. You're borrowing from your future. If you pay back the debt by building real competence, it's a smart investment. If you don't pay it back, it's insolvency. Martin Fowler later extended this concept with a quadrant that distinguishes prudent and deliberate debt ("we know the trade-off but we need to ship now") from reckless and deliberate debt ("we don't have time to do things right"). The first is Gates selling an OS and then building it. The second is Holmes selling a device that can't exist.
The most common mistake we make when talking about this topic is confusing faking with lying. They're not the same thing and the difference is not subtle.
Faking is presenting a version of yourself that is one step ahead of where you are right now, knowing that you have the foundation and the willingness to get there. It's what an actor does when they take a role that scares them. It's what an entrepreneur does when they present a vision bigger than their current reality. It's what I did at that interview.
Lying is declaring something false about present and verifiable facts, knowing that there is no realistic path to make it true. It's saying "we have four million users" when you have three hundred thousand. It's showing a video of a truck in motion when the truck has no motor and there's no technology in development to make it move. Jobs showed an unstable iPhone that fundamentally worked: it made calls, it browsed the web, it played music. It was fragile, immature and held together with tape, but the technology existed. Milton showed a truck that didn't move in any way other than by gravity. The difference is not between perfection and imperfection, it's between something that exists in embryonic form and something that doesn't exist at all.
If we look carefully at all the success cases and all the failure cases, the pattern is always the same. Those who faked it successfully made promises about the future: "we will be able to do this." Those who ended up in prison lied about the present: "we are already able to do this." The former were buying time. The latter were buying trust they could never return.
The next time you find yourself in front of an opportunity bigger than you, and it will happen, because that's how growth works, ask yourself one thing: is the distance between what I'm promising and what I can do closeable with my work?
If the answer is yes, you're not faking it. You're betting on yourself. You're doing exactly what Gates did when he sold software he didn't have, Jobs when he presented a phone that didn't work and the Airbnb founders when they photographed apartments door to door pretending they had an automated platform.
If the answer is no, stop. Not because the world will find out, even though it probably will. But because the difference between a visionary and a fraud is not decided by the final outcome. You decide it, before you even open your mouth, in the moment when you know whether you're buying time to build something real or selling something that can never exist.
In the end "fake it until you make it" is not moral advice. It's not a trick either. It's a risk calculation. It works if you're honest with yourself about what you can actually do, about how much you're willing to work to close the distance, and about how fast you can do it. It works if the debt you're taking on is a debt you can pay back.
If you lie to yourself about these things too, you're not faking anymore. You're just lying. And sooner or later the bill always comes.
Notes
[1] The "golden path" story is told in detail by Fred Vogelstein in his Wired reportage and then in the book Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (2013). Engineers Andy Grignon and Scott Forstall confirmed that the prototype had forced paths to avoid crashes — any deviation from the sequence could freeze the device on stage.
[2] Grignon recounted that the engineering team toasted with whisky after each segment of the demo that went off without problems. AT&T installed a portable repeater inside the Moscone Center to ensure coverage, and Apple programmed the iPhone to always display five bars of signal regardless of actual reception.
[3] The cereal box story is confirmed directly by Brian Chesky (Airbnb CEO) in numerous interviews. The founders created 500 boxes of "Obama O's" and "Cap'n McCains" during the 2008 presidential election, generating about 30,000 dollars that allowed them to fund the company in the following months.
[4] Paul Graham has repeated this quote on several public occasions and on his blog. The admission to Y Combinator happened in January 2009, in the Winter 2009 batch.
[5] Eric Ries recounts the Dropbox case as a paradigmatic example of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in The Lean Startup (2011). Houston posted the video on Hacker News and Digg, and the waitlist went from 5,000 to 75,000 users in a single night without the product being actually usable.
[6] George Lazenby's story is documented in the documentary Becoming Bond (2017) directed by Josh Greenbaum. Lazenby confirmed having no acting experience and having invented his résumé during the taxi ride to the audition.
[7] Christopher Nolan has cited On Her Majesty's Secret Service as a direct inspiration for his approach to the Batman films. Steven Soderbergh has called it his favorite Bond film in various interviews. The film has been reevaluated by critics in recent decades as one of the most complex entries in the franchise.
[8] Hindenburg Research, "Nikola: How to Parlay an Ocean of Lies into a Partnership with the Largest Auto OEM in America" (September 2020). The report documented that the Nikola One promotional video showed the truck moving on a downhill road with no active propulsion system. Milton was convicted of fraud in 2022 and received a 4-year sentence in December 2023.
[9] Billy McFarland was convicted of wire fraud and investor fraud in 2018, receiving a 6-year sentence. While out on bail he launched an additional fraudulent scheme selling fake tickets to exclusive events like the Met Gala. The FBI documented fraud totaling over 26 million dollars.
[10] Carlos Watson (Ozy Media) was convicted in 2024 on all charges including bank fraud and securities fraud. The sentence was nearly 10 years, among the heaviest for startup fraud in recent history. COO Samir Rao pleaded guilty to impersonating a YouTube executive during a call with Goldman Sachs.
[11] The HP study is frequently cited in the literature on the confidence gap. Laura Guillen (2018) in Harvard Business Review added an important nuance: the gap may reflect not a difference in actually felt confidence but in how confidence is interpreted by outside observers based on gender.
[12] Albert Bandura (1977), "Self-efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change," Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. Self-efficacy theory is among the most replicated in the entire history of psychology. Bandura demonstrated that the belief in one's ability to perform a task predicts performance better than objectively measured competence. Confirmed by Bandura & Adams (1977), Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1(4), 287–310, with tests on phobic patients: self-efficacy accurately predicted the degree of behavioral change.
[13] Anderson, Brion, Moore & Kennedy (2012), "A Status-Enhancement Account of Overconfidence," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 718–735. Six studies showed that overconfident individuals attained higher social status because peers perceived them as more competent. The mechanism: they spoke more often, with a confident tone, provided more information and appeared calm. Subsequent research (Cheng et al., 2021, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General) showed that overconfidence is socially contagious and spreads through social networks outside conscious awareness.
[14] Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968), Pygmalion in the Classroom. Students randomly labeled as "intellectual bloomers" gained an average of 12.2 IQ points versus 8.4 for the control group. The effect was entirely mediated by changes in teacher behavior. Subsequent meta-analyses (Jussim & Harber, 2005) estimate that the Pygmalion effect accounts for 5–10% of variance in student outcomes. Raudenbush (1984) showed that the effect dropped to virtually zero when teachers had already known the students for more than two weeks — expectations matter most when there is no prior track record.
[15] Robert Cialdini (1984), Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The commitment and consistency principle establishes that once a public commitment is made, people experience internal pressure to behave consistently with that commitment. The effect is strongest when the commitment is active, public, effortful and freely chosen. A study cited in the book showed that changing the wording of a message from a statement to a question ("Will you please call if you have to change your plans?") reduced no-show cancellations by 64%.
[16] Johnson & Fowler (2011), "The Evolution of Overconfidence," Nature, 477, 317–320. Through an evolutionary mathematical model they demonstrated that overconfidence maximizes individual fitness when the benefits of contested resources sufficiently exceed the cost of competition. Accurate self-assessment is evolutionarily stable only under very narrow conditions. The authors note that this helps explain why overconfidence "remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars."
[17] Locke & Latham (2002), "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey," American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. Meta-analysis of about 400 studies with over 40,000 participants conducted over 35 years. The correlation between goal difficulty and performance was r = 0.82 when the goal remained within the range of the individual's abilities. When the goal exceeded actual capabilities, the correlation dropped to r = 0.11. For novel and complex tasks, learning goals ("develop this skill") produced better outcomes than performance goals ("hit this number").
[18] Ward Cunningham (1992), "The WyCash Portfolio Management System," OOPSLA '92 Experience Report. Cunningham introduced the technical debt metaphor to describe the cost of shipping non-optimal code. Martin Fowler (2009) extended the concept with the "technical debt quadrant": prudent and deliberate debt ("we know the trade-off but we need to ship now") maps to productive faking; reckless and deliberate debt ("we don't have time to do things right") maps to destructive faking.