Fake It Till You Make It… Well I Faked It Until It Faked Me Back

My earliest memories with the fake it mentality were from a kid in our secondary school who was always the best in our class. When asked the secret to his success, he said one word. “CUP”.

Years later I came to learn that by CUP he meant Cram-Understand-Pass. Far from my delusions of thinking that by CUP he meant that his secret was in drinking a lot of tea.

Cramming to me meant getting fake knowledge and using it to pass. Since it worked for him, I figured it would work for me. Some subjects in my O’levels surely needed that approach considering how useless I thought they were then. Long story short, I was wrong about my need to cram.

I did not learn my lesson though. I stopped cramming in my academics but the faking it till you make it mindset had stuck and it was validated when I started learning about making money online.

There were so many people (especially in MLMs that I joined then) that encouraged me to keep faking it.

One company, in particular, used to even provide us photos that showed us how great their offices were. The point was to use such material to help in our marketing efforts. Using their content, we would sell dreams we never had to other people so that we would achieve those dreams. Total lunacy it was.

I had really loved cramming in education and had no problem with it because it was between me and my grades but when faking became an activity of involving other people, my whole being was not okay with it.

I remember this couple from Belgium that had decided to join my downline after I had spent months faking my success. They were going to be my first downlines and I was excited.

The man spoke very little English but still wanted to get me on a call. During our call, I noticed that he was a struggling father with a few little children one of whom was seeking and he was desperately trying to get some money for medical expenses.

On the call, he told me that he was willing to invest all he had as long as I guaranteed that he was going to make money with that company.

I struggled with my beliefs in that company and I told him that I could not guarantee anything but it seems this is not the answer he wanted. He did not want me to tell him the company was a sham.

Former Regents’ Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University Robert Cialdini, says the root cause of people falling victim to financial fraud is their uncertainty about the details of their financial environment.

When people feel uncertain about financial decisions, he notes, they look outside themselves, and this sets them up for fraud.

Back to my Belgian friend, at that time, I came to think of it as his way of trying to sell himself the idea of joining this company because it served as a real light (in fact the only light) in the darkness of his financial needs.

I tried to discourage him from entering telling him that he should not invest his only money but he kept asking me to let him in.

The weeks that followed made us two friends who were in this struggle together. He gave me a virtual tour of their home, introduced me to his wife and kids, and given that he was an elderly man in his late 60s, I felt like he was my dad.

You can be as hard-hearted as stone but when you see an image of your loved one in the eyes of someone else, you are immediately filled with empathy towards that person.

I felt the need to protect him from this industry which I knew enticed people with huge return potentials but most never made it.

So I gave him a guarantee and told him to invest with me. I told him that if he lost his money, I would make sure I give it back to him from my own money and then some.

I had some money saved up for this for these kinds of investments and it was money I was ok with if I lost it.

Would you know it? One month after his investment, the company stopped “paying” and not long after that, I received the call. He was crying and I told him that I had made a promise that I had to keep.

I gave him back his initial $500 and added another $500 because, at that time, I had made about $1500 holding on bitcoin when it spiked in 2017.

I never heard from him again not because he ghosted me but mostly because what had brought us together had come to an end.

I think his concerns were genuine and that is why I gave him back his money and then some so that he could take care of his family.

When that company collapsed, I was not sad but rather relieved that I never had to fake it anymore.

But I still faked it some more in other areas of my hustle at least unknowingly.

Back then, there were many indicators that I ignored entering these MLM scams because I was trying to stay positive and use the law of attraction to get what I wanted.

I watched people I was within that previous scam move onto the next scam like nothing happened. Most of these people were “successful” at least that is what I thought. Maybe they were better at faking. But whatever they did, it worked.

I was in MLMs for seven months and I only recruited one person from who I never made any dollar but rather ended up giving him my own money.

But this never taught me a lesson.

The fake it till I made it mindset was not easy for me to get rid of.

I think one of the reasons for this was that so many people were using it and to me, it seemed as though it was working for them

I kept telling myself that my own success was close by. Until I faked myself into a $25000 loss.

Over the years as I have tried to distance myself from that, I have learned one lesson.

The law of causation works even when you fake it till you make it.

1. Faking it in school caused me to have less and less understanding of subject matter and only gave me the bare minimum I needed to pass until that led me to get expelled.

2. I never learned my lesson and faked some more so that I could make a few dollars on the side and that not only ended up getting me nowhere but it also caused me to lose a bit of money.

I still kept it on and I lost much more. Can you imagine a broke 3rd-year college student losing $25000 in a night?

All the faking I was doing was coming back full circle to fake me back.

I know this because I now have a very different life and am no longer meeting with circumstances that “fake me over” and once I meet with such events, am quick to get out of them before they cause me problems.

The fake life of people trying to make it in life has only increased with the increase in usage of social media. Maybe this is a way that some people choose to satisfy their need for validation or maybe others seek riches through being fake.

What I have learned about this mindset however is that unless you score high on the scale of sociopathy and indifference, you should stay away from this life model because it will always take more than it gives and you don't want that trust me.