Fake It Till You Make It

How our actions affect our preferences and why that changes everything

Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash

In the late 1990s, I took up meditation. Books I’d be reading talked about how life-changing it was. So I made up my mind to start meditating for 10 minutes each day in the morning. I figured: how hard could it be to sit still and do nothing for 10 minutes?

It turned out there is nothing harder than sitting still and doing nothing - even for 10 minutes. Everything I had learned in my life until that time had trained me to make complete and efficient use of every moment I had. This meant that if I was sitting still I had better be planning my day, or thinking about what I had to do at work, or solving one of the various problems that were concerning me in my life at the time, or… something else productive. Doing nothing but focus on my breathing felt like a form of insanity. My mind revolted against it. My body revolted against it.

There is an old Zen koan, “You must meditate for one hour each day. If you are too busy to meditate for one hour, then meditate for two hours.” On the face of it, this of course seems crazy. A person who does not have time for one hour of meditation does not have time for two hours. Yet there is a kernel of wisdom at the heart of the koan - and it is this wisdom that unlocks not only the secret to meditation, but also to doing just about anything else transformative.

A little economics

To understand, we need a little economics. Traditional economic theory teaches us that a person has preferences: for certain foods, for certain durable goods, and for certain ways of living. These preferences are a “given” - we like what we like, and that’s all there is to it. Based on our preferences, we make our choices. These choices also depend on another “given” - how much money we have to spend. But that’s all there is to it. There is literally nothing more to being a consumer.

It’s no wonder they call it “the dismal science.” If things really went according to this traditional economic account, we could hire AI to make all our life decisions for us. We’d never have to turn our minds on again: we’d simply engage in whatever activities we were predestined to prefer. At least as I see it, this is not a description of a life worth living.¹

The good news is that this traditional economic story is actually wrong. A wealth of psychological evidence suggests that our actions don’t just follow from, but also affect, our preferences.² And recently behavioral economists have been developing new economic theories of consumer decision-making that take this evidence into account.

There are two main elements to how our actions affect our preferences. First, when we take an action, we see ourselves take the action, and we infer from that what kind of a person we are. A woman who runs a few times starts to think, “Hey, maybe I’m a runner.” A man who prepares a few meals muses, “Maybe I’m the sort of person who cooks.” This tendency to mold our identity to the activities we see ourselves engage in increases our comfort level with those activities and induces us to prefer the activities more.

Second, when we engage in an activity regularly, our minds and bodies in essence learn the activity. A man who gets in the practice of listening to classical music develops an appreciation for it and so likes it better. A woman who practices windsurfing obtains a muscle memory for balancing on the surfboard and so gains greater enjoyment from doing so. This mental and physical learning has effectively altered these individuals’ preferences.

These two mechanisms lead to a process we’re all familiar with - habit formation. That term often has a negative connotation: it can bring to mind unhealthy activities such as smoking and gambling that have the potential to be addictive (another negative term). But habits and even addictions can be a good thing: if you develop a deep appreciation for classical music, you acquire the potential to spend many hours pleasurably listening to it each week, such that there may be nothing you’d rather do for long stretches of time. Few would consider such an addiction to be a bad thing - particularly if you keep your wits about you and continue to exercise free will over how much time you spend on the activities you engage in day by day.

Why does this matter?

OK - so your choices affect your preferences. Why is this so important? Simply because it opens wide the possibility for radical choices about who you want to be, how you want to see the world, and what you want to do with your life.

Let’s bring it back to meditation. As I mentioned earlier, when I began meditating it felt wrong to me at first. Crazy, even. So what did I do? I kept at it anyway. The upshot is that 25 years later I’m still doing it. As simple a thing as that seems, the practice of meditation has transformed my life.

What happened for me is that, as I continued the meditation practice, my body and mind learned. I learned to sit still. I learned to observe my own thoughts. Most importantly, I learned to wait for what the experience would bring - however unexpected. Eventually, I found - not every day, but every so often - that I could look beyond the things in my mind and witness something infinite and wide open. What I was witnessing was - how shall I say it? - a well of possibility. (I know I’m not doing it justice describing it in words. But it is quite amazing. If you’re an experienced meditator, perhaps you understand what I’m talking about. If you’re not, then maybe if you try meditation and stay at it for long enough, you’ll experience something similarly amazing!)

What I did in learning to meditate is just one example of a larger idea I call “Fake It Till You Make It.” It’s this idea that’s at the heart of the Zen koan about meditating for two hours a day: if one small step in the direction you want to go isn’t getting you there, you should, as crazy as it feels, consider committing to a much larger step. While I didn’t (and don’t) meditate for two hours a day, what I did do - when I found that meditation wasn’t doing anything for me - was redouble my commitment to it and hold on. Until finally it clicked. Put another way, I continued meditating until my actions caused my preferences to fall in line.

This was not a trivial thing. I had turned myself into a different person.

What does it mean to “fake it”?

Now I want to be clear about what I mean by “faking it” when I say “Fake It Till You Make It” - and what I don’t mean. I don’t mean hold yourself out to other people as something you’re not - particularly where people’s lives, limbs, and fortunes are at stake. Don’t, for example, pretend to be a neurosurgeon and operate on people’s brains. Don’t tell people you have a transformative new method for processing blood tests if you don’t, in fact, have one. Let there be no confusion on this point: no form of snake oil is ever covered by Fake It Till You Make It.

What I do mean is this: you should take bold steps to represent to yourself who you are and who you might become. And do so not primarily by way of your thoughts, but through your actions. In particular, Fake It Till You Make It is about stepping WAY outside your comfort zone with what you do so that you transform your notion of who you are and, in the process, change your life and your perception of the world.

One way of looking at it is through the lens of the economic concept of capital. Your "capital" consists of all of those durable things in your life that hold value and define who you are. In the special way I’m using this term, it’s the things people normally think of as capital - money, financial assets, house, car. But also, and more importantly, it includes what you conceive of as your personal capabilities and traits - all those things (beyond your finances) that embody your ideas about what you can and cannot do. Fake It Till You Make It is a commitment to step beyond your personal capital and take action without regard to it. In doing so, you build a new reality that isn't dependent on an entrenched sense of what’s possible.

Shall we dance?

Perhaps the most perfect example of Fake It Till You Make It comes from a 1996 Japanese film called “Shall We Dance?” The protagonist, a mild-mannered businessman, decides to take up ballroom dancing. In the beginning, he is quite anxious and diffident about it: it’s completely different from anything he’s done before. His instructor tells him the key to overcoming his lack of confidence as a dancer is to make his first physical step onto the dance floor a bold and confident one. At first the businessman can’t bring himself to do such a thing. Besides, how could a mere step possibly make a difference? When, in the final dance-competition scene of the movie, he does at last take that grand step, it changes everything - for the audience at the competition and, more importantly, for the protagonist himself. In that moment, the mild-mannered businessman transforms himself into a dancer.

And so it is in life. Our actions can change everything. Sometimes a single grand step is all that is needed. Other times it’s about sticking to a daily practice though it feels all wrong - until, magically, it feels all right. When we turn the traditional economic logic on its head, letting our choices lead the way and letting our preferences and personal identity re-form around them, we open new possibilities for altering our lives and our world.

1. Given all the algorithms and recommendation engines out there, it seems the people at many large consumer product and retail companies believe this is actually how we would like to live our lives.

2. See, for example, Ariely, D., & Norton, M. I. (2008). “How actions create – not just reveal – preferences.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(1), 13-16.