Faking it till I make it.

I saw a twitter post on a few days ago. This was by none other than my great mentor Sajal. Sajal and Ateev were the two founding engineers at Orangehealth. I joined them as the 3rd engineer.   

Here is the thread. 

Little back story - I was joining them from Radicali, at Radicali we were a bunch of young raw folks. Sajal's product engineering philosophy, combined with close look at how Dhruv (Founder @Orangehealth) operated with clarity on the product, Prathamesh's design explanation, reviews helped me build a product and user first mindset. What do I say about Ateev, he was the one always watching our back. Making it easy. Well, I can go on. How Ayush found all eges-cases on the product. Whatever minimum, I saw of Tarun handling & designing operation excellence. Rajendra Sir with the knowledge. I said I could go on.

Let's come back to the point. He was replying to this clickbaity tweet. I know where it is coming from. The original twitter means to not fake your status game. Don't show off. I am not here to comment on it. 'Making it' is more important to me. How people handle it after making it is a personal choice. Whether you show off, or play it under the carpet - upto you. If you feel like 'making it' is a journey, we will talk about it later. For now we will stick to 'Faking it till making it', specifically Faking before making it.

Let's break it down - 

Making it

To make it, you need a goal. You always have to start with a goal. One that you are fully committed to. A goal requires plans. Multiple plans, broken down by different milestones in the journey. Bridging the gap between today and the goal on each steps. You need to put a lot of things together to achieve this. And most important of these is putting your mental game in place. 

Faking it

Yes, faking it. To be a winner you need to start thinking like a winner, work like a winner. Think you are already making it, you are destined to make it. Now, back track honestly from here. Figure out what all are you destined to do. And live it. This is what faking it is. 

Let's take a simplified example, 

Goal - Running a sub 20 5k. 

Planning - I have 3 months to run sub 20min 5k. And my current PR is 24 min. I have a plan prepared by an expert coach on Nike run club. The expert coach has already applied back-tracking to prepare the plan.

Executing the plan, is what it requires now. When I know execution is hard, this is where people give up. Faking can really help here. Everytime I go for a run, I am the sub 20 5k runner completing his traning. Everytime I feel low, I fake it to think how would I the future, who has already run a sub 20 min 5k would pick him up. 

And this is how I weight my risk and opportunities as well.

All of this is internal. Tricking mind to play the best, live the moment in head to prepare for reality, to bridge the gap. Elite atheletes do visualisations before games, they live the moment way before it actually happens to prepare their future self, by using their fake future self. Oh, are we in a time travel paradox? 😅

Go, fake it till to make it. 

Cheers.