Why "Fake It Until You Make It" Is Actually Great Advice
[Music] There's an incredible fallacy that plagues contemporary train of thought that insists that in order to feel how you want to feel, you have to get something. You know, you won't truly feel happy, confident, and motivated unless you have an awesome car, some sweet clothes, and you've landed your dream job. It's the things that we get that determine how we feel, act, and live. Once we get awesome stuff, we'll feel awesome, right?
It's really easy to fall into this way of thinking. In fact, modern commercial advertising simply wouldn't exist if it didn't ruthlessly prey on this way of thinking present within all of us. But the falsity in this train of thought really becomes apparent when you compare successful businesspeople with lottery ticket winners.
Pretend the lower middle-class person who has no idea how to deal with money suddenly wins a 30 million dollar lottery and becomes a millionaire worth a fortune overnight. Meanwhile, in the same city, a successful business person was finally promoted to the ranks of partner, a position worth 5 million dollars. He worked his way up the corporate ladder through determination, discipline, adaptation, innovation, and a thousand lessons learned the hard way.
So both people, in this moment, are worth millions of dollars. However, if we end this story the way it usually ends in real life, a year from now, the lottery ticket owner will be bankrupt. He will have had no idea how to deal with that money intelligently. He will have had some bad habits and didn't develop the discipline needed to avoid the temptation of pouring all that money into those habits.
The businessman will have been smart with his investment, sportsing the money back into the company that he worked for, which was rapidly expanding. He will have quadrupled his money over just one year, landing him at a net worth of over 20 million dollars. Now, the reason why this story sounds so plausible is because it happens all the time in real life. People who win large sums of money and haven't developed the character necessary to handle it go bankrupt, while the people who actually can handle the money do well with it.
So clearly, this little thought experiment reveals that if you get a lot of stuff, you won't be a better person because of it. If the majority of successful people on the planet are hard-working, energetic, passionate individuals, do you think they inherited those traits because they became successful, or do those traits have to do with them becoming successful in the first place?
Most successful people would argue the latter. Prolific writer Ralph Waldo Emerson has a famous quote directly related to this way of thinking, and it also happens to be one of the most hilariously simple quotes of all time. Simple, but it's still profound, and it goes like this: "Do the thing, and you will have the power."
That's it! He didn't say that once you have the power, you'll feel like doing the thing. He said, "Do the thing, and you will have the power." If you want to be successful, do the things that a successful person would do, and you will have the power. You will have success.
The 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who was a pretty successful guy, had the exact same philosophy. He said that there were all kinds of things he was afraid of at first, ranging from grizzly bears to mean horses and gunfighters. But by acting as if he was not afraid, he gradually ceased to be afraid. Teddy Roosevelt faked it until he made it, and you should too.
If you want to eventually have millions of dollars, then be smart with your money today, right now. Make your own coffee instead of buying one from Starbucks, and work that extra shift tonight because that's what somebody who's good with money would do. Act like you're good with money today, and you will eventually become someone who's good with money, aka you'll be rich.
Do the thing, and you will have the power. On the same note, don't wait till you're confident enough to ask that girl out. Ask her out now because that's what a confident person would do. If she says no, then ask more girls out, even if it terrifies you, and again and again. Eventually, you'll be someone who's really confident in asking girls out.
Act, and you will become. Do the things you know you should do, even if it feels uncomfortable, because eventually you'll get used to it, and before you know it, you will have become the person you want to be.
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