I was writing a post on tests, but it got too long and this content seemed to stand apart as a post of its own. Remember this when I put up the next post. It'll come in handy.

We often tell guys to "fake it til you make it." But this only makes sense if the way you fake it actually leads to making it. Consider ...

Examples of What Not to Do

Fake It

  1. Your wife is out of town. You goof off the entire time. She calls when her plane is landing. You clean up the entire house just before she gets home and pretend you're husband of the year because you can run a clean ship without her.

  2. You talk to a pastor congregation leader about your mission. In order to persuade him you start making up stories that prove the success of what you're proposing, relying on the lie to sell it to him. You convince yourself that it's better to get him to start doing things your way than not at all, so it's worth the falter in your integrity.

  3. Your wife is really struggling with the kids. You're struggling too, but you act like you're super dad and they respect you all the time, even though they don't. She feels inferior and neither of you feel compelled to seek actual answers to improve your kids' lives because you both think you have it under control.

  4. You're in a circle of people and they all seem to be really comfortable with each other, but you feel like you're the odd one out. You make up stories to sound impressive.

  5. You're screwing around on Reddit at work and your boss walks in. You frantically pull up some spreadsheets to make it look like you were doing actual work.

These are all [personal] examples of faking it that will never lead to making it.

Make It

  1. Your wife is out of town. You finally get the chance to see how you'd run the house without her. You really want to goof off the entire time, but you decide to keep things in order and set boundaries for yourself as to when you'll goof off and when you'll upkeep things. You hate every minute of it and want to break your own boundaries. You're faking your way through. You haven't made it - and the fact that you have to set boundaries for yourself in the first place proves this. But you do it anyway, and you become a little more disciplined as a result.

  2. You've never discipled anyone before, but you're pumped to try, so you decide to tell your pastor congregation leader about it all anyway. He's not fully sold on it, so you put your money where your mouth is and tell him who you're going to start discipling and that the growth in this guy over the next 6 months will be the proof of the effectiveness of what you're proposing. Then you hop to it, even though you have no clue what the heck you're doing. You're faking it. You're not a competent disciple-maker. But you learn by diving in head-deep and eventually make it, rather than being the guy who never gets started because he wants to wait until he's "ready" or "mature enough."

  3. You want to look like super-dad to your wife, but the honest reality is that the kids are just as defiant with you as they are with her. You devise a new approach to parenting and tell your wife you've got the situation under control and that she just needs to follow your lead. You don't actually know how this new approach will turn out. You're faking it. But you're going to learn from the effort and refine your process until something does work.

  4. The circle of people you're in are chatting up a storm and laughing at each other's jokes. You're an incredible social introvert and generally horrible with conversations. You step into the circle with a big grin on your face and say something totally stupid that you thought would be funny. They laugh at how stupid the joke was. You haven't made it. You faked your confidence. But now you've learned something that doesn't work and have an opportunity to practice various techniques at recovering in a social dynamic like that. Or maybe it did work and boosted your confidence a bit more until you become comfortable hopping into conversations from being an outsider.

  5. You're not disciplined at work at all. You screw around on Reddit, but decide that you need to at least look like you're working from time to time. So, every now and then you tell yourself you're going to pull up a TPS report and look it over. You have no idea what the heck a TPS report is in the first place. You're faking it. But after eventually seeing a few dozen of them, you're starting to realize where the important bits are and how they connect to other stuff that you actually do know what to do with. You just might make it after all, and you've disciplined yourself at the office in the process.

These are all ways I adjusted the initial failures I had at various points in my life to start developing actual character - and I'm still going.

Counter-Productive Game-Play

Lots of guys think that playing the part of the alpha will get them the results they're looking for. Think again. The "I'm the alpha game" is actually incredibly counter-productive. Consider the following scenarios that would cause a guy to play the "alpha" game.

If you are playing the alpha to "fix your marriage," you're living in the frame of your marriage. By definition, living in any frame other than your own is "not alpha." In this old post (which will most certainly come up in my book), I focus on the way "the marriage" is personified in culture to control men. This is particularly true in churchianity because women know they don't have biblical grounds to boss their husband around, so instead they have to adopt concepts, give those concepts transcendant authority over their husbands, and then tell their husbands they must meet those mysteriously transcendant standards because "that's what married people are supposed to do" - even though no one can explain exactly why married people are supposed to do any of that stuff. It's not technically your wife's frame, but it's a conceptual frame that's not your own, and she gets to tell you what that frame's boundaries are.

If you are playing the alpha to fix things with your wife, you're living in you're wife's frame. Let's be clear: this scenario involves pretending to be something you're not because you think that's what someone else really wants from you. In this case, that someone else is your wife. And you're trying to give her what she wants in order to get what you want in return. This is a covert contract. It's also at the very essence of the blue pill mentality.

If you are playing the alpha because a group of guys on the internet told you it's a great way to get your wife to sleep with you, and it's not quite working, but they keep telling you it's just that you're doing it wrong ... well, now you're living in the frame of a bunch of guys on the internet. That includes me. Sure, my frame is big enough to have you - but I'm here to empower men to do God's work, not take them under my wing indefinitely. Get out of my frame. Go be your own man.

What's the alternative? Actually becoming the best version of yourself. Your best physical shape. Your best emotional stability. Your best charm. Your best mental fortitude. Your best financial prospects. Most importantly: your best determination to fulfill a mission that actually makes a difference for eternity. Your frame needs to be your best self. Not the "perfect husband." Not your wife's dream-guy. Not what I tell you to be. Your best self. Nothing less.

You see, when you do things for other people's sake, you can never be the genuine article. You will always be a fake. When the tests come, you will ultimately fail. You can cheat for a while and make it look like you're a great success. That's what we do here in our advice threads: we become your cheat-sheet. But at the end of the day, you've got to get to the point where you can stop looking to the guy next to you for what he'd do and figure out for yourself what you're going to do. Yes, you need to learn what strategies work first, and then figure out how you personally will implement them. But it has to be uniquely you. The teaching and field report threads are showing you what the genuine article looks like - not giving you some boilerplate stereotype of which your life is just a lame spin-off.

CONCLUSION

Faking it is ...

  1. Going to fail if you do it in a way that you're not actually internalizing anything from the process, and

  2. Going to undermine all of your efforts if your underlying goals in doing this are still tied up in someone else's frame.

Focus on internalization and stick to your own frame - which if you are abiding in Christ is synonymous with his frame. Yes, that means making disciples.