Perform!
Until you aren’t.
Somewhere out there is a you that doesn’t quite exist yet. A you that’s the you you’ve been dreaming about. A you that’s a better version of… you. More accomplished. More experienced. Stronger. But you haven’t been able to get there. Not because you’re not capable… you just haven’t performed it enough times for it to stick.
We tend to think of who we are as something fixed and discovered — like our real selves are buried somewhere under a pile of crap just waiting to be uncovered. Fully authentic.. fully formed… just in need of the right circumstances to finally emerge like Marilyn Monroe popping out of a giant birthday cake. (I think that’s something that happened right?) So… we wait and wait and wait until the circumstances are perfect and we feel ready. We wait until the confidence arrives on its own, or until our expertise feels earned enough to finally claim and the title stops feeling like cosplay. We treat identity like something that happens to us rather than something we build, and then we wonder why we feel stuck.
But most of what we call ‘personality’ or ‘expertise’ or ‘confidence’ got built the same way everything else did… through repetition and discomfort. Being the thing before you felt like the thing. The difference between the person who becomes the expert and the person who stays the aspiring one isn’t usually talent or credentials or time. It’s a willingness to perform the role out loud in public… before it feels completely true.
Actors know this. Musicians know this. The rest of us are sorta resistant to it for some strange reason, probably because we’ve conflated performance with dishonesty somewhere along the way, and we’re too proud to be caught pretending.
Faking implies deception, but performance implies practice. Those are not the same thing, and the distinction matters. (At least enough for me to write this silly article about it.)
For example… when a guitarist sits down to learn something they can’t yet play, they’re not faking musicianship. They’re performing. Practicing. Honing their craft. When my son, who’s chipping away at learning to skateboard, throws his shoulders back and pushes off like he’s done it a thousand times, he’s not lying. He’s practicing confidence until his body finally catches up. The performance isn’t a fraud. It’s a rehearsal for something real. And the rehearsal is how the real thing gets built. Knowaddamean?
If you’re a small business owner who cringes a bit every time someone calls you an entrepreneur, that cringe is information. It means the gap between who you are and who you’re performing as is still wide. It means the word doesn’t fit yet, the way a new jacket doesn’t fit — a little stiff, a little unfamiliar, not quite broken in, not quite “me”. The solution isn’t to wait until the cringe goes away on its own, to hold off on the title until it feels earned, to keep being timid with phrases like ‘I kinda run a small business’ or ‘I do a little freelance work on the side.’ The solution is to say the word out loud, in a sentence, to another human being, and then say it again. Until it sounds like you. Because it will. Not because you faked your way into it — but because you performed your way into it, which is a different thing entirely.
This applies at every scale. Want to be seen as an expert in your field? Call yourself one. Not recklessly, and certainly not without the work to back it up. But you absolutely don’t need to wait for someone else to hand you the designation. That’s not how it happens. It never has been. Expertise is one part body of knowledge and one part decision to stand behind what you know. Most people with deep knowledge of something are still out there describing themselves as ‘sorta familiar with’ it. They’re still waiting for permission that’s likely never coming. Meanwhile the person with half their knowledge and twice their confidence is the one getting hired, getting quoted, getting asked to speak at the thing. Pretty frustrating ain’t it?
So lead with confidence you’re still assembling. Dress for the version of your business that’s two years ahead of where you are today. Introduce yourself as the thing you’re becoming, not the thing you’re leaving behind. Will it feel strange? You betcha. Will anyone call you out on it? Almost certainly not — and if they do, they’re probably the kind of person who says “well actually” at parties and you don’t need their approval to begin with.
There’s a reason ‘dress for the job you want’ is a bit of a cliche. Not because it’s profound advice, but because it works, and people keep needing to hear it. The external signal reshapes the internal story. You wear something, you carry yourself differently, other people respond to you differently, and slowly the loop closes. The outside performance starts informing the inside reality. This isn’t magic and it isn’t self-delusion. It’s just how humans construct identity over time, which is always more malleable than we give it credit for.
The discomfort you feel when you perform ahead of your identity isn’t a sign you’re being dishonest. It’s a sign you’re growing into something real. That specific feeling of ‘this isn’t quite me yet’ is the feeling of becoming, and most people mistake it for fraud and just… stop. They pull back. They over-qualify and wait for the feeling to pass before moving forward again. And then they’re surprised when nothing changes.
The ones who don’t stop just keep performing. They sit with the discomfort long enough for it to get boring, and then one day they look up and realize they stopped performing a while ago. They’re just doing the thing now. They’re just being the person. The gap closed while they weren’t watching, somewhere between the first time it felt like a lie and the hundredth time it felt like a reflex.
That’s when you know it worked. That’s when the performance becomes the person.
So go ahead. Be a little performative about who you’re becoming and what you’re building. The alternative is waiting, and waiting is its own kind of pretending.