In search of certainty
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. — Bertrand Russel
I help people with presentations. Sometimes they come to me with a lot of poorly structured content. This is a technical problem, and it can be solved easily. A far deeper problem is when people lack conviction, when they don’t believe in their own content. These are often some of the smartest people there are. They know anyone’s thinking is faulty, so they are never 100% sure about anything. This makes them better thinkers, but also poorer presenters. When you lack conviction, it is hard to convince others.
Where can smart people find certainty and conviction in these highly uncertain times, in highly complex domains? “Fake it until you make it” is the mantra that startup gurus and business coaches keep on repeating. If my client does not display enough confidence, as a presentation coach I am supposed to manually fix all the wrong non-verbals, all the subtle cues which surely betray that my client doesn’t truly believe what they say. I never do this. Early in my career I decided not to do it, and 15 years later I think this is one of the best decisions I ever made.
The problem is not that faking it does not work. It definitely does. The problem is that, in the immortal words of Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. The problem is with the price of it. The problem is the slippery slope and escalating commitments. Once you start faking it, it becomes increasingly hard to stop. You start faking non-verbals, then you round the numbers slightly, and next thing you wake up and your whole P&L sheet is astray. Sheesh, how did that happen?
Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy advocated “faking it” in her TED talk with 50+ mln views. She then went on to become a poster person for the reproducibility crisis in social psychology after her own research on faking it didn’t replicate. Ah, the irony! Did she believe in faking the experimental results as well? Perhaps not, but in a system awash with faking these things abound to happen. Adam Neumann, the CEO and founder of WeWork, had invented some highly creative methods of accounting. He resigned after the valuation of WeWork went from 47 billion to 9 in a botched IPO attempt. I wonder if Masayoshi Son, WeWork’s largest investor, still thinks faking it is such a great idea. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame, landed herself in prison, convicted of fraud. I wonder if her investors, the clients, employees and board members of Theranos would subscribe to the “fake it” mantra now? Oh, and do I even need to mention SBF/FTX?
Alas, smart people can’t have full factual certainty that their actions will produce a desired effect. This is a superpower only the stupid possess. Investors know this better than anyone. Startups in their portfolio pivot and fail all the time. Founders like Jeff Bezons and Elon Musk openly told their investors that chances of success were 1 in 10, which is a statistically accurate prediction. But they also had great conviction that their goal was worth achieving, the problem worth solving, the opportunity worth exploring because it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t a factual certainty, it was moral certainty, a moral conviction.
Moral convictions are a double-edged sword. Indeed, morality-laden reasoning was misused by the very same people like Cuddy, Neumann and Holmes. Some investors and executives have already become allergic to yogababble, spiritual or moralising language. The great news is, you don’t have to use any of that in your presentation. You don’t have to say that one of the reasons you’re making a cancer-screening startup is because your beloved grandmother died of cancer (true story). Knowing why you’re fighting for this deal is enough, and this alone gives you confidence. Well-discovered moral convictions tend to be deeply personal. They are grounded in the most profound experiences of one’s life, sometimes happy, sometimes traumatic. They give you the state of confidence, but your data and conclusions are still open to criticism.
Did Neumann, Holmes and Cuddy possess sincere moral convictions? We will never know. They could have been psychopaths, faking it just for the pleasure of it. Or maybe it was a machiavellian gesture, inventing a false morality for the sake of profit. It is far more likely, however, that they had genuine moral convictions and that this is the main reason they were faking the numbers part. They were faking it because they sincerely believed fakery is permissible for the greater good, because they wanted to build something, to go from 0 to 1. They were wrong, they made a moral error.
Vladimir Lenin famously said that you can’t make a revolution wearing white gloves. Well, perhaps you should not be doing it then. The ends do not justify the means, the means are the ends. What you reap is what you sow. Once you start the Red Terror, it is very hard to stop. You keep doing it until you kill all the friends and relatives of the people you killed before. In a country like Russia, these could be millions of people. Now ask yourself, is the revolution still the right thing to do? The same reasoning applies to faking it.
Neumann, Holmes and Cuddy didn’t think it through. They overlooked the obvious. In hindsight, you don’t have to be a towering genius of moral philosophy to see that an approach that advocates faking it might be slightly problematic. Hardly any system of morality on Earth advocates fakery. Some see it as a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless. For as much as you can, avoid being evil. That’s, like, the first rule. At least don’t be evil in a predictable and boring way, which faking it definitely is. How hard could it be? Well, ok, it’s quite hard. The hardest part is going against the crowd that tells you that faking it is part of the business. The hardest part is not being a sheep.
Faking it is not a business constant, it’s a variable. Selling without faking is possible. I’m not saying it’s easy. But it’s possible. It's a problem that needs to be addressed. The moral dilemma of “fake it or lose the deal” might have a solution. A lot of dilemmas do. The whole history of humanity is about coming up with better solutions for a rather limited set of moral problems. It is mostly about harming other people: killing, cheating and stealing. Let’s make another step in the same direction. Let’s do what we do best, let’s innovate.
People with tech smarts possess abundant capacity for imagination, creativity and problem-solving. They also have a tendency of overlooking the human side of it. It has been observed that engineering is the most popular education among the Islamic radicals, with religious studies coming only second. And that’s too bad, because technical solutions decoupled from sound moral reasoning are either shallow or catastrophically dangerous. Great companies like Apple or Tesla provide good solutions for both technical and moral problems. Don’t get me wrong, the technical part is essential, it gets you from 0 to 1, which is a lot. A moral solution gets you from 1 to 10. It gets you from good to great.
Overlooking the problem of faking it doesn’t serve us well. We are either shooting ourselves in the foot by undermining our confidence, or we are shooting in the foot our investors, employees, suppliers, contractors and friends. We should stop dispensing this dangerous, outdated advice about faking it and just start figuring out how can we solve this without fakery. This is the only sane and decent way to overcome our crippling under-confidence.