Fake it, SO you make it
When I was in primary school I remember learning how to greet people.
It went a little something like:
Person 1: “Hello”
Person 2: “Hello!”
(Shake Hands)
Person 1: “I’m Joe, nice to meet you”
Person 2: “I’m Samantha, nice to meet you too”
In New York it’s somewhat different.
Within the first minute of meeting someone and them introducing themselves, you’ve been given an abridged version of their accomplished career. Most of the time, without asking.
It’s more like “Hi, I’m Joe. I’m a two time founder who spent 10 years successfully scaling my consumer goods company to two million users and now help other startups to get to six figures in revenue in 12 months or less.”
Everyone here is hustling and working on standing out to create a connection that may prove helpful. The desire to do more business forces this conversation front and center. There’s little time for pleasant chit-chat and trying to get to know someone. One has to sell themselves in this hyper-competitive city. The result: people come across as super confident, an expert, and accomplished.
For a South African, the cultural change has been jarring. I wasn’t used to people selling themselves at this level. To me, it came across as bragging, or as being full of yourself or inauthentic.
Yet to everyone else, it’s just part of the New York City handshake and it’s part of a strong US individualistic culture that encourages the celebration of ones own success.
This results in people seeming more competent than they really are. In the first few months it took me a while to realize this. It was difficult for me to be able to assess new founders that I was meeting for the first time, as my “bullshit radar” was off and needed to be recalibrated for this new environment.
There was another result that for me was somewhat unexpected. I started to hold back in conversations with new people and my own confidence took a knock. I could see that in a room full of new people, I would be less sure of myself and what I was going to say despite having an informed opinion. I would be there, second guessing my own knowledge on the topic, as others continued to speak with high degrees of confidence and self-promotion. That sub-second reservation and body language can be felt in a room and it’s read as, incompetence.
Last week I came across this Harvard Business Review article that seems to affirm this. The article speaks about a seminal study that explored the connection between confidence and perception of competence. What the study found is that people who predicted that their own ability to perform a certain task would be high, were perceived by others to have competence in the performance of that task, regardless of their actual ability or actual performance of the task. Simply speaking, people will believe you when you say you’re good at something, and will affirm that belief by finding evidence later on to support it.
The study also found that people tend to penalize humble actors by deciding against them and choosing the confident ones, suggesting that: “In order to convince others of your abilities, you should make it a habit to communicate that you are good at what you do — without any self-deprecation regarding your core competencies… This doesn’t necessarily mean praising yourself at every opportunity; rather it means projecting an optimistic attitude. By displaying more confidence in your abilities, you set yourself up to be recognized for your competence and your contributions”.
So what does this study mean for new startup founders trying to carve out their niche and win new business against more established incumbents? What does it mean when pitching for work that you’ve never done before? What does it mean when you’re trying to establish a name for yourself in a new field?
It means that in order to be taken seriously and to be perceived as competent by others, you can’t wait for the results to speak for themselves (they wont). You need to actually fake it, SO you make it.
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