There was a time when “fake it till you make it” meant building confidence. Now? It’s become a full-blown business model—and a dangerous one.
From self-proclaimed VA mentors to YouTube gurus, LinkedIn thoughtfluencers, TikTok wealth whisperers, and AI prompt hustlers, we’re living in the age of manufactured authority. People aren’t growing their skills anymore. They’re growing personas. And they’re charging for it.
😏 The Performance Economy Is Thriving
What are you really buying from these “experts”?
- 🔹 A renamed Google Sheet packaged as a proprietary system
- 🔹 Canva slides disguised as premium frameworks
- 🔹 Motivational buzzwords sold as strategy
- 🔹 Scarcity-based marketing to push a product that barely functions
These aren’t mentors. They’re performers. They’re good at selling the dream, even if they never lived it.
And the more convincing they look, the more they flood the ecosystem with noise that drowns out people doing the actual work.
It’s not just annoying. It’s dangerous.
People follow this playbook thinking they’re building careers. They’re actually building echo chambers—copying someone who copied someone who never made it in the first place.
This performance-first mindset is the same problem I called out in The Lie of Hustle Culture. It rewards noise over mastery.
🔊 Fake It = Lie Early, Charge Fast
“Fake it till you make it” used to mean building courage to try.
Now it means:
- “Call yourself a 6-figure expert.”
- “Sell a course before you’ve built a process.”
- “Monetize your journey before you’ve even arrived.”
You’re not skipping imposter syndrome. You’re skipping competence. And when people copy this formula, the internet fills up with coaches teaching coaches how to coach coaches. A recursive pyramid of nothing.
Whole niches get saturated. Clients get burned. And real professionals get lost in the noise.
The passion economy failed not because people lacked drive, but because too many mistook performance for profession.
🔹 I Was There When Work Mattered
I didn’t learn this from someone’s webinar. I learned it through years of doing the job while the job evolved beneath me.
I worked graveyard shifts in BPOs: customer service, tech support, SME, trainer. I handled irate customers from four continents while troubleshooting real systems.
I blogged in the 2000s—when you could actually rank with your ideas, not just your formatting. When Google rewarded thought, not schema.
I studied computer science before it was cool, learned to code as a kid, then re-trained as an adult through formal bootcamps and mentorship.
I didn’t start teaching the moment I learned something. I sat with it. Broke it. Rebuilt it. Shipped it.
Now I lead QA teams. I write, build, publish, and survive the content wars daily.
So when I say this isn’t how we grow industries, it’s not ego. It’s frustration.
It’s exhaustion. Because the fakers aren’t just annoying anymore. They’re in the way.
🎮 Sidebar: Before the Playbook, There Was Just Play
Back in the ’90s, computers weren’t even meant for gaming.
Most games were made by engineers for themselves. The mainstream was focused on consoles—Atari, N64, Sega. But IBM PCs and Commodore 64s quietly sparked a rebellion. Developers didn’t follow rules. They made them.
There was no Stack Overflow. No YouTube tutorials. Just config.sys, IRQ errors, and the thrill of getting Doom to boot without crashing your machine.
That’s the world I grew up in. We didn’t “brand” ourselves. We just did the work.
Some of us learned to debug before we learned algebra. Some of us learned to survive tech long before it became trendy.
So yeah, I take it personally when I see people treating hard-earned skills like weekend TikTok challenges.
🔹 The Rise of Content Without Competence
With the rise of influencers, pranks, passive income pitches, and AI-regurgitated content, every niche has become a noisy battlefield.
More people think it’s easy, so more people join. The more people join, the more saturated it gets. The more saturated it gets, the harder it is for real builders to break through.
Take blogging. In the 2000s, getting Google-approved was straightforward. You could rank if you wrote well. Today?
- You need schema
- PageSpeed insights
- Mobile responsiveness
- Structured content
- Semantic keyword depth
All that, for lower ad revenue per niche than we had 15 years ago.
YouTube is no different. Used to be raw, creative, and real. Now it’s algorithm-driven thumbnails, SEO-optimized titles, AI-generated b-roll, and “Top 5 Tips” content loops that never end.
Even AI is falling victim to this. Tools that could help you think are now used to spam. Same with prompt engineering—a once-useful skill hijacked by people selling templates with zero understanding behind them.
I warned about this shift in Prompt Engineering: Asking Better Questions and again in AI SEO-Generated Content Is Killing the Web. The tools aren’t the problem. It’s the people faking mastery for views.
Some creators practiced. Others just filmed pranks and built funnels.
It’s all quantity. No weight. No impact. Just more noise.
🔧 So What Do You Do?
Here’s how I survived—and how you can too:
- Be transparent. Say when you’re still learning. Clients respect honesty over inflated claims.
- Build in public. Share your work, your process, your fumbles. It builds trust.
- Give before you grab. Offer real value before you charge for advice.
- Charge when it’s earned. When your work has weight, your rate writes itself.
- Mentor when you’ve survived something. Not when you’ve repeated someone else’s script.
- Respect the craft. It’s not about being first. It’s about being solid.
- Stay in the fight. Because the hype fades. But the ones who build always stay standing.
📚 Want to Go Deeper?
If this post hit something real for you, here are some deeper dives:
- 🔗 The Lie of Hustle Culture — Why we confuse movement with progress.
- 🔗 Passion Economy Failure — When making a living becomes performance art.
- 🔗 Prompt Engineering: Asking Better Questions — The skill behind the AI tools (not just template spam).
- 🔗 AI SEO-Generated Content Is Killing the Web — What happens when we flood the internet with empty content.
- 🔗 Mastering Remote Work Without Burning Out — A grounded look at leveraging remote work without falling for the productivity trap.
These aren’t surface-level posts. They’re from the trenches—just like this one.
❄️ Final Cut
This isn’t envy. This is a warning.
If you’re charging for advice and you haven’t bled for it, you’re not a mentor. You’re just early.
If your business is built on branding, not output—it will collapse. If you’re faking it just to make it—you’re lying.
I’m not here to preach. I’m here to outlast.
And when the hype dies, I’ll still be here.
CTRL+ALT+SURVIVE.