“Fake it till you make it” is common advice to the hesitant and underconfident. The idea is that if you pretend to be better than you are, you’ll be able to hang on just long enough until you actually figure out what you’re doing and you’ll be able to successfully pursue your goals. You’re planning, in a sense, not for the current version of yourself, but for a better version, which you can become if you just hang in there and muddle through for a while. But is this generally a good idea? Is faking perfection the ultimate life-hack?

Sometimes, aiming for something ambitious is a good idea, because if we fail to live up to our ideals, we’re just back to where we started. I’d like to be the kind of person who exercises every day, so I might consider signing up for the thirty-day yoga challenge at my studio. If I fail to go every day, not much is lost – I am simply back to the status quo, and maybe I even got my butt off the couch a bit more often than I normally would. But sometimes, planning for our ideal self and failing is much costlier. My mother’s fascination with tech gadgets is a good example. She would like to be the kind of person who uses her smartphone to improve her life – she’s seen other people use apps to manage their finances, plan shopping and meals, track their exercise, navigate in unfamiliar places, and so on. Over the last decade, she has spent thousands of dollars on the newest and best technology – to then use her phones only for calling and texting, since she never gets around to learning how to use their extra features. Pretending to be a tech-savvy gadget user led her to waste a lot of money, which she could have spent instead on things she would have actually enjoyed, like vacations or nice meals. Unfortunately, her problem is a common one – psychologists call it the ‘planning fallacy.’ In estimating how likely we are to succeed in a goal, or how quickly we will complete a project, we are generally overly optimistic, in part because we seem to fail to consider our past experiences with similar projects. We plan for our perfect selves, not for our actual selves who struggle with procrastination, delays and interruptions. (Interestingly, we are much better at making predictions about other people’s plans.) However, it is not clear that the opposite strategy is any better: suppose you’ve tried and failed to quit smoking several times in the past. You’re convinced it’s the right thing to do, you’ve thrown out your cigarettes, but every time, in a stressful situation, or when socializing with other smokers, you break down and start again. In a sense, you have excellent evidence that it’s just not going to happen. You might think that it’s not worth trying, just to set yourself up to fail yet again. But that seems too defeatist – surely we shouldn’t simply give up once we’ve tried something a few times and failed, especially when it’s a very difficult pursuit?