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Happy Friday, {{first name | friend}}!
Fake it till you make it is bad advice. Always has been. This week I got proof of exactly how bad.
I was having a conversation in a WhatsApp group about LinkedIn posts that turned out to be completely made up.
Fake layoffs.
Fake revenues.
Fake near-bankruptcies.
Fake "I almost gave up" moments, invented from nothing, pulling in tens of thousands of likes.
Sad thing is, this happens all the time. People will always find the shortcut.
You know the kind. The post that reads a little too clean, a little too dramatic, a detail that doesn't quite add up if you think about it for more than four seconds.
Most of us don't think about it for four seconds. We just hit like and scroll.
Here's what's making it worse right now.
The big creators are preaching "share your story."
Good advice, said loud enough, by enough people, that the whole congregation started following it.
Except somewhere along the way, a chunk of them skipped the part where the story has to actually be true.
They just skipped straight to performing vulnerability, because that's what seemed to get rewarded.
If you've been reading since I started this newsletter in December 2024, you already know where I stand. I've said it from day one: your story is how you stand out.
Not a story.
Your actual, specific, unpolished one.
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Here's the thing about the fake version, though it doesn't just fail morally.
It fails practically too.
A made-up story can't survive follow-up questions.
Ask a real story more about itself and it gets richer, because there's actual memory underneath it. Ask a fake one, and it gets vaguer, because there was never anything down there to draw from.
You can fabricate a post. You can't fabricate a conversation.
And the engagement doesn't even mean what it looks like it means.
You can get 40,000 likes on a lie.
You can't get a real client relationship out of one, because relationships need the story to hold up over time, and fabrication never does.
It's a loan, not an asset. Eventually it comes due.
Sound familiar? It should. It's the same shortcut that shows up everywhere, the polished bio, the borrowed quote, the case study nobody can verify.
Different disguise, same instinct: it's easier to invent the story than to sit with the real one long enough to find what's actually worth telling.
The real one is slower.
It's also the only version still standing a year later, when someone finally asks you the follow-up question.
Stephen
P.S. I've been saying this since December 2024, and I'm not going to stop: the shortcut always gets found out eventually. Slow and true beats fast and fake, every single time.
