Uggh I never thought that some version of "The Secret, but for tech bros who worship Tim Ferriss" would get so many upvotes.

"Fake it 'til you make it" is terrible advice, in any arena.

There is the case where you may undervalue your skills or misread a situation, and you actually have more efficacy in producing some outcome than you may think (e.g. applying for some job even though you feel woefully underqualified, then landing the job and having to work super hard to get up to speed, but you /do it/). In this case, you don't have to fake anything. You just have to do it.

But the common case where people advise this is terrible, i.e. to just "pretend" as though your internal thoughts were somehow that of someone whom you desire to be like.

A canonical example is telling some introverted guy to just "fake it til you make it" when it comes to dating. What ends up happening is these guys muster a ton of willpower to put themselves in extremely uncomfortable situations (e.g. going to something like salsa dancing or yoga with the intention of "meeting girls") and attempt to "be" like whatever they imagine a confident "Chad" to be. Inevitably this backfires because they have no idea what confidence is, and it usually leaves them off worse than before.

When it comes to procrastinating, you cannot attempt to change deeply ingrained feelings BEFORE you start on some epic task.

No, the only way that has ever worked for me and what I have seen work is to get started on the smallest possible thing, and be /consistent/.

For example, I want to learn more about how hash tables are constructed in C++, so I'm trying to write my own library to create code and write tests for my own edification. I can tell you that whenever I would see the initial task of "learn hash tables", my mind would just give up hope. The task is too dang big and abstract!

But the key to getting started and quitting that procrastination is to learn to /hope/ for something reasonable and doable, not /hope/ for something that would require a deus ex machina to just yeet yourself over to the other side from novice to expert.

Hoping for "becoming really dang good at hash tables" is vague and overwhelming, but I /can/ hope for "set up a hello-world application with reasonably best-practices CMake". Tomorrow, I can code up a simple interface that just proxies to =unordered_map=, then the day after I can write the internals myself, and so forth.

Hoping to "become a Chad" is a bad goal for our friend from the prior example. He can't /hope/ his way into becoming more confident "ladies' man", but he can sign up for an intro class on the weekend for a hobby he always wanted to learn (on the road to building a better more fulfilling life that will bring him into contact with great people, both men and women; "becoming a Chad" is a bad / naive goal of many boys who fail to grow up).

If anyone struggles with this, I highly recommend How We Change [0]. After spending a decade fighting anxiety and depression based on material from everything from Tim Ferriss to Jordan Peterson (neither of which were very helpful, but that's another comment...), this book finally helped me break free. It's not any overnight panacea, but I'm enjoying steady improvements in mental health that I wish I had had the knowledge to make long ago.

[0] https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062961112/how-we-change/