Insights
You can't fake it for too long
The problem with "fake it till you make it."
Leo Judkins, Founder, The iGaming Leader"Fake it till you make it" is one of the most common pieces of advice in business.
There's some truth in it. You can fake certainty for a meeting. Maybe a month.
But you can't fake it for long.
And at the level most of us operate at in iGaming, people smell hesitation.
Your team starts noticing. Your board starts noticing. You start noticing them noticing.
And then you start second-guessing yourself even more.
The spotlight effect is lying to you
There's a cognitive bias called the spotlight effect. We believe we're constantly being watched.
That everyone is clocking our mistakes, our uncertainty, our hesitations.
The reality? Nobody cares as much as you think they do. It's only you that cares so much about it.
But even if the spotlight isn't real, the doubt is. And that doubt has to go somewhere.
The real problem isn't confidence. It's where the doubt goes.
Most leadership advice says: project more. Be more confident. Show up stronger.
So you push through another board meeting, another all-hands. You tell yourself you just need more data before you can commit.
But the data gets you to a point. And then your gut instinct, built on years of experience, has to get you the rest of the way.
The problem is when you don't trust that instinct because you've had nobody to test it with.
So you wait. You sit on a decision for weeks or months, hoping more information will make it obvious.
It never does.
What "faking it" actually costs
There's a moment in your career nobody warns you about. The one where you know what's coming, weeks before anyone else does.
For me it was 80 redundancies.
People who'd moved abroad with us. Friends. People I'd had dinner with. I knew their partners. I knew their kids. And I knew for weeks.
You can't talk to them. You can't talk to your team. You can't talk to your friends. Because most of them are on the list.
So you carry it alone. You project confidence through every meeting, every dinner, every Friday drink. Knowing what's coming on Monday.
Two weeks after the first round, we had to do another 40. I'd promised them it wouldn't happen again.
The hardest decisions aren't the ones with bad options. They're the ones where every option comes at a personal cost, and you're the only one who gets to choose.
The answer isn't projecting more. It's having a place to be uncertain.
You need a place where you can be uncertain in private, so you can be decisive in public.
That's not therapy. It's not coaching. It's pattern recognition.
Talking through a decision with someone who's seen that exact pattern before, who can tell you where their gut instinct came from when they faced the same thing, and who has nothing to gain from agreeing with you.
Saying the thing out loud to someone who's been there, and hearing them say: "I've made that exact decision. Here's what happened."
That's how you stop faking it. Not by projecting harder, but by removing the doubt before you walk into the room.