The Peter Principle posits that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. What happens after that point? The implicit assumption is that they stop getting promoted and linger at whatever level they’ve arrived at, and surely all of us can point to mediocre leaders who seem to exhibit exactly that circumstance. But in fact, that situation is not stable but subject to career pressure, as Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf define it in Making a Career in Dictatorship. Unable to move up, and very possibly unable to meet expectations, the person who is subject to the Peter Principle is at risk of losing their job, or even their entire career. Which means they might take an even greater risk to save it. Gläßel and Scharpf write:

The logic of career pressure also offers a compelling twist to the Peter Principle. The Principle posits that individuals in hierarchical organizations are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, where they can no longer perform effectively and cease to advance. In contrast, our logic shows how these individuals may surpass this point and climb the hierarchy even further. Career-pressured individuals often take on high-risk, labor-intensive, or morally contentious tasks. By loyally executing the organization’s dirty work, they can reestablish their value, regain competitiveness, and even outpace peers who were previously ahead of them. Alternatively, they may resort to sabotaging superiors or higher-ups by making false allegations or revealing secrets to create vacancies above them and forcibly advance their careers.

Gläßel and Scharpf, Making a Career in Dictatorship, page 182

In other words, someone promoted up to their level of incompetence, sensing a threat to their own livelihood, becomes a threat to everyone else. I’m reminded here of David Graeber’s theory in Bullshit Jobs, that a great many management jobs are basically feudal retainers—people kept around in order to make the folks above them look good. Very often, making someone else look good may well mean tackling the dirty work for them so that they can keep their hands clean.

The petered leader has in effect been made an imposter—a real imposter, not a “syndromed” or perceived one. They must seem competent, to preserve the appearance that they belong in the role; while in fact they are not capable of delivering on their actual responsibilities and may have been quietly tasked with unrelated services both illegal and unethical. As a result, one of the primary tools of the real imposter is obscurity. Imposters cloak themselves in a fog of obfuscation and busyness, so that the people around them can never say for sure what it is they are doing, or how well (or not) they are doing it.

What we call imposter syndrome was originally termed imposter phenomena, a term that makes plain that it is something that can be observed, not merely felt. The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm. But perhaps there’s even another, more diabolical move here. What if the popularity of imposter syndrome is, in part, a means of obscuring the actual imposters in our midst? What are we missing when we look inward instead of around?

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The best reality TV show I’ve ever seen*–indeed one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen, period**–is the original British version of Faking It. It ran on Channel 4 in the early 2000s, when I was a postdoc in the UK. A member of the public would take one month to learn to fake it as an professional in a field mostly or entirely unrelated to their real profession. They would learn to do this by moving in with one or two mentors–themselves experienced professionals in the field in which their mentee had to fake it–and doing intensive training full-time. The climax of the show was a contest pitting the faker against three actual professionals, each with a few years of full-time professional experience. The contest was judged by elite pros in the field. The judges would decide who performed the best. Then they’d be told that one of the contestants was faking it–had only been doing it for a month–and asked to guess who it was. The faker won if they won the contest and weren’t ID’d as a faker by any of the judges. There wasn’t any prize for winning, per se, but the people who took part in the show invariably got a lot out of it (more on this below). You can find old episodes on YouTube, and you really should do yourself a favor and check them out. Some of the best ones include cellist to club DJ, burger flipper to chef, and physics grad student to magician.

Faking It was an amazing show. It changed the lives of a bunch of the people who went on the show. Remember, this was pre-influencer times–the contestants weren’t looking to become influencers or reality TV stars. They weren’t even looking to change their lives, at least not necessarily. But yet they did. Some people who went on this show changed professions. They literally faked it ’til they made it! And even those who went back to their old professions and old lives often went back as completely different people–much more self-confident, much more outgoing, and with totally different interests, to the point that their old friends and colleagues were shocked at the changes. I love the message that you don’t just have to “be yourself,” not even “the best version of yourself.” You can be different, and better, than that. People can really change, if they really want to, and if they’re placed in the right environment.

Which got me wondering if Faking It has any lessons for mentoring more broadly, in particular for academic scientists mentoring graduate students. Obviously, Faking It is very different than grad school in all sorts of ways–but that’s the point. You don’t just have to look close to home for insights and inspiration. Looking very far afield can help too.

Mentoring lessons from Faking It

“Faking it” is a misnomer. The phrase ‘fake it ’til you make it’ is easily misinterpreted, because the ordinary connotation of ‘fake’ is something with no basis in reality whatsoever: an actor playing a part, or an AI-generated video clip, or one of Danielle Dixson’s datasets. But the mentees on Faking It really did master many aspects of their new profession. Now, they generally did so in circumscribed ways. For instance (mild spoiler alert), IIRC the sheep shearer who became a hairdresser only learned one haircut, because he only needed to learn one for the contest at the end. I do think there’s a lesson here for many graduate students (and postdocs and junior faculty) in ecology, especially those suffering from imposter syndrome. You’re not an imposter–not a fake with no basis in reality. Rather, you’ve already mastered some aspects of your profession, and you’re in the process of mastering more.

There’s talent everywhere. Previous experience is overrated. Faking It mentees generally had little-to-no relevant previous experience in their new professions (although see below for exceptions). But yet they almost all faked it successfully or came quite close.

Desire, determination, and grit are properly rated. Faking It mentees knew what they were getting into, at least in broad strokes. They knew they were signing up for a very intense month of training, very different from anything they’d done before. And they saw it through. They were a self-selected bunch of gritty, determined people, though the environment they were in also fostered their grittiness and determination (more on that below).

Technical skills are both the easiest and least-important things to learn. A common theme of Faking It episodes is that learning technical skills isn’t the hardest part, or the most important part, of learning a new profession. Apparently, anybody who really wants to can learn the technical skills required to perform card tricks, or mix tracks as a DJ, or filet a salmon, or whatever. Over and over again, the hard part of faking it almost always turns out to be acquiring the personality traits and soft skills you need to fake it in your new profession. You invariably need self-confidence. And depending on the profession in which you’re faking it, you need other personality traits and soft skills too. For instance, to be a magician you have get comfortable with lying to people. To be a chef, you have to learn to be calm, focused, and situationally aware while working as part of a team under intense deadline pressure. To be a club DJ, you have to be outgoing and enjoy partying with other people. Etc.

Tutoring beats letting people figure things out for themselves. Grad students often are expected to figure a lot of things out for themselves and to teach themselves a lot of things. Many graduate advisors, including me, take the view that this is how you learn to think and work independently–you learn it by doing it. But that’s the polar opposite of how mentoring works on Faking It. Mentors on Faking It spend a lot of time tutoring their mentees one-on-one, and in many cases that seems to have set the mentees up for success as independent professionals in a new profession. As a mentor, I wonder if I have room to improve in recognizing when one of my graduate students needs me to sit down for a long time with them, teach them something, and give them drills/assignments/etc. to help them master whatever it is I’m teaching them.

Figuratively throwing people in at the deep end is a great way to teach them to swim. Or at least, it’s a great way to start their first swimming lesson. Mentors on Faking It routinely threw their mentees in at the deep end from very early on–surprising them by asking them to fake it in their new profession for members of the public within their first few days (sometimes even on their first day!). No doubt that was to create some drama for the TV show. The TV audience got to watch through their fingers as the mentees invariably crashed and burned at their first attempt at faking it. But just because it made for good TV, and just because it invariably made the mentees incredibly stressed and embarrassed, doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad mentoring–that it hindered rather than aided the mentees at achieving their ultimate goal of faking it successfully. Throwing the mentees in at the deep end invariably gave the mentors insights as to the mentees’ strengths and weaknesses. It also created a teachable moment, opening the mentees’ eyes to just how much work it was going to take for them to fake it successfully. And it motivated the mentees, a point that deserves its own bullet…

Failure, and risk of failure, can be great motivators. The mentees on Faking It get subjected to a series of public tests throughout their training, in preparation for the final contest. They almost invariably find those tests nerve-wracking, and they sometimes fail those tests quite badly. Almost everybody hates failure, and especially hates embarrassing, public failure. The mentees on Faking It invariably channel that fear of embarrassing failure into intense practice. To be clear, the mentors on Faking It aren’t cruel–they’re not deliberately setting their mentees up for failure purely for the sake of having them fail. Rather, they’re pushing their mentees and setting high expectations, recognizing that if mentees never fail during their training it means the expectations weren’t high enough, and that failing to push the mentees would merely set them up for a huge failure in the final contest. This broadly jives with my own experience as a mentor. Several of the cases in which my own mentees made the greatest strides were cases in which they were very anxious about an upcoming high-stakes task at which there was some real (or at least perceived) risk of failure: an oral candidacy exam, an oral thesis defense, a presentation at a big international conference. And just like on Faking It, my own mentees invariably gain a ton of confidence from succeeding in a situation in which there was some real, or at least perceived, risk of failure. On the other hand, few of my own graduate students have experienced actual failure during their time in my lab. More broadly, I have the (admittedly anecdotal) sense that few grad students anywhere ever fail their candidacy exams or thesis defenses these days. I wonder a little if that means I, and others, need to adjust our mentoring approaches, whether by setting higher expectations, or by arranging for student to have more opportunities to engage in tasks on which failure is possible.

Fear of letting others (and yourself) down can be a great motivator. Mentors and mentees on Faking It often do short talks to the camera about how they think the training is going and how they’re feeling about it. A common theme is that mentees don’t want to let themselves down. They want to feel like they’ve given their best effort, want to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel proud of themselves, and don’t want to feel that they’ve wasted their time. But mentees aren’t focused solely on themselves–they also don’t want to let their mentors down. They invariably like and trust their mentors, and deeply appreciate all the time and effort (and, often, professional and personal sacrifices) that their mentors have put into training them. All mentees on Faking It feel like they owe it to their mentors to succeed. And for their part, the mentors invariably like the mentees, and also feel that the mentees owe it to both themselves and their mentors to put in their best effort. This is a point I want to reflect on more. Over the years, I’ve increasingly emphasized to my graduate students that their graduate program is for them, not for me–that they don’t work for me and don’t owe me anything, and that it’s my job to help them achieve their goals. Have I swung too far in that direction? Or perhaps this is an area in which the concentrated intensiveness of Faking It makes it disanalogous to grad school? The mentors on Faking It spend a lot of time training (and living with!) their mentees over the course of a month. If someone volunteers to put you up for a month and spend all day every day training you, you might rightly feel that you owe them more than you owe a graduate supervisor who meets with you once a week for an hour or something.

Good mentoring focuses on the things the mentee most needs to improve, and plays to the mentee’s strengths. The mentors on Faking It focus their training exercises on the things the mentees most need to improve at. “Face your fears” seems to be the motto of every Faking It mentor. No mentee can ever get out of a training session or training exercise by saying–truthfully!–that it makes them feel anxious or uncomfortable. But Faking It wasn’t solely about mentees improving their weak points and facing their fears; the mentors also helped the mentees play to their own strengths and work around their weaknesses as far as possible. For instance (very mild spoiler incoming), they helped the physics student-turned-magician to develop a stage show that wouldn’t require him to talk much when he first came out on stage, because he was struggling to master stage patter. In summary: when deciding whether to focus on improving a mentee’s weaknesses, or playing to a mentee’s strengths, Faking It mentors answer “Why not both?”

It’s great to change your mind–but not too often or too easily. An implicit premise of Faking It is that on the one hand people have a lot of agency and a lot of options in life–more of both than they probably realize. You can choose to be something, and someone, totally different than what you are right now. But that on the other hand, you can’t exercise your agency, and choose among your options effectively, if you change your mind too often or too easily. Once you’ve decided to go all-in on faking it as a chef or a magician or whatever, you have to follow through; you can’t back out at the first (or even second, or third) hurdle. Faking It suggests that you shouldn’t be either too slow or too quick to change your mind about what you want to be.

It’s sometimes surprising what previous experience is or isn’t ‘relevant’. Some mentees had a bit of previous experience that you’d have thought would be helpful, but turned out not to be helpful at all. Conversely, a few mentees’ previous professions turned out to be shockingly relevant to their new professions.*** (SPOILER IN FOOTNOTE) I’d say my own experience as a mentor for grad students has confirmed this. Some of the best grad students I’ve encountered were excellent in part thanks to previous experience that doesn’t have any obvious direct relevance to grad school in ecology (e.g., a background in humanities; seemingly-unrelated private sector work experience).

Some things can’t be faked, or rushed. The least successful episode of Faking It that I saw involved teaching a guy with a desk job to fake it as a pro surfer. The guy failed, badly–he couldn’t pass as a pro surfer physically, nor could he do anything beyond riding a surfboard straight to the beach. It’s simply not possible to get physically fit enough in a month to pass as a pro surfer, unless you’re pretty fit already (which this guy wasn’t). Analogously, I’m sure there are some aspects of being a good a scientist that you can’t learn–or even learn to fake–in a short amount of time.

What do you think? As I hope is obvious, Faking It does not provide a complete, exhaustive Theory of Mentoring, and the above is not a complete, exhaustive List of Things I Believe About Grad Student Mentoring. I just found it interesting to mull over Faking It and reflect on whether, despite its obvious differences from grad student mentoring, it might nevertheless provide some transferable lessons. Looking forward to your comments as always. I encourage you to use the blog’s comment thread, but you can also use the anonymous comment form at the bottom of the post.

*Small sample size alert

**Small sample size alert #2

***It turns out that being a professional cellist is excellent preparation for being a club DJ. Or, perhaps, being a talented musician is excellent preparation for being both a professional cellist and a club DJ.

Cop30 host sets out steps to break link with coal, oil and gas as it aims to move focus from negotiating to implementing

All countries can start to break their dependence on fossil fuels now without needing to wait for new technologies or economic changes, Brazil’s government has said ahead of a global climate summit.

Brazil, the host of last year’s UN climate conference, set out the world’s first global “roadmap” for phasing out fossil fuels on Tuesday, showing that countries could boost their economies and pull people out of poverty while breaking the link with coal, oil and gas.

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A Canadian drone maker with investments from a company linked to Donald Trump Jr. lobbied the federal government 44 times over the course of just over a year prior to receiving an up to $24-million contract.

On Sept. 11, the Canadian government awarded Saskatoon-headquartered Draganfly Inc. a five-year contract to supply the Canadian Armed Forces with an initial 100 drones, up to a possible 5,000, described as “low-cost tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance uncrewed aircraft systems.”

Record numbers of foreign workers in Canada are claiming their employers are abusing them, straining a federal relief program designed to help them find other jobs. 

In 2025, more than 15,600 foreign workers applied for a federal open work permit intended to help them escape abusive workplaces — a more than twelvefold increase from the number of applications in 2021. 

Behind Prime Minister Mark Carney and EU President Ursula von der Leyen’s joint announcement to make Canada an “associate member” of the 27-nation bloc by next June, there looms CBAM, a ‘carbon tax’ that could make it very expensive for Canadian companies shipping to Europe. Analysts say the solution lies at home.