Act As If

QUOTE

Kurt Vonnegut once said…

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

(American author)

CONCEPT

Act As If

"Act As If" is the practice of behaving as though something is already true in order to help make it true. You don't need to wait to feel confident before acting confidently. Act confidently, and confidence tends to follow.

The psychology behind it dates back to William James, who argued in the 1880s that we have the causal arrow backwards. We assume feeling produces behavior—you feel brave, so you act brave. James proposed the reverse is at least equally true: behavior produces feeling. Act brave, and the feeling arrives to justify the action.

STORY

The Act … That Became Fact?

The day before the biggest fight of his life, 22-year-old Cassius Clay stood on a scale in Miami Beach screaming at the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, and a doctor recorded his pulse at 120 beats per minute—a number so alarming that observers concluded he was terrified into incoherence.

Cassius Clay was undefeated at 19-0, but almost nobody thought that mattered. Sonny Liston was 35-1, a physically overwhelming champion who had demolished former titleholder Floyd Patterson twice, each time in the first round.

Clay entered the fight a 7-to-1 underdog.

A number of writers argued publicly that the fight shouldn't happen at all, that it was cruel to put a fast-talking kid in a ring with a man like Liston.

Clay's response to all of this was to behave, relentlessly and publicly, as though the outcome were already settled. He had been doing it for years—predicting the exact round of his knockouts, calling himself the greatest before there was any evidence for the claim.

At the weigh-in, he was hysterical, taunting, seemingly out of control. Liston watched him with a pulse of 80. But the performance was deliberate.

Clay later explained the logic plainly: Liston wasn't afraid of him as a man—but he could be made afraid of a lunatic. The pulse reading that convinced the press Clay was panicking was, in Clay's own telling, part of an act designed to plant doubt in the only person in the building who mattered.

On February 25, 1964, in front of 8,300 people at Miami Beach Convention Hall, the fantasy became the reality.

Clay danced away from Liston's power, jabbing and moving, controlling a fight nobody believed he could survive. Liston injured his shoulder swinging at a target that kept disappearing. Between the sixth and seventh rounds, Sonny Liston did not get off his stool.

Joe Louis called it the biggest upset in the history of boxing.

Two days later, Clay announced his new name: Muhammad Ali.

And the rest is history.