“Fake it until you make it” –Steven Tyler, Aerosmith

How can you adequately explain meteoric rises to fame? From a marketing perspective, what secret formula enables a normal, everyday schmuck off the sidewalk to create for themselves a dynamic public profile. Why does Paris Hilton get so much press? How did Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher transform himself from a presidential talking point to a war correspondent in Israel?

Why do some people on this rickety love boat known as the web soar radiantly above their peers while others scratch and claw their way deeper into obscurity.

To find the answer, let’s play a children’s game — let’s play pretend.

The rules are simple. Close your eyes, close your mouth and start thinking about what you want to be. You can be anything, anything at all for the sake of this game. You can be a Fireman, saving people from burning buildings or a Senator, saving people from burning banks. You can climb great mountains, meet famous people, live a life of luxury or bring luxury to the lives of others. Shut those eyes really tight now and picture whoever or whatever makes you happy.

Done? Good. Now open them a let me explain.

What makes some people rise and others wallow has a lot too do with talent, a lot to do with opportunity (if you haven’t read Outliers yet, please do) and more than a little to do with grit and gumption, but when you look closely at the moving parts behind that rise it boils down to plain old-fashioned self-selection.

If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck. If you walk like a pundit and sound like a pundit, they might send you to Israel to be a pundit. Fully embrace whatever delusional reality that you want to spin for yourself, work everyday to make more and more portions of that delusion real and soon enough you might start seeing that your game of pretend has transformed into your reality.

It sounds almost ludicrously simple and I wish I could give you some sort of top 10 list to validate it further but the reality is — sometimes the most important things are just that, simple.

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