Larp it till you make it: rehearsal, display and the point where it becomes fraud

The phrase borrows a line first quoted in a 1973 fraud ruling. What studies on lab coats, power poses and self-belief really showed, three convictions built on faking it, and a test that separates practice from deception.

Published: 20 October 2026 · Last reviewed: 1 November 2026

One costume, two settings

Picture the same blazer on two occasions. In the first you wear it in front of a mirror and a friend, rehearsing a pitch you have never given. In the second you wear it across a table from someone who is about to wire you money. The blazer is identical, and the two moments could not be further apart. That gap is the whole subject of "larp it till you make it", also written "larp until you make it".

It is "fake it till you make it" with the costume named. Larp comes from live-action role-play, and online it describes performing a status you do not have (the larp meaning explainer follows the shift). The advice is to act as the trader, founder or creator you want to be, trusting that reality will follow.

Inside that sentence hide two activities that arguments tend to blur:

• Rehearsal. Playing the role to build the skill, alone or in front of people who know it is practice.
• Display. Showing others a status you have not reached so that they treat you as though you had. Flex culture pays well for this.

Psychologists mostly studied the first. Judges mostly dealt with the second. This page takes the judges first, because the phrase itself came out of a courtroom.

A phrase born in a fraud ruling

The idea predates the words. Wikipedia's entry on the aphorism quotes William James in 1922 recommending that people act as if cheerfulness were already present, and notes that Alfred Adler used an "acting as if" method with clients in the 1920s.

The earliest attestation of the phrase itself is less inspiring. Wikipedia points to a federal appeals court opinion dated 1 February 1973, SEC v. Glenn W. Turner Enterprises, concerning Dare To Be Great, Inc., which the Ninth Circuit called a get-rich-quick scheme. Describing the training of recruits, the judges recorded that:

• a recruit was told to fake it until he made it, meaning to convey an impression of wealth he had not achieved;
• he was urged to take on debt, if needed, for a new expensive car and showy clothes;
• he was told to carry large sums of money, borrowed if necessary, to flash them.

The court concluded that the scheme was a huge and successful fraud. So the first documented use of the slogan is not a motivational poster. It is a judicial description of larping wealth in order to recruit buyers.

Three convictions built on faking it

These summaries come from court opinions and from the U.S. Justice Department's own announcements.

Theranos

In United States v. Holmes (N.D. Cal.), the faked items were a blood analyzer said to run tests it could not, reports carrying pharmaceutical companies' logos that wrongly suggested their endorsement, a battlefield deployment that never took place, and projections of more than $100 million in revenue for 2014 after no revenue in 2012 or 2013. Elizabeth Holmes was convicted on 3 January 2022 of one count of conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud against investors, and on 18 November 2022 she was sentenced to 135 months.

Frank

In United States v. Javice (S.D.N.Y.), the faked item was a user base: 4.25 million users claimed to two banks, against about 300,000 real ones, with a synthetic data set commissioned to support the claim. Charlie Javice was convicted in March 2025 of conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud and securities fraud, and sentenced on 29 September 2025 to 85 months.

Dare To Be Great

The 1973 case, covered above, affirmed the SEC's preliminary injunction against a scheme that recruited people by showing off borrowed wealth.

No one is punished here for ambition, confidence or a costume. Each record describes a particular false fact placed before someone making a decision: a display of wealth to a recruit, a pharmaceutical logo to an investor, a row count to an acquirer. That is the exact place where larping until you make it stops being advice.

What studies say about acting the part

Four lines of research are usually quoted in the idea's defense. Here is what each claimed and what happened next.

The lab coat

In 2012, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky named the idea of "enclothed cognition": clothes act on the wearer through what they symbolize. In the first experiment, 58 undergraduates wore a white lab coat or did not, then took a Stroop test. The coat wearers made about half as many errors on the hardest trials. In two further experiments, the same coat described as a doctor's coat sharpened sustained attention, while the one described as a painter's did not.

The headline result did not survive. In 2019, Burns and colleagues ran a preregistered direct replication of the first experiment and found no lab coat effect, arguing that any true effect is too small for the original design to catch. A 2025 meta-analysis of 105 effects from 40 studies (3,789 participants) flagged concerns about the early studies' replicability while finding evidential value in work published after 2015. Its authors were the originators, joined by a third colleague.

The takeaway for the larper is narrow: a costume works, if at all, through what it means to you, and the size of the effect is disputed.

The power pose

In 2010, Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap reported that holding expansive poses altered testosterone and cortisol, financial risk-taking and self-reported power in 42 participants.

Eva Ranehill and colleagues repeated the design in 2015 with 200 participants and an experimenter blind to each person's pose. Self-reported power went up. Hormones and all three behavioral tasks did not budge.

In 2016, Carney posted a statement on her faculty page saying she does not believe power pose effects are real, and listed the flaws of the original herself, among them the small sample and the selection of self-report questions from among many asked. A 2021 review in the British Psychological Society's magazine judged the hormone and behavior claims unsupportable but felt power partly supported, and cited a 2020 meta-analysis suggesting that the effect comes more from avoiding slumped postures than from adopting grand ones. Standing tall may help you feel ready. It leaves your track record, and anyone's judgment of it, untouched.

Self-belief that has a source

Albert Bandura's 1977 theory of self-efficacy names four sources of the belief that you can do something: past performance, watching others succeed, persuasion and your physical state. He called mastery experience, the first, especially influential, and described expectations built on persuasion as weaker for lacking an authentic base in experience.

That is the useful core of "act as if". Acting works when it means real doing, in small repeatable attempts that succeed. Telling yourself or an audience that you have already arrived is the weakest source on his list.

The cost of a long performance

In 1978, Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes described an impostor phenomenon among more than 150 highly successful women: despite degrees and honors, they believed they were not bright and had fooled everyone. One habit sustained the feeling. Many gave professors and supervisors the opinions they wanted to hear and withheld their own, so they never found out whether their real views would have been judged sound.

That is the hidden price of a sustained act. Approval won by the act goes to the act, and the person behind it is left feeling like a fraud.

The part that holds up

Read together, the studies support a modest, practical version:

• rehearse where failure is cheap, such as a mock interview, a pitch to a friend, a demo or a paper trading account;
• dress for the role if it means something to you, without expecting the outfit to carry you;
• keep a tally of real attempts and real wins, since mastery is the strongest source of confidence;
• keep the act private, or label it, so the approval you get lands on the work.

One more reason to prefer practice: a rehearsal gives you evidence you can show later. A mock interview leaves you with sharper answers, a demo account leaves a log of decisions, a pitch given ten times leaves a better pitch. A display leaves only the impression it made, and impressions have to be maintained, which is exactly the burden Clance and Imes described. Rehearsal pays you back in skill, while display charges interest.

Seven checks before you perform for someone

An act is practice until another person acts on it. These seven checks find the line, the same one that divides larp from poser, performance from grift.

1. Who is watching? You, a coach or an audience that knows it is a performance means rehearsal. A buyer, investor, employer, client or follower deciding whether to trust you means stop and think.
2. Is a decision riding on it? Money, a hire, a signup, a subscription to your calls.
3. Manner or fact? Confidence, posture, clothes and tone are manners. Revenue, users, balances, credentials and a track record are facts, and faking one is a false statement however steady your voice.
4. Does a label cost you anything? If "practice", "role-play" or "mockup" changes nothing, you are rehearsing. If the label ruins the point, the point was the deception. The larp wallet guide uses this same test for wallet screens.
5. Can the other person check? If your only evidence is something you made, a screen, a card or a chart, you are asking for trust and not offering proof.
6. Would you show how it was made? If they later saw the process, would they feel informed or cheated?
7. Who loses if it is false? If it is anyone but you, it has stopped being your rehearsal.

Some pairs make the contrast concrete. Practicing a pitch on a friend is rehearsal, while telling a buyer you have millions of users is misrepresentation. Wearing the suit of the job you want is rehearsal, listing a degree you do not hold is not. Paper trading to learn a platform is rehearsal, posting a profit card from an account you do not have to sell a course is not. Synthetic data in a labeled product demo is rehearsal, and the same data given to an acquirer as real customers is not.

Props, mockups and where the line sits

The Frank case shows the boundary most cleanly, because the tool itself is ordinary. Synthetic data is a normal part of building and demonstrating software (fake data in a product demo explains how to label it). What the trial record describes is passing such a data set to an outside vendor so that a bank would accept it as confirmation of 4.25 million real users.

Screens behave the same way. A wallet mockup in a skit, an explainer or a film is a prop, and this tutorial shows how to shoot one with a Mockup label on screen from the first frame to the last. Sent to someone as proof of funds, the same image is the 1973 case with a phone.

When the persona is a whole account and not one post, what a larp account is and how to spot one applies the same test, and our own larp wallet review turns it on our product.

We build that sort of prop. Flexdger Wallet is a crypto wallet app mockup that holds no funds and connects to no blockchain, and our terms of use forbid presenting its screens as a real balance, a statement or proof of funds. The on-screen label is what keeps a clip on the rehearsal side when it travels without its caption.

Founders have their own variant, with its own warning from Y Combinator: tech larping and founder larping explained.

Where the details come from

• Ninth Circuit opinion in SEC v. Glenn W. Turner Enterprises, 474 F.2d 476 (1973)
• Justice Department announcements: the Holmes sentencing (2022) and the Javice sentencing (2025)
• Enclothed cognition: Adam and Galinsky (2012), Burns et al. replication (2019) and Horton, Adam and Galinsky meta-analysis (2025)
• Power posing: Ranehill et al. (2015), Carney's 2016 position statement and The Psychologist, a decade of power posing (2021)
• Bandura on self-efficacy (1977) and Clance and Imes on the impostor phenomenon (1978)
• Wikipedia entry on fake it till you make it (2026)