Make It Work: 22 Time-Tested, Real-Life Lessons for Sustaining a Healthy, Happy Relationship

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July 2000The second time Harry sees Draco Malfoy after the war, it's over a year later, and a lot of things have changed, and a lot of things haven't. The participants in the programme are highly motivated to retrain because they know that if they do their best now, they will have a job in five months. So the atmosphere in the classroom is really positive. They’re very ambitious, so it’s also a lot of fun to retrain and this is part of the programme’s success, I think. So, if you are running around in the morning contemplating your toothbrush (?), or you can't find your shoes or your car keys, you might say "Oh no, I am never going to make it to work!" or "I'm not going to make it to work on time!"

Of course I'm sure, Hermione, I know what Malfoy looks like." The silence after this feels awkward, especially with the odd, shrewd look Hermione gives him. Harry clears his throat. "We spoke. It was obviously Malfoy. Thing is, he had a fake name on his name tag. Well, it said Drake, and I really don't think people call him that, or at least, they didn't used to." When you work with people make it work, you get a relationship not a transaction, a new member of your team, not a contractor and someone committed to your goals with a tenacity that matches yours. It is at this point that it really hits Harry what he has been doing, how weird it must have looked to everyone, how weird it probably is, that he's trying to force someone from his childhood he didn't even get along with to tell him about his life, when he's expressed very clearly that he doesn't want to. He's hit with that same sense he got when Ginny broke up with him, when Sirius fell through the veil, when Dumbledore died, when he died himself – that sense that he's watching himself from the outside with vague horror. That boy was in the coffee shop today, though! The boy we saw him with. In the pub. Perhaps they're – you know."She takes a deep breath, as though afraid of starting something she doesn't want to start, and blurts out, "Is there anything you want to talk about?" as if she cannot restrain it anymore. For example, think about a person a month into their job at a large marketing firm. They’re starting to get the hang of their workflow, but they aren’t familiar with everyone else at the company. The time has come to give a big presentation, but the nerves are starting to take over. Social anxiety can significantly inhibit their ability to provide a solid performance. Faking it till you make it can work here, but factors like social anxiety make it much more challenging. That manic look?" says Harry, startled into laughter. "I do not have a manic look. And I hardly stalked him, either." Make it better” is where the meat is. “Better” is the juicy part that you’ll spend the majority of your day achieving. Better code, better design, better approaches. But what does “better” mean? We’ll get around to that later.

In other words, setting a goal can change your behavior, so you achieve the goal. Where Can You See “Fake it ‘till You Make It” in Pop Culture? You've been here long enough," Malfoy continues. "You're loitering now, all right? And I think you should leave."

SUBJECTS

American cinema is where the “fake it until you make it” theme often appears. The comedy film Trading Places from 1983 is an excellent example. In the movie, Eddie Murphy plays a con artist who switches places with a commodities broker portrayed by Dan Aykroyd. Murphy’s character doesn’t know anything about the industry. Still, he fakes it until he makes it to get rich. Why is Malfoy working in a coffee shop in muggle London is a much simpler question, he thinks. It has a concrete answer, probably, and a clear path to working it out, the sort of path he's always followed – nosy persistence. It's a new, fresh question, with a straightforward but not especially easy solution, a solution that requires he get out of this flat and put on actual clothes and speak to people other than Ron and Hermione. Finding out what's going on with Malfoy is something to do, something to discover, and he hasn't had anything like that in what feels like so long. Harry turns up at the coffee shop again the next day. This time, he arrives later, having waited until Ron and Hermione left for the day. He's not really too keen on them knowing what he's doing. He knows they'd have something to say about it he doesn't want to hear. The “fake it till you make it” strategy is more about changing your behavior than fundamentally changing who you are. Then who is?" Harry asked. "Who is going to understand, then? It's not like anybody else – " He didn't want to say "died," that sounded far too melodramatic, so he just said, "That's stupid, Ginny. That doesn't make any sense." But he thinks he knows what she meant, in a way – he noticed, during the time after Ginny's graduation, the way things were strange between them after a while, after they were suddenly able to spend as much time together as possible. He noticed the way she shirked away from him sometimes, the way she regarded his nightmares and insomnia with strange anxiety, the desperate way they seemed to bury everything with false lightheartedness – but he tried desperately not to, because he did love her, despite it. He loved her when he stared longingly at the marauder's map in a tent pitched all over the United Kingdom, when apparently she wasn't thinking about him very much at all. He loves her still.