Merlin Mann:

There’s a very unkind phrase that I’ve actually applied to myself. The phrase “poser” or “poseur”.

This is where you take on all the trappings and all of the affectations of something, and where you end up doing some pantomime version of something that’s theoretically interesting to you.

That could be an artist, it could be an activist, it could be a programmer, but it could be something where you have watched enough of this one kind of thing to be able to mimic it to your own level of satisfaction, that you feel like you look like that kind of thing.

But no matter how good you get at looking like you do a certain kind of thing, or looking like you are making certain kind of thing, it’s absolutely no solution for being able to produce that thing.

Go listen to it. It gets better halfway through.