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Be honest with yourself
Wednesday, 20 December 2006
Despite what many of us were bought up to believe, lying can sometimes be a good thing. You'd be stupid to tell your new boss that you don't like her haircut after she's asked you, for example. In the world of social relations, white lies rule.
In fact, many people use honesty as an excuse in these situations to reward their base instincts of cruelty and criticism. This is a bad idea, likely to do more damage than good, but that's a subject for another article.
What I want to concentrate on with this one is that, while it may be convenient and worthwhile to lie to others sometimes, it rarely is with yourself. When it comes to assessing the situations you find yourself in, brutal honesty is the best policy.
Or, to put it another way, a nasty truth is better than a sugar-coated lie.
Believe it or not, this goes against one to the tenets of popular culture. Positive thinking and self-belief are seen as important characteristics for people to develop for their own sakes. As if such things existed in a vacuum, completely removed from the outside world. In my opinion, that's just plain dumb.
Because what is positive thinking really? Doing things like chanting to yourself "I can do it if I believe hard enough" or writing down lists of things you wish were true? Why would anybody bother with these types of routines?
There's only one reason, because they don't really believe what they're telling themselves. The cult of positive thinking is about lying to yourself, plain and simple. It's about taking your assessment of reality, and trying to dismiss it through clever mind tricks.
A lot of people who are successful appear to be positive thinkers. Rich and successful businesspeople are often confident of their success in a new enterprise; skilled sportspeople see themselves as winners; and great artists are certain of their ability to produce a good work.
But this type of positive thinking isn't achieved using the popular sense of the term. These people aren't confident because they've tricked themselves into believing something.
Instead, they've taken the time and effort to assess reality. They're confident, because the large amounts of feedback they've gathered from the outside world tell them to be so.
Successful businesspeople often do an enormous amount of research before going ahead with a deal. They look sceptically at every aspect of it and ask "What could go wrong?". They spend hours pouring over the hard numbers. If after all this work, the businessperson appears to be a "positive thinker", that's because she's done her homework and knows it looks like a good deal.
Skilled sportspeople, or indeed talented people in any field, have also taken a good assessment of reality. A world-class striker in soccer isn't confident of his ability to put the ball in the goal because of any kind of chant he's done inside his head. He's confident because he's kicked a hundred thousand such shots before, in practice and in real games.
The world tells him he's good at kicking balls into goals, not any mental-image trickery or other nonsense. He's also certainly taken a realistic assessment of his weaknesses at many points in his career and worked hard to improve them. That's how he got so good at kicking goals in the first place.
Regardless of what you think or wish were true, reality is what it is. It's an outside force that you have limited control over with enormous influence over your success and happiness. Your decisions about how you interact with it are the main basis for what kind of life you'll live.
And the quality of a decision almost always depends on the amount of information and knowledge that's been put into it. A trained surgeon with world-class body-scanning equipment is preferable to a witch-doctor in a medical situation, because decisions the surgeon makes are based on more knowledge and information.
In almost any other case, the same basic fact will be true. The better and more experienced the knowledge that goes in, the more successful the decision is likely to be.
So interacting with reality by trying to feed yourself bad information in the hopes it will make you feel better is just plain dumb. Putting a positive spin on something rather than trying to discover the reality is the same as trying to do maths by pretending that 1+1=3. The results are going to be bad.
Be honest with yourself in all things. Take in reality in all its aspects - from the horrible to the sublime. For it's not how you twist what your senses tell you that will determine your success, so much as how good the quality of that information is in the first place.
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