I find it very easy to lie. In fact, I would say I’m quite good at it. At little lies like ‘Yea, of course I’ve seen that film, go on...’, or ‘Yea, that is a nice shirt!’, and also at big lies like, ‘yea, I’m good thanks, how are you?’. If I wanted to, for better or worse, I could convince people of these things without thinking about it. But for a long while I’ve been making a lot of effort to cut this shit out. Not because it’s bad, or because it has certain moral connotations (though it does), but because the results of raw honesty are much, much more interesting.

Trying honesty honestly

Someone you probably don’t know called Anna recently wrote and performed a seven minute story at a bar. It was funny, it was about her grandmother, her ‘Nonna’, who always asks if she’s eaten, or when the next time she’ll visit might be. But it was also deeply personal; about her struggle to find purpose and her insecurities around letting her beloved Nonna down. It was good in no small part because of its tremendous honesty, it made you feel something. I doubt there was a dry eye in the room.

The problem is that this kind of honesty is hard, and it takes a lot of courage to do once, never mind make a habit of.

I’ve actively tried to meet lots of new people recently, asking friends to invite me to things and to include me in their plans. And while I’m not quite myself these days, the magic of social media means I can continue to be honest after the fact. Whether I made a friend at a party or on holiday or at a nerdy festival, I make a point of reaching out and being honest in my appreciation for them and trying to make more plans.

Often this is very scary and or a nerve racking thing to do. Something as simple as saying ‘thanks, I appreciate you’ is easy to overthink, or talk yourself out of, because maybe it feels unnecessary, or like it would come across in a way that you don’t intend. Or what if it’s ignored? Or what if it’s un-reciprocated? Or just sounds silly?

Why do we lie?

I’m not a psychologist or an expert of any kind at anything, but I reckon the answer has something to do with a fear for the consequences of the truth. We say we are fine when we are not because we don’t want the other person to know the truth, because they might judge us or think less of us in some way. We tell people their horribly ugly shirt is nice because we don’t want to hurt their feelings or because if we do, they might think of us differently.

And we don’t reach out to the people we appreciate to say so, or to thank them, because what if we are honest and they don’t reciprocate or they don’t understand, or they laugh at us? In short; we doubt ourselves, and so we lie.

In favour of openness

I’ve found honesty to be a very productive interesting valuable thing to do. Not in the juvenile sense when your parents or teachers tell you to ‘always tell the truth’, that’s not what I mean. But in relationships, in work, in life. And the difficulty I face in being honest isn’t like other things. It’s not like I have to struggle to be honest, or work for it, it doesn’t feel like overcoming some barrier or struggling up a hill. It’s more that I have to notice when I have the opportunity to say something honestly, and take it.

Professional honesty

When I worked at Canonical, in the early days I was asked to run and analyse the results of a ‘developer survey’. We created a set of I think 10 questions that we sent out through various community and marketing channels to ask developers about their experiences with our products. When the results came in it was easy to see a lot of good things that we were doing well, some things that we were doing poorly, and some things that people didn’t like that we were doing but who obviously didn’t have the full context.

I was also tasked with writing a blog post about the results. I distilled the results into sections relevant to the survey and I realised I had a choice to make. Looking at previous ‘survey result posts’ I could easily have summarised the good stuff, brush off the other stuff, and turn it into a marketing piece. Or, I could write up all of the results, the good, the bad, and the ugly, not defending what we were doing as much as laying it on the table. I choose the later and it was one of the most successful blog posts of the year.

People from the community reached and even existing customers reached out directly to me to tell me how much they appreciated the honesty. This was one of the principles the company was built on: ‘openness’. They build ‘open source’ technology, and the openness resonates with people. Since then as far as I am legally allowed I’ll be as open and honest as I can about my work. For several reasons, but a major one being that people respond well to honesty.

Truth encourages truth

This blog hasn’t grown much, or at all quickly since I started it over a year ago. This is because I do very little promotion, I am terribly inconsistent, and do very little revision so there’s lots of mistakes and bad sentences. However, it has a good number of readers who reply and chat to me about the topic or give me some much appreciated feedback. Unfailingly though, the posts that get the most responses are those where I tell a personal story and when I’m the most honest.

People respond to honesty, especially to personal honesty, because it seems a lot more sincere than most things you hear or read. For the person telling the truth, honesty creates vulnerability. You’re exposing yourself to the world, it’s out there and up for criticism, or ridicule. But its also there for engagement. People recognise vulnerability and take it as permission to be honest themselves, to talk about themselves or their own experiences, and so they respond.

Say something

Have you ever realised after the fact that you wish you had said something more? That you wish you had said ‘thank you’ to your friend for making dinner, or ‘good job’ to a colleague who did something really well, or ‘I’m sorry, I was wrong’ after an argument, or even ‘I love you’ to a family member who you won’t see for a while.

Of course you have, you’re a human (presumably). But despite how it might feel, I think it is always worth it to say these things. To be more openly honest with your gratitude or, repentance or, whatever.

The worry about how these things would be received is almost always groundless. Whenever someone has asked me if I like their shirt and I replied honestly, ‘well to be honest I don’t like it, I don’t think it does anything for you’ it’s started a real conversation. Whenever I have fretted about not sending a message to someone because I was worried it might make me look foolish or needy or weak and then done it anyway, I have always come away feeling better.

And doing so these days is so easy. It’s just a few clicks on your phone, you don’t even need to look them in the eye when you say something, but you should usually say something.

Conclusion

This post is a pretty unfocused meander through my thoughts about honesty, but more than that it’s a reminder to myself to try to be more honest, to be more open, and to seize the opportunity to say something when I can. Because doing these things is almost always better than not. It’s scary, we doubt ourselves and we lie to ourselves all the time because it’s hard, but I think it’s worth it.