Honesty

“Honesty is the best policy.”

This saying holds a lot of truth. Unfortunately, I feel that in today’s society it is so lost on us. Perhaps that will change as time goes on, but honestly, I feel it will fall further through the cracks. The act of being honest has fallen prey to the “social justice warriors” and advocates of political correctness who would rather you speak in only the most carefully chosen words, beat around the bush, or constantly tell little white lies to spare everyone’s feelings. Of course, there’s a time and a place for sparing feelings and carefully choosing words. I’m not saying those have no place in the world, but in today’s western society they are valued far too high and used far too often.

Many people, myself included, are constantly afraid of and anxious about being honest with people because it will upset them due to them either not wanting to hear the truth, refusing to accept it, not having the self-awareness to realize it, or not wanting useful feedback on themselves or their work. There’s an innumerable set of reasons for these things deep-seated in how people were raised, how society sets us up to be, and how our nature has trained us. The latter, I believe, is due to the fact that hundreds of thousands of years ago we had plenty of truly urgent and important concerns revolving around survival so any time we could find an easier way to make it through those tough days, we took it.

Why is telling the truth important? For one, it saves everyone a lot of time and energy by avoiding misunderstanding, giving us additional time to process reality, and allowing us to move forward with the new information we have received. Whether that means bettering ourselves, accepting a sad truth and beginning the next phase of our lives, or simply giving us more time to spend on important things.

The most productive people in the world don’t waste time avoiding honesty. In fact, many make it part of their values. You can see this in the corporate culture of many amazing companies. Not that corporations, or their leaders, should be our role models for everything, but the founders of Pixar preach what they call radical candor. The only unfortunate part about “radical” candor is that it’s considered radical thanks to society’s hold on sugar-coating everything to spare the feelings of those who don’t want to hear the truth. With radical candor comes an understanding that when I cut to the chase and give you the unfiltered truth, I’m not saying it to be mean or hurtful, I’m saying it because I believe it needs to be said to get us to a mutual understanding of what we can do together to better ourselves, our situation, or whatever it is we are working on (product, service, project, etc.).

I’m not saying hearing the truth is always easy. I’m not saying telling the truth is always easy. Often, both of those things are exceptionally difficult, especially in the early stages of learning to embrace them. However, in the long run, it simplifies one’s life dramatically and frees us from many of the burdens that come with avoiding the truth such as remembering the intricacies of our lies, stressing about how to perfectly word something so we don’t upset others (especially when it is a recurring theme with the same individual), or wondering about whether someone really did need to hear the truth and if, by not telling them, we did them an injustice by not being entirely honest.

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