Why you should pick the truth you like best but don't lie

Imagine that you come in in position 43 out of 200 in a race you did. It is true to say that 20% of the participants have been better than you. It is also true that you have been beaten by 42 people. At the same time, though, it is true that you have beaten 75% of people and that you were better than 157 people.

This might seem like a classical illustration of “The glass is half full not half empty.” but hold on it get’s more nuanced than that. To make it a bit more interesting, here is another thing that is true. *You were the 43rd fastest person of all 8 billion people in the world*. This feels like a stretch, or even a lie. You might say that it doesn’t make sense to compare yourself to people who didn’t even compete (or in this case even to people who don’t have legs or can’t (yet) walk). But aren’t we doing the same every day? Sometimes we are even among the 8 billion people who didn’t compete in the race but still comparing ourselves to the ones who did compete.

Let me illustrate with a personal example. Before deciding to move to a start up, I’ve been working in a big cooperation with a fixed leveling structure. In this company there was, in my opinion, quite a culture of workaholism that I didn’t really want to participate in. This culture wasn’t really forced on me by my manager giving me way to much workload it was more a phenomenon of peer pressure. Even though, I conciously distanced myself from that and said things like “I won’t work more than the 40h that I have in my contract, I have other priorities as well in my life…” I found myself being annoyed when I heard of a peer being promoted to the next level before me. Essentially, what I was doing was exactly what I described in the first paragraph. I compared myself to people who were doing a race where I didn’t want to compete in. This personal example, is already way more subtle then the first one of the race. But it can’t become even more subtle.

Let’s say, I would have had a different attitude to my work and wanted to be promoted quickly. Would it be fair to compare how quickly I got promoted relative to my peers?

There are relatively obvious reason why it wouldn’t. In many cases we wouldn’t have the same manager, wouldn’t work on the same projects and wouldn’t interact with the same stakeholders. Consequently I might be getting my promotion earlier because I just got a better manager for example. But there are also more hidden reasons. Let’s use the metaphor of the race again.

Assuming, I was going through the death of a close family member during my time at the company. Wouldn’t that have been a disadvantage for me? Or if I had kids and my peers didn’t?

It is basically like me having to run to extra loops, making the race 12k long while the others had to run just 10k. Still others of my colleagues might have had to run 14k because they were suffering through a depression. Okay now you are (maybe) convinced that it’s not good to compare yourself to other people for example about promotions because there are all these different factors influencing it. Some you can easily see and some not. But what about a real race? A race where everyone runs in the same weather on the same course on the same day. Maybe your peers have differences in their muscle fibres, that endowed them with a higher share of the enduring muscle fibre type, maybe there body responds better to training naturally. But maybe they have a more demanding job than you which makes it harder for them to find the time to train. Maybe they have a strong temper which makes it hard for them to go through periods of disappointments. Even in such a controlled environment, like a race, a comparison doesn’t really makes a lot of sense.

But was does this have to do with truth and lies?

If you can’t just judge your progress or value by comparing yourself to other people how else can you do it? You can rely on internal measurements. For example instead of looking at if you have run faster than your friend, you could look if you have given everything you got that day. But this is tricky. Some people might go to far in the other direction and basically just excuse everything they do. For example, if they had a bad race, they’ll say they had a bad day, they didn’t have enough time to train, there girlfriend was stressing them out the whole week before or 1000 other excuses you can imagine. But are these true? It depends. No one can easily judge from the outside if they are true or not. Since our emotions and realities are so subjective, no one can say with certainty that these excuses are not valid, because no one can feel and think exactly what this person felt and thought. Even if I look at my own excuses it’s very hard to decide whic ones are excuses (lies) and which ones are truths. But there is no way around being fully honest with yourself and asking yourself as many times as possible “Am I just kidding myself or did I really make the right decisions and judgements”

Becoming good at that is a matter of practice and a matter of willingness to face harsh realities. However, let’s say we are now fairly good at these things. How to we pick the right truth?

You might object now and say there is just one single truth. But this is only true in very limited contexts. For example if the car is red or not has just one true answer (ignoring complex philosophical arguments on the nature of color for now). But as I said in the beginning to say you were faster than 157 people is as true as saying you were slower than 42 people. Or sticking to the example of excuses for now: If I realized I did have enough time to train but I decided to spend more time with friends than on the stadium track. What truth is that? Is it true that I am lazy because of that? Is it true that I trained badly or is it true that I am a person who values his friends and prioritizes them?

Given the described scenario, all of them seem might be true. However, the last one is probably way more pleasant than the former two.

My take here is, there is no reason to suffer by obsessing over painful truths. It’s already hard enough to not believe any lies. So why not make life a little easier and pick the truth that makes us feel the best. But be careful to not forget how hard it can be to discern truths from lies.