banner talking about how honesty brings an advantage

Here’s What We’re Covering:

It doesn’t always pay to be good.

There are huge stretches of human history where the only way to win has been to lie, cheat, and steal.

Luckily for those of us who suck at being bad, goodness is paying off.

Particularly honesty.

It doesn’t always feel this way. We see people getting ahead by doing bad every day. Sometimes it’s in the news. Sometimes it’s in the office.

So, honestly, honesty doesn’t win in every situation or domain. And not every type of honesty wins either.

Nobody wants to lie. It just seems to be the only option sometimes. Especially when we’re feeling weak or scared.

But honesty is quickly becoming the best option in the most interesting and profitable areas in life and the economy.

Early on, all my chips were on honesty. It wasn’t a choice. It was a struggle though.

Common wisdom says that you should be honest to be a good person despite the general understanding that getting ahead sometimes requires lies and thus giving up your good-person status.

This assumption that you have to lie to be successful is not just poison for society but also ineffective in the long-term.

The lifetime of a lie is shrinking and the compounding effect of honesty is increasing. We’ll get into the mechanics of this later.

My goal is to prove to you that honesty is the best policy. Not just for being a good human, but to get ahead in business and life.

The remainder of this post will be broken down as follows:

  1. Honest Stories. I will tell you three personal stories to demonstrate how honesty plays out in relationships, networking, and business. These stories will help frame the rest of the post, especially the business story.
  2. What Honesty Is & Isn’t. This section will help us understand and define honesty in a way that is useful and powerful. A lot of people are confused about what is honest and dishonest behavior and so fail to be functionally honest. (Hint: Having no filter isn’t honesty.)
  3. Dangers of Honesty. We’ll look at some of the main ways people get scared off from being honest, and why most of the fear of these possible outcomes are unwarranted.
  4. Benefits of Honesty. Some of the most important reasons to be honest.

Time to tell some truth…

My Own Stories About Honesty

In Relationships

A long time ago I was in Vegas and drunk. I was drinking, but most of the intoxication was Vegas. There was also a girl.

I couldn’t man up and text her. She was older and a soap queen. People stopped her for autographs. Intimidating!

So a friend took the phone and did it for me. It was fun, lighthearted. The phone was passed to the next person, then again. Nobody crossed the line into rudeness. I thought the texts were absurd enough that she would know they were a joke.

She responded… positively.

We dated for a while. It was fun, lighthearted.

Then I told her about how our relationship started with a bunch of texts that weren’t from me.

She didn’t mind, “Yeah, I kind of thought that.”

We dated a couple more months. It was fun, lighthearted. No depth.

The relationship couldn’t overcome its initial lie.

For contrast, the first girl who saw me cry – maybe the most honest thing I could do – was the first girl I fell in love with.

In Networking

A couple years ago I lied about why I was late to a meeting at a coffee shop. I forget what I said, but I needed this person to like me. He was one of those people that opened doors.

I told my lie and went to go get coffee (dark, black). While in line for coffee, I began to get nauseous. I thought I was nervous at first, but it wasn’t that kind of twist in the stomach. Then I understood.

I walked out of line and straight to the man who I wanted to like me. Our first interaction was a lie, our second would be a confession. This was going to suck.

“I’m sorry, I lied. I was actually late because…”

He laughed a little and told me to go get my coffee. The next month, he had me working with an Oscar winner. The month after that, he told me that my confession made him trust me fully.

In Business

In the last week, honesty has been worth probably more than $100,000 to StartupBros.

Let me explain how honesty has compounded to make this happen. We’ll start with the 3rd level and work our way to the 1st level. To help understand, imagine a snowball rolling down a hill. The outer layer is the 3rd level of honesty, and the core is the 1st level of honesty.

We’ll start with the 3rd Level of Honesty.

We are working with a select group of business partners to help expand and sell our flagship coaching program (The Importing Empire Jumpstart Group). These are powerful people who are constantly being sent requests.

The only reason they listen to me?

“You sound honest,” every one of them is surprised as they say it.

I’ve heard this in nearly every phone call. Like it’s this strange thing to be honest. Sometimes the trust is so deep they agree to partner without even looking at the program. (This is the 3rd level of honesty in action.)

Most want to see what they’re going to be promoting, though.

I show them the inside of the program, even allowing them to explore the inside themselves. This isn’t common practice, but transparency is important to us.

Literally every single person who had doubts about our program before seeing it has come back to us ecstatic.

“You guys are ACTUALLY making this happen for people. This isn’t crap with a bunch of marketing around it.”

By being honest with our clients and creating the best possible program for them, we are now able to proudly show it to others who might promote it for us. When they look inside the program, they see extensive curriculum, useful resources, guest experts, people talking through their problems, and people sharing the successes they’ve had because of the program.

This is the 2nd level of honesty in action. If we weren’t doing our absolute best by our clients, then our transparency would actually work against us.

Now, we wouldn’t have even had the opportunity to honestly create that level of a coaching program if people didn’t want us coaching them in the first place.

We’re now at the core level of honesty. This is the 1st level, the place where you jump off the cliff and hope people catch you.

Early on at StartupBros we decided to do something different from what others were doing. We decided that we would give away everything. We thought if we provided an overwhelming amount of value for free, we’d eventually win in the end.

This abundance mindset allows us to be more generous with information than most. That’s why you get “how-to” information here that other people charge a ton of money for.

Will wrote about everything he’d do if he were to start an importing business from scratch. It was the first time anyone gave away details like that for free.

This generosity got us the number one Google search result for “importing from China” and similar search terms. People started flowing in, taking in all the information… and demanding to pay.

Screenshot of a google query about importing from China

And so the Importing Empire Jumpstart Group was born.

To launch that program, Will put together a webinar packed with information. It, like the blog post, has everything someone needs in order to get going with building an importing company.

If you’ve ever been to a webinar, you know that the presenter usually spends an hour or two pretending to educate you while actually just teasing you in hopes that you’ll be frustrated enough to buy the damn thing. We hate that.

People responded like crazy. Every time we hold the webinar people tell us it’s the best one they’ve been to. They’re overwhelmed by the value provided. Some people come to every single one.

It feels good to provide that kind of value, but it really feels good when generosity pays. An extremely high percentage of people who see the free live webinar join us for our paid program. And, like you saw above, we make sure they don’t regret the decision.

This is the 1st level of honesty in action. Being honest before you know it will work. Doing the right thing even though you’re not sure it will put you ahead.

If we weren’t honest before people became our clients we may sold them on making a million dollars in their first month or something ridiculous. They may have joined but immediately demanded refunds. If we weren’t honest with our clients, they wouldn’t have any success. If they didn’t have any success then they wouldn’t want to stay with us, they’d spread negative things about us, and we wouldn’t have anything promising to show potential business partners.

These stories only touch on a couple aspects of the power of honesty. The rest of this post will be dedicated to the nuts and bolts.

picasso-art-lie

What Honesty Is & Isn’t

Picasso realized that, “Art is the lie that enables us to tell the truth.”

A lot of people fall into bad business practices because they have a warped sense of what honesty is. For many people, it’s dishonest to make a profit at all.

It’s important that you have a solid understanding of what honesty is and what it is not in order to confidently build your business.

Honesty isn’t pretending you don’t have a great product to sell. It is selling the dream—as long as you can deliver.

Let’s take a closer look.

What Honesty Is Not

First we’ll focus on

1. Divulging everything.

Honesty has nothing to do with telling everything to everybody.

When two football teams go on the field, they don’t know what the other person will do. They’ve entered the field with an understanding that there will be secrets.

Apple isn’t going to tell you everything they’re testing out in their R&D department. No company would! The only reason to invest in R&D is to gain a technological advantage over your competitors. Microsoft doesn’t complain that this holding of secrets is dishonest.

In the same way, you don’t owe anyone else complete access to you. Not telling everything does not make you dishonest.

2. Withholding information to mislead.

If you withhold information from a person when you’ve made them believe you haven’t withheld that information, you’re being dishonest.

Again, a football coach is withholding information from the other team. A lawyer will withhold information and try to lure the defendant into a trap with it. In a business negotiation, there is a certain type of information that everybody understands doesn’t go on the table.

These are instances of people misleading others while remaining honest. The other side doesn’t expect to be lead in the right direction.

3. Facts. This is what we mean when we talk about “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Facts, on their own, aren’t honesty. Just because all the facts are right, doesn’t mean they’re telling the truth. You can organize data to say whatever you want. You can take words out of context.

Let’s say a CEO wants to boost his company’s valuation. He’ll have the PR department focus on spreading the word of a couple promising projects from the R&D department. Maybe using a couple experiments’ data to make some crazy claims about solar power and how this will be the only company truly able to harness its energy.

Meanwhile, the company really has no promising research, and it’s in the red. They’re desperate.

First, the price spikes dramatically due to the twisted facts. Second, the CEO sells a nice chunk of shares. Third, the company declares bankruptcy.

4. Cynicism/Pessimism. There was some study that claimed depressed people have a more clear understanding of how the world is. This could be true, but optimists are able believe in a more interesting future—and thus able to actually create change.

It feels more honest to be down on our own lives. To downplay what we’ve accomplished.

The hopeful person might be seen to have their heads in the sky. The pessimist, feet firmly planted.

Someone who says, “I think I can create this,” risks not being able to deliver. This opens them up to be seen as, among other things, a liar. Even if they didn’t guarantee anything, the audacity in wanting to create something sets them up to be called a liar.

5. Being perceived as honest. As we just saw, being honest and being perceived as being honest are two very different things. This is obvious to say, being able to actually tell the difference isn’t so easy.

6. Pretending you’re weak. There’s that famous line, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

I’m fairly certain that, whatever we do in life, we’ll figure out a way to measure a good chunk of it. (Maybe not the love part though.) Still, we hold back.

Why do we hold back? One reason: we think it’s more honest.

Honesty is more about effort than achievement or getting it right. It’s more about trying than hitting the mark.

7. Certainty or Explaining yourself. Having an opinion on something that is not 100% certain is not dishonesty.

Trying really hard to do something means pushing into areas where you can’t make promises. You don’t understand the situation enough to explain anything with real certainty.

It’s not dishonest to not know something.

Nassim Taleb’s general principle of antifragility is this: “[I]t is much better to do something you cannot explain than explain something you cannot do.”

If you fail and can explain yourself, we still don’t know for sure that you honestly tried.

In one case, we nod our heads, feign a smile, and never give you another chance again. In the other, we trust you and give you another chance.

8. (A wrap-up.) An eight is an infinity sign on its side, right? There are infinite other ways in which we confuse honesty. I’ll leave these to you.

Two important things to notice about these points:

What Honesty Is

You’ll notice that there is more to say about what honesty isn’t than what it is. This is because honesty is fluid. If you are able to get rid of the common things it’s mistaken for, you’ll go a long way in understanding the thing itself.

1. Revealing rough edges. Honesty includes “this isn’t for you”. It helps give a full view of the thing. It filters some buyers out.

At the personal level, this means being okay with, “I may not be for you.”

2. Selling the dream. If you can deliver it, and then some. A $500 bottle of wine isn’t 10x better than a $50 by most measurements. The experience of enjoying a $500 bottle of wine might be.

Cristal feels like more of a celebration than Korbel. That feeling is the dream: the fantasy becomes reality.

There are studies that show good news can make people with certain sicknesses have a better chance at healing. Is a doctor more honest for being factual or for giving his patient the best chance possible?

I don’t know, but I’d take the story and let my family deal with the facts.

3. A posture. An honest posture means that people can trust you to have their best in mind. It’s honesty based in actions, not facts. Like we saw above, facts are often dishonest. There are people who tell stories that have nothing to do with the real world and yet, we wouldn’t call them liars.

Tim Kreider says this about his friend Skelly: “It would never have occurred to any of Skelly’s friends to call him a liar. Despite his incidental falsehoods, he was a fundamentally genuine person. As his fellow fabulist Blanche DeBois once protested, “I never lied in my heart.” He was authentic, decent, and kindhearted.”

4. Playing by the rules or not. We talked about football earlier: it’s honest to make secret plans, they’re part of the agreed-on rules. One of those agreed-on rules is using a ball, not a deflated one you sneak in, that’s dishonest.

(By the way, this is the most I’ve ever talked about sports in any context before. I have no idea what’s going on.)

There is always an agreed-on set of rules. Honesty is playing within them.

This doesn’t mean putting yourself at a disadvantage. Arnold Schwarzenegger has used psychological warfare to beat opponents in bodybuilding, politics, and business. He sent his political rival a metallic set of bull balls once, a symbolic way of saying, “Grow a pair.”

Schwarzenegger is open about these types of games, so he carries a certain type of authenticity. He is honest about his trickery.

Is this honesty? I don’t know, but it certainly doesn’t feel dishonest.

David certainly wasn’t following the rules when he used a sling against Goliath. Nobody calls David dishonest though. He just did what he had to do.

5. Respect of your own experience. This is the counter to the dishonest cynicism we talked about above. If you’re honest with yourself, your life is just as interesting as any other.

We each spend all day fascinated with the problems and situations in our own lives. There is, by definition, nothing more interesting to us.

Yet we pretend that some celebrity or expert is the one truly living correctly. They get it. If only we could make our lives look a little more like theirs.

Your life is the most fascinating thing you’ll ever do.

When you’re building your business, you should admit to yourself that it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.

It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s the thing you are doing. Put all your interest into it.

Don’t humbly lie to those around you that it’s boring or that they wouldn’t be interested in it. This will destroy your business—who wants to invest in something the founder isn’t interested in? Who wants to buy something made by someone who doesn’t care?

Nobody.

If you’re being honest, you’re a little narcissistic. This isn’t bad. Nobody wants to take a picture of you as bad as you want to take a selfie. Nobody wants to build your business but you. You, you , you.

6. Tact. Honesty often comes in navigating tense situations to a better spot.

Sometimes that means keeping some information off the table.

Sometimes that means using a tone that isn’t emotionally “true.”

Tact is important.

5 Dangers of Honesty

It’s time to look at some of the dangers of being honest. These are the things that scare us into lies. After looking at what honest is and is not about, you should already see these in a less “dangerous” light.

1. People will reject you. I’m sure some will. Yet there is nobody in history who has been universally rejected for their opinion.

Not a single one. Hitler, Stalin, and Charles Manson all had terrible, despicable opinions about how to lead lives, yet they found plenty of people to agree with them.

Of course that’s not the rejection you fear. It’s being disowned from your religious family for being an atheist or marrying a person of another faith. It’s being rejected from your friends for liking the pop song.

It’s the fear of looking arrogant or delusional for wanting to start your own business.

All these things may happen, but “The truth will set you free.”

When you allow yourself to be honest you become a powerful magnet for people. We are starved for authenticity. We are waiting for someone to say out loud what we silently believe.

It’s more about “how” you have your belief than “what “ you believe. If you are obnoxious about your belief, then more people will be turned off. If you carry your belief and respect those of others, you’ll find more acceptance and more truth.

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but how it thinks.”

– Christopher Hitchens

2. You’ll lose customers or clients. This is the same as the fear of rejection. Rarely are companies punished for honesty.

When a company says, “We screwed up, let us fix it,” we don’t blame them for the mistake.

When a company makes green claims through a thin façade of greenwashing, we all feel it. And it pushes us way.

3. People will take advantage. This is true. The world is full of people who are just waiting to take cheap shots, to take whatever they can when you’re not looking.

In relationships, this means creating a strong vulnerability. You have to leave yourself open for a punch or you can’t connect with anyone. It also means setting boundaries. You don’t need to let everyone see everything.

In business, it means being as generous as you can. For us, it’s giving away all of our premium content with a 30-day no questions asked money back guarantee. Some people come in and steal everything, some even take it all and start their own programs, but most don’t.

We leave ourselves vulnerable to be taken advantage of and some people do. But it still does us more good than harm.

4. You’ll show the world you’re weak, stupid, or whatever the hell. We think that if we’re honest, we’ll expose the worst parts of ourselves when, in reality, people can feel them already.

When a business tries to cover-up a mistake, they just look dishonest. It doesn’t matter if they’re trying to fix the situation.

At the end of the day, there is no covering it up. There is no lie that lasts a lifetime. If we don’t know exactly what it is, we see the shadow of it. Remember Tim Kreider’s friend Skelly? He has more to say:

“What someone’s lies about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves. These inventions illuminate the negative spaces of someone’s self-image, their vanity and insecurities, and most childish wishes, as we can infer from warped starlight the presence of a far vaster mass of dark matter.”

He goes on to discuss the “Soul Toupee”:

“The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves that we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.”

Of course, the things that we are most scared about revealing to the world are usually not a big deal at all to others. They pretend not to notice because they see how desperate we are to hide them. They’ve already accepted the thing we’re scared to show.

This is all a very long way of saying: You’re not tricking anybody.

The world isn’t hungry for perfection; it’s hungry for authenticity. For someone to trust—not worship.

Be professional, know your shit, do your best, and then be human.

5. It will make you vulnerable. Yes it will. This one only feels like a danger, though.

People buy from people who are vulnerable. People fall in love with people who are vulnerable. People trust people who are vulnerable. People want to help people who are vulnerable.

Because people know that invulnerability isn’t for humans.

The Benefits of Honesty

Here we are, time for the good stuff.

1. Honesty begets honesty. We all want people to be honest with us, there is no better way to achieve this than being honest with others.

“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

This does a couple things:

  1. It short-circuits their paranoia and thus creates a more effective relationship.
  2. It actually makes people more honest. We naturally want to meet the expectations of others. When we are honest and expect honesty, we are likely to get it.

2. Honesty compounds. Being dishonest in the short run can put you ahead, but it’s a one-off thing. You’ll burn bridges and be seen (at least by someone) as untrustworthy. If you try really hard, you can make this work for a long time. Eventually though, you’ll get tired of finding new people to screw over. You have to constantly fight and backstep and make things up.

Honesty builds on itself like a snowball rolling down a hill. Honesty builds momentum.

If you are honest to friends, they will continue to be your friend and want to build a closer relationship.

If you are honest to your customers, they will keep buying from you and recommend that others buy from you.

It can feel like dishonesty has the upper hand early on. In the long game, though, there’s no stopping the compounding of honesty.

3. “Speed of Trust.” There is a business book with that title. I haven’t read it, but I see the title every once in a while and remember how important trust is.

Nothing happens without trust. No relationships can be built or fun had. No sales or growth of any kind.

Trust is necessary. Trust in ourselves, in others, and in the world; therefore, the single best way to gain this trust is to be honest with ourselves, others, and the world.

4. It makes everything richer. Honesty makes life more interesting. You don’t spend time skirting subjects, so you get to the thing you actually want to be talking about.

Honesty is scary, so it forces you to push outside of your comfort zone.

Honesty is less constrained, so it exudes energy.

5. Honesty is more profitable. Ben Franklin said that honesty is the best policy, not the best moral decision. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger took that to heart early on at Berkshire.

They built a reputation not only for being competent but being honest. That meant that owners preferred them over other investors.

The legendary tech investor Paul Graham has said that the same rule applies in Silicon Valley: the good guys are winning. He says this is because of (1) transparency and (2) unpredictability:

“It’s obvious why transparency has that effect. When an investor maltreats a founder now, it gets out. Maybe not all the way to the press, but other founders hear about it, and that means that investor starts to lose deals. [2]

The effect of unpredictability is more subtle. It increases the work of being inconsistent. If you’re going to be two-faced, you have to know who you should be nice to and who you can get away with being nasty to. In the startup world, things change so rapidly that you can’t tell. The random college kid you talk to today might in a couple years be the CEO of the hottest startup in the Valley. If you can’t tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone. And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who are genuinely good.

In a sufficiently connected and unpredictable world, you can’t seem good without being good.”

6. It just makes life better. Unless you’re a psychopath, you can feel it. Honesty makes everything better. Dishonesty makes everything bad.

Wrapping This Up…

I’ve written nearly 5000 words about honesty now. I could keep typing. I’m like talking about simple things ad infinitum.

But maybe now it’s time to do some honesty. To tell some person that thing. To be honest about what you thought of that movie. To take a peak at your Soul Toupee.

Author

Avatar for Kyle Eschenroeder
Kyle Eschenroeder

Thanks for taking the time to read this! Let me know what you think - the good, the bad, the ugly - in the comments below.

I'm an entrepreneur (more in the StartupBros About Page) in St. Petersburg, FL

41 comments add your comment

  1. Thanks for the well thought out post and response Kyle.

    Whatever or whoever inspired it must have been coming from a very vulnerable and emotional place; selfish or not.

    I read a quote this morning…
    “Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people committed to misunderstanding you.”

    Honestly I should have learned this lesson a long time ago.
    Still I question the validity of it. Honestly explaining who I am and the stories of my being; some that consume me, have often been of profit (emotional, monetary, whatever) for others though incredibly painful for me. So when my honesty is mistaken I do my best to take comfort in the variable of miscommunication.

    When it comes to certain touchy subjects I’ve taken to the habit of emailing myself the reality. A silly thing based on a fantasy where someone I dared to love changed details in my email leading me to believe that a dream was a reality. Usually reality is much sadder and harsher than a crazy made up world with rock stars, princesses and superheroes; as you so kindly pointed.

    The honest questions I ask myself:
    Does it take more than three visits to Heaven to be considered an Angel? If I have lost two children will the universe ever give me a chance at having a third? If I loved someone who has a ego that is out of this world would I be willing to be alone if he never loved me back? With so many options to make a difference in this world, which one is best for me? Was it the right choice to walk away all the other times? If I had to face Mr. Clean again would I still walk away with $2,500? Was starting over the stupidest or best decision I ever made? Who cares?

    Thank you for sharing your stories. They often help me to see the sad truth of my life.

    • Hey Genesis,

      Those are some big questions.

      Honesty definitely isn’t a cure-all for getting outcomes we want in some circumstances. It’s just getting to be the more effective option in most places.

      You’re definitely one of the brave ones!

  2. Bravo, bravo, bravo to all who have posted so far….

    First….to RW….you have expressed my thoughts exactly in an eloquent manner. You would be an interesting person to communicate with about Private Label business. If you are a member of the Mark Scott Adams community (which I will be a member of in 24 hours or less) perhaps we could chat sometime about our business philosophies….I digress….

    Meanwhile back at the Ranch….so to speak.
    Humongous Kudo’s to Kyle and Will on their Mind Blowing, Kick Ass, Awesome, Bitchin’, Knarley (the last 3 descriptions were used by my teenage son back in the 80’s…hehe) 3hr. 57min. webinar.

    Honestly……during the webinar I learned 2 important things that will be INVALUABLE to the success of my upcoming Private Label business….again….many thanks to Kyle and Will.

    Of course it goes without saying Kudo’s to the man who made it all happen…..Mark Scott Adams.

    Much success to all in your business future.

    • So glad you found Will’s presentation profitable!

  3. 5000 words, I’ve read it all and was so refreshing.
    Thank you so much!
    Always a good test:
    ‘if one can look into a mirror and honestly see what’s within and feel peace in heart’
    – they are on a right track
    – if something feels uneasy, it’s time to look around and see where one fell off the track and fix it, finding the azimuth again

    • Indeed! Thanks for the additions Zuzana!!

  4. “If you’ve ever been to a webinar, you know that the presenter usually spends an hour or two pretending to educate you while actually just teasing you in hopes that you’ll be frustrated enough to buy the damn thing.

    –So true.

    People responded like crazy”

    –Haha. Yes, I remember checking out your webinar, and being extremely impressed, and I’m not even part of your target audience for it!

    You’ve done a terrific job over the last year with building the importing courses from the initial article by Will.

    • Institutionalizing the thing 🙂 Lol

  5. I know Kyle and Will you want to encompass all religions and peoples of the world. Yes thus the truth. Honest is Godly hence it will produce fruitful results. Like you wrote in shot term one might think they made a mistake to be honest about a situation but that which is dishonest will still bear a bad fruit. You plant grapes you get grapes nothing like harvesting Apples from a grape plant. These are natural laws. Honest is of God and will surely bear the fruits of progress. You have well explained it.

    • Never thought of it like that, thanks Robert 🙂

  6. When I saw how long your article was I wasn’t going to read it all, just skim through it but I became well and truly hooked; I kept nodding my head each time that something you wrote resonated with me.Thank you for your insightful words, you seem wise beyond your years.
    In truth, my own honesty and integrity has been called into question so many times in my life and in several instances, my stance seems to attract the very people that no one would wish in their lives. This has lead me to dream of eventually living in a lighthouse out at sea with the dingy tied to my tiny jetty; if someone wants to see me it will be my decision as to whether I will row to the mainland and pick them up. I suspect that I won’t have many visitors sharing a cup of tea with me.

    • It *would* be pretty crazy to live in a lighthouse…

      I’m glad you got hooked 🙂

  7. Very insightful and thorough, thank you for sharing. I am in an industry where dishonesty (along with false embellishment, omission and inflated egos) is almost expected and assumed par for the course. I’ve never been good with doing business that way, and in the end am glad to have been able to successfully navigate the treacherous shark-infested waters while keeping my integrity intact. I have not only been able to accomplish great things, associate with like-minded friends and business associates, but (best of all) can wake up each day feeling good about who I am.

    I like the Picasso quote. Another expression I really like regarding honesty is that “Honesty Without Compassion is Just Cruelty” (not sure who to attribute that to).

    Cheers!

    • I love that expression! That sums up what I was trying to point at.

      Congratulations on doing the hard works that integrity requires 🙂

  8. It was good to read and learning the different aspects of honesty. I have always looked at honesty as a kind of humility.

    • Good seeing you over here too Roberto! I love the honesty as humility idea… I think there’s a lot to it.

  9. This might as well have been written by Ghandi or Seth Godin (wait, they kinda look alike, hmmmmm.)

    Anyway, brilliant.

    P.S. Money loves speed, but truth….

    • Jordan,

      I left an earlier comment concerning the webinar that you sponsored with the Startup Bros. This article is all about honesty (as is how you portray your business) and yet during the webinar the presenters blatantly instruct people to lie about who they are (possibly a secretary) and about how many locations you have when trying to acquire product samples. I like the information you provide but this is so hypocritical….is it not?

    • Jordan Malik just commented on my blog post! YEeeeehaww!!!

      I love that image, StartupZap should pick it up 🙂

  10. Okay, I honestly can say that after I listened to the webinar and then I listened to myself I realized that no matter what money, getting wealth from importing from China is not going to fill me up. So I am sticking with my small business of making toys and rocking horses myself. Because my joy and true fulfillment lies in making things, not in reselling them, even though sanding the wood gives me bloody blisters on my hands for days and figuring out the right way to apply paint on them takes like 10 times longer than I expect it. And I did not start making any money yet form it, after I’ve invested so much into materials and supplies. But anyway, I feel I will be happier in my heart making much less from this than from making lots through importing to Canada from China. And I thought that I unsubscribed from your newsletters. But there was one more from Kyle just now 🙂

    But by God, Kyle, while I was reading your article you kept touching my heart and my solar plexus chakras (the one just where our stomach is :)) with your articles so deeply. Noone else did it before. Hmmm… Thank yoU! 🙂 <3 I can feel that you are much more than a business person, and I can't find the right word to describe what I perceive you to be. Someone very rare and very generous. Someone who has a gift of appreciation for things that are much more precious than $$$. May all the Good Forces of the Universe support you with every step of your Way!

    • Thanks so much for the kind words Mary! I’m so grateful to reach your tummy chakra 🙂

      Really glad we snuck one more email to you!

  11. Very interesting. I’ve listened to your webinars on selling on Amazon and you very straightforward instruct people to lie to the representatives of the various foreign sellers in China. You instruct your students to say they are a secretary or someone other than who they are. You also instruct them to tell the sellers that you have offices all over the US when trying to get a good deal on acquiring sample products. How do you reconcile that with this article?

    • Wow…I guess there is no comment for only my questioning comments. Your actions are much like a politician, that is you say all sorts of nice things but your actions are quite to the contrary. A politician can say they are leading the most transparent administration ever when in actuality they hide most everything but many people will tend to believe what they say because they don;t really pay much attention. You’ve done the same. You write extensively about honesty (and its attributes) but blatantly instruct people to be dishonest and think nothing of it…and you’re applauded for it. Very sad but hopefully you’ll change your tactics and instruction in the future.

    • Great point! This is where things get murky.

      Did you know that Laurence Fishbourne lied about his age to get a role in Apocalypse Now? He said he was 17 when he was younger. The movie took so long to get going that he was actually 17 by the time they filmed.

      He wanted the best for his career and he wanted to do a great job in the movie. All Coppola wanted was to make a great film. The 17 year old restriction was bureaucratic BS…

      There are a million stories like this. People fibbing a little bit to get their foot in the door and really perform. At the end of the day, everyone is happy they fibbed.

      They honestly wanted the best for all involved.

      One of my friends started his company from nothing. Taking out expensive loans each time he wanted to make a new order from China. In order to get going he had to tell lies or stretch the truth to his manufacturer. Now he is doing $20 million a year and accounts for almost ALL of that manufacturer’s business. He even helped the owner of that factory by a home here… right next to his own.

      When we tell clients to say they’re the secretaries/etc (technically they ARE…) we aren’t having them scam anyone. We’re helping them start a business that they want to grow into something amazing that is profitable for the manufacturers.

      The manufacturers WANT to provide opportunities for people serious about building businesses, just like Coppola wanted to make the best film possible. Our clients starting out WANT to make the best business possible and make continually larger orders from the factories. In this case, the 17 year old rule is the factory’s default BS detectors.

      I hope this helps make sense. Technically it may be dishonest in the short-term, but the intentions and outcomes always end up favorably for both parties. And, like the article said, sometimes it’s profitable to be dishonest, just not in the long-term. In this case, I don’t even think it’s bad to be dishonest for a minute.

      • I really do appreciate you responding…thank you. I understand that there are times when we all stretch the truth but its never a good practice to misinform on purpose. It seems you are of the camp that believes “the end justifies the means” (another of the politician’s favorites). That is if you believe it’s advantageous to misinform a little it’s OK as long as meets your individual, higher, virtuous goal. After all it’s for the good of everyone or so you believe. Here’s the thing though, every person gets to define what is right in their own mind and therefore (according to your rules) can bend the rules to justify getting what they want. So, (much like politicians) people are “fibbing a little” all over the place to get ahead and attain their wishes or push their agenda. There are many activists and politicians that would agree with you that it’s a good thing to lie a little now for a better cause. I totally disagree.

        I did enjoy most of your webinar and do wish you well. Enjoy your weekend.

        • well thought out and well written, both of you. this interaction actually is like, gold standard when it comes to two different minds DISCUSSING, not arguing. seeing this made me happy.

  12. The deeper I delve into my business, I find honesty plays a huge role in winning people over. I’m not an “expert”. But, I know a hell of a lot about my niche and work hard at bringing success to my clients.

    This is a great read. Thanks for posting.

    • Exactly! You don’t need to be an “expert” if you know what you’re talking about

  13. I write in my About page and in my posts when I’m consulting for a company and highlighting its product. Being an Authority Affiliate by actually working X amount of hours a week with the products you highlight is a great way to go. I’ve been fortunate enough to get hired by companies I like, and then providing that insight no other publisher can b/c nobody else is having drinks and meetings with the CEO, CFO, COO, etc.

    • Awesome! I agree, we work really closely with all of our affiliates because of that exact reason.

  14. your latest post on honesty is pretty spot on and applicable to a lot of things. a surprising amount of things. you’re an extremely spiritual guy. i’m a fan of your writings and posts. thanks for providing value in a lot of ways. i feel if you boiled both of us down to a philosophical roux we’d vibe on fairly similar frequencies. i think having a good conversation with you and will someday is on my bucket list.

    “The world isn’t hungry for perfection; it’s hungry for authenticity. For someone to trust—not worship.
    Be professional, know your shit, do your best, and then be human.”
    “Honesty begets honesty.” yeah i’ve noticed people are mirrors, but they’re also reverse mirrors. it’s an interesting thing. while practicing the skill of speaking my mind with no hesitation, i ran across a black guy at night that could have probably pushed my shit in. he asked for a cigarette. the first thing i thought of i said, which was, “nah man, i don’t have a cigarette, but i hope you get your head screwed on straight.”

    he immediately said “whatchu say?” in a pretty “i’mma beat your ass black and blue” kinda tone. his energy got all high and frantic. fantastic. exactly what i’ve been looking for. a situation that would challenge my emotional bearings. as my heart beat faster i slowly turned around, slowly looked at him and i slowly repeated what i said. “i said i hope you get your head screwed on straight. my dad has been trying to quit all his life and he hates cigarettes. just hoping for the best for you man.” i know in my heart of hearts i mean no ill will to anybody, so there is no reason for me to show guilty body language behavior for the things i say, such as stuttering or denying utterances, both being courses of action which would have probably lead to him beating my shit in. i’ve also noticed that high frantic manic energy has a strong tendency to get absorbed by slow moving assured energy. i suppose that’s what i mean by people being reverse mirrors. it’s also why deadpan is my preferred and best form of humor. noticing these things has also benefited my dating skills forsure.
    after he heard my response along with my reasoning as to why i said that to him, the black guy calmed down and confessed that he had been trying to quit recently as well, and connected with me a bit. we then went our separate ways. and i felt much more successful than i would have if i had instigated a fight with him.

    it’s easy to say fuck it and just fight. but this path is not sustainable nor is it consistent with the levels of satisfaction and joy it brings to my life. there’s something beautiful about finding more positive alternatives to me though, even if it may seem harder at times. what i’ve more recently found is that it’s actually easier as i continue, just as anything is, since everything is a skill that can be developed imo, even shitting.
    “Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.” – Emerson

    i’d say my self esteem is way too high. but it works in a strange way. it’s only high because i honestly think everybody is the shit in their own way and i see the potential for great connection and good times with everybody, and if not with me, definitely with someone else, which is also a great thing. people tend to feel this from me. suddenly me seeing them as the shit makes them see me as the shit. and then we’re both the shit. and then we’re both having a really good time together.
    i went to a convention called sakuracon (an anime convention) for the first time this year even though i’ve always been a weeaboo to a degree. it was interesting. after more than one person telling me that hanging out with me one on one has brought them out of an intense/severe depression or that our time together was in a way the best they’ve ever felt in their life up to this point, platonically (why isn’t this a word) or romantically, i was elated but it also made me rethink why exactly people tell me this.
    it is probably because, as one friend knighted me, i am like a mobile sakura con. i noticed at sakura con some core desires of human beings and why sakura con is so successful.

    it is a stereotype that most people that go to anime conventions are lacking on the emotional stability side. those people feel the strongest me vs them mentality (i’ve noticed people that feel connected with others tend to be also more emotionally stable. those that feel the least connected with others tend to be depressed.) in their lives, few people tend to acknowledge, celebrate, and accept their existence. but all they have to do is dress up as their favorite character, go to the con, and suddenly- random people start hi 5’ing them, giving them hugs, and recognizing their character, etc. their existence becomes acknowledged, celebrated, and accepted. i realized that i do this to people, but to them themselves. not their favorite character. a shocking feeling that many people do not typically get. a fragment of the universe (me) celebrating who they are and what they’re about, while relating to their flaws and accepting them for who they are with no judgement. and in them exposing the story of their fascinating lives, i am constantly humbled and educated, while i make friends with them in the process. i see everyone eye to eye firmly, i do not believe any one being is above another or below. i’ve observed everybody wants a friend, not someone that needs them to lead, nor someone that needs them to follow. that one quote comes to mind. you’ve probably heard of it.

    i don’t really know how i went on his tangent but i figure you’d find enjoyment in reading this type of material anyway. perhaps it’s me being honest with myself and my desire to connect with a jolly looking white guy that that feels like me in a lot of ways, and his friend that reminds me of a type of person i’ve noticed i am attracted to in the platonic sense. it’s actually kind of surreal to see you and will give off such similar vibes my cousin and i perpetuate.

    thank you guys for existing.

  15. Awesome read, awesomely written. Lots of nuggets to take away and more to come back to reabsorb.

    • Glad you liked it, see you when you come back 🙂

    • lol you’re absolutely right. If only I were that good…

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