If you’re just and honest, you’ll earn the trust of your people—inside and outside the organization’s walls. With more data, consumers will make more informed choices, choosing to do business with just and honest organizations. This stuff is literally so obvious it’s probably hurting your prefrontal cortex to think about, not to mention it’s your clue that the author of this book is no Einstein. And yet, from every corner of our world bullshit spews forth like a Roman fountain. It gushes from the lips of execs, from the minds of founders, from conference rooms full of employees, and from the talking heads screaming at us from our flat-screens.
Let’s not delude ourselves: our norm isn’t normal, and we have a responsibility to at least recognize the sheer amount of lies that invade our lives. Then, and only then, can we decide to do something about it, and even ask that nasty little question, how? A complex query, indeed, since there are so many ways leaders and their organizations can choose to define and then embrace an “honest” way of being. And as we saw in chapter three, even consumers have different definitions of being honest—from being fair to workers, to caring for the environment, to creating better communities, and more.
When you consider your sales, marketing, operations, new product development, communications, management style, and every other aspect of your business, it can be overwhelming to consider all the ways in which you could use honesty as a strategic tool for innovation and growth. Heck, we haven’t even come close to creating an exact definition of honesty yet. That’s why we need a framework for honesty—a simple way to decide what’s important, which questions to ask, and how to approach the complex problems we leaders face on a daily basis in our organizations. Furthermore, the framework must apply to every industry—from for-profit businesses to nonprofit organizations, and from start-ups to enterprise companies. If honesty is universally effective, we must have a method for applying it universally.
If honesty is universally effective, we must have a method for applying it universally.
A bit of warning here: nothing you read in this book should shake the foundations of your beliefs. You already know this stuff. All I did was put a shiny wrapper on something you know, in your heart, to be self-evident. But that’s where the power comes from: your already knowing what’s right. The stories in this book will arm you with the valuable ammunition you need to fight with strength and courage, and to win. With that in mind, allow me to give you a little backstory of how a lowly life-form like me came to attempt codifying such an obvious truth.
DISCOVERING THE ROOT CAUSE OF HONESTY (AND INNOVATION)
I wasn’t always a crusader for honesty. I started out like any other well-meaning twenty-two-year-old entrepreneur who wanted to build a thriving business and get rich doing it. With the help of a talented team, my business partner and I morphed our fledgling video production company into a content production company and then into a full-service marketing agency that worked on behalf of leaders from local car dealers to Warren Buffett himself. Over the years, we helped organizations in more than thirty industries at the local and national level clarify their messages, create better marketing, and grow. We even emerged from the perennial struggle bus to eventually grace the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in America for two years in a row.
In the early days, we figured out a small distinction that seemed to set us apart: while most other marketing firms were concerned about making beautiful things or running focus groups with potential new customers, we were concerned about diving deeply into the psychology of our clients’ current best customers. We knew that if we could understand what lay in the hearts of a client’s most ideal customers—the ones who spent the most money, came back the most frequently, and shared their experiences with more new customers—we could create messaging that would perfectly connect the brand’s unique selling proposition with more ideal customers.
Over the course of a decade in business, we used this simple, honest technique to create incredible results for clients, in some cases giving them up to a 500 percent return on their investment with us.
That simple premise usually gave us all the firepower we needed to create compelling marketing campaigns. Instead of focusing on what executives thought about their brands and potentially succumbing to their biases, we simply went to their best customers and asked them what they thought; that way we ended up with a true set of insights. Over the course of a decade in business, we used this simple, honest technique to create incredible results, in some cases giving clients up to a 500 percent return on their investment with us.
I recall being in one of our first pitches with that approach, at a local college. For a year we had been collecting video testimonials from their students in our role as video production vendor. Eventually our work landed us an opportunity to pitch as the agency of record. At the pitch, we showed a video montage of what the students were saying about the college. From those insights we derived a new tag line, which we proposed as the centerpiece of the school’s campaign.
At the end of the presentation, the president of the college paused momentarily while we wrung our hands in anticipation of our fate. She looked in disbelief at the tag line printed in front of her and gazed up at us. She said, “I’ve been looking for something like this for years. How did you come up with this?” Of course, I was tempted to say, “’Cuz we’re the’ biggest bunch of geniuses you’ve ever met!” But that would have been a lie. The truth is, all we did was get honest about whose opinion mattered most, and we simply listened to what those opinions were telling us. And with the message we crafted—the one their own best customers gave us—we were able to grow their open house attendance for prospective students by more than sevenfold.
My colleagues and I would sit in meeting after meeting, shell-shocked at how many executives preferred to keep their heads firmly planted in the sand if it meant that nothing had to change.
Unfortunately, creating impressive results for clients wasn’t always that simple. But before we get to that, I’ll be honest with you: I never set out to write about, speak about, or frankly even think about honesty. Getting honest insights from current customers didn’t seem all that honest to me when we started out . . . it simply made logical sense, given the work we were doing. Not every client saw it that way, though. In fact, what shocked me most about my career in marketing was witnessing the clients who disagreed with what we found. It was most curious sitting in a boardroom with key executives and having them tell us every reason why their best customers’ feedback was wrong, and why it made much more sense to just maintain the status quo, or copy whatever the competition was doing, or simply create something that the executives could agree on, even if it completely missed the mark with their own customers. My colleagues and I would sit in meeting after meeting, shell-shocked at how many executives preferred to keep their heads firmly planted in the sand if it meant that nothing had to change.
Did twentysomething Peter brandish honesty in their faces and insist they tear down their presumptions? Did I jump up on the conference room table and give bombastic speeches to persuade them to remove their heads from their asses? Of course not! I had employees with families to feed. I smiled and nodded like a benevolent nun and did whatever they wanted us to do to keep those checks coming. (Don’t worry, you can lambaste me over my moral ineptitudes in chapter fourteen.) And then I would watch, my nonplussed face wedged between my hands, as those campaigns would inevitably crash and burn.
After seeing the same horrific behavior in organizations large and small and in every industry under the sun, I started to ask myself, Why did some of our clients use our growth strategies to innovate and dominate their industries, getting a massive return on their investments, while others never even got out of the starting gate . . . embroiled in politics and wedged firmly into the status quo? It took my own personal crisis to see this enigma for what it was—a fundamental lack of honesty.
That’s why, when I first learned of Netflix’s failed sale to Blockbuster, I immediately recognized the root cause—not daftness but dishonesty. Blockbuster’s well-meaning, well-educated, and experienced executives simply failed to get honest—about what had changed in the industry, the preferences of their customers, and the dangerous strategy the activist investor was thrusting upon them.
THE FRAMEWORK THAT CHANGED MY BUSINESS—AND MY LIFE
Honesty can take on many different meanings in life and business. It can mean true, candid, direct, transparent, authentic, and more. But in my definition of honest in business, there are three very specific levels of honesty that any organization can use to innovate and dominate. All three levels fit into a framework I’ve come to call the Hourglass of Honesty, because the process works just like sand would move through an hourglass. It works in any organization, large or small, and in any industry. It works for start-up entrepreneurs, managers of small teams, and executives of billion-dollar companies. Right now, we’re just going to look at the top part of the Hourglass, the part that asks you to take an honest journey inward through three levels—community, others, and self.
The Honest Journey Inward
Community
The first level of honesty is getting honest about the community. To attain this level, it’s essential to understand what’s happening in the world around you and what’s changing in your industry. It’s putting yourself in the context of your present surroundings and circumstances, and observing the zeitgeist of our society. Consider, for instance, what the #MeToo movement has brought to our global conversation; how that singular shift in our consciousness has created a cascade of reactions, stoking the fires of related issues like gender-pay inequality. Reflect on how the 2007–2008 financial crisis drastically changed the trust level between consumers and businesses. Witness the swift rise of nonbinary gender fluidity—an idea that seemed nearly impossible just a few short years ago.
Times, they are a-changin’, and society seems to be shifting its belief systems at an ever-increasing clip. It’s critical for leaders to continually be honest about these changes, because they provide the basis for how we operate as a cohesive society with agreed-upon social norms. Many executives fail to properly assess this level of honesty, just as Blockbuster ultimately did. Its executive team failed to change with society’s evolving entertainment habits, and they paid a hefty price for letting an activist investor steer them back to the status quo.
The world at large is brimming with innovation and change. To succeed at the first level of honesty, you must embrace that. You must be adaptable. You cannot be like the many leaders who blindly choose the status quo and hide behind “the way we’ve always done it.”
Getting honest about the community means thinking critically about the world around you, developing a keen awareness of how society’s belief systems and habits are changing, and learning to consistently examine the evolving beliefs of our time. The information you need exists all around you; it bombards you every day in the form of news media and advertising, in conversations by the office Keurig, and at your dinner table at home. Today’s best opportunities will float toward you as long as you’re actively listening for them.
Getting honest about the community means thinking critically about the world around you, developing a keen awareness of how society’s belief systems and habits are changing, and learning to consistently examine the evolving beliefs of our time.
Others
The second level of honesty is being honest with and about the others in your life. The “others” are the people who make up your personal and professional worlds. They are your family, friends, colleagues, bosses, clients, neighbors, and, well, others. Most people are dishonest with and about those around them at some level. For instance, think of your friend who won’t break up with her boyfriend, even though it’s objectively obvious that her boyfriend is no good for her. Think about the times you’ve avoided a much-needed, candid conversation with another person because you think it might jeopardize the relationship. Consider a time when you’ve excused the bad behavior of a loved one under the excuse that you’re “protecting” them.
Examples of this phenomenon abound in our professional lives. Think of your work colleague who has been verbally abused by his boss so many times but won’t confront his boss about it. Think about the times you’ve sat in a meeting where it was clear what needed to happen but the interpersonal politics were so thick and corruptive that nothing could possibly get done. In all these examples, the subject is unwilling or unable to be honest with and/or about the others around them.
To capitalize on the second level of honesty, we must break free of the bullshit and be honest about our others. With so many outside threats and with so much change in the world, who can afford to be dishonest, particularly at the executive level? The “others” include all the others: customers, suppliers, vendors, direct reports, bosses, board members, chief executives, frontline employees, advisers, prospects, and more. It will always be up to you to decide which group of others you must be honest about, though I suspect you’ll find that decision obvious, and you’ll see how to choose your others with some of the stories in this book. The trick is to get honest about all your others as a continual habit of leadership—and even get honest about your family or social group, when required.
If you believe that business is driven wholly by the people within it, then you’ll agree that getting brutally honest with and about the people in your workplace is critical to making the right assessments, building the right teams, and achieving your goals.
If you believe that business is driven wholly by the people within it, then you’ll agree that getting brutally honest with and about the people in your workplace is critical to making the right assessments, building the right teams, and achieving your goals. If the others around you are so critical to your success, then the question for you, as a leader, is how much time you should spend blindly accepting the people around you vs. honestly assessing them. It’s the difference between accepting those around you at face value and digging deeper to get at the truth of what people around you know, believe, fear, and perceive, as well as what they can achieve.
Getting honest about your others is usually much more difficult than getting honest about your community. It takes forgetting about being “nice” and instead being thoughtfully, and yes, brutally, candid. It’s no secret that the highest-performing organizations get the right people in the right positions, and you can’t hope to align your people that way without being honest with and about them in the first place.
Self
Getting honest about the community takes intense listening skills and awareness. Getting honest about others takes the resolute pursuit of objectivity and the bravery to be honest and direct with those around you—not even letting “love” and “kindness” come before truth. But in the third and final level of honesty, getting honest with the self requires something entirely different, an element that escapes the vast majority of leaders across every size organization, every industry, every culture, and even every country. Getting honest with the self requires self-awareness, that elusive character trait that all want, most insist they have, and yet very few truly possess. Getting honest with and about the self requires a lifelong pursuit of exploration into the very depths of your identity, where you find countless fears, hopes, dreams, and beliefs that serve you or defeat you by the millisecond.
Of course, you can’t be honest about what you can’t see, so step one is actively and continually seeking to identify your true self. As Dolly Parton said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” Then, once you learn to see, you must learn to parse absolute fact from subjective opinion, which is difficult enough with those around you but incredibly challenging within your own mind. And yet, we know that getting honest with and about ourselves is critical to success and happiness, as we hold in high esteem the most enlightened, self-aware folks around us: Gandhi, Oprah, Einstein, Maya Angelou, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Nelson Mandela, and all the wise folks whose quotes float around the internet as leadership gospel.
Nearly every religious doctrine teaches a measure of self-assessment, from the Christian approach of seeing and repenting sin, to the self-auditing process of Scientology, to Buddhist teachings on consistently examining one’s own consciousness. All these encourage us to hold a mirror to ourselves—or, in some cases, to ask the divine to show us our true selves, as the Jewish leader King David did when he cried out, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; and see if there is any wicked way in me” (Psalm 139). We have a responsibility, both as organizations and as individuals, to get honest about ourselves. This final step unlocks tremendous opportunities for you, as a leader, to achieve massive success in business.
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” —Dolly Parton
I’m blessed to coach other entrepreneurs, helping them build their own mini-empires. Time after time, founders have come to me insisting that all they need is a better strategy for sales or a better tactic for marketing, when in fact they actually need to push past uncertainty, or admit that they need to pivot their business model, or otherwise get deeply honest with themselves about their self-limiting beliefs, biases, or fears. As Mark Manson, New York Times best-selling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, wrote, “We lie to ourselves as a way to protect ourselves from getting hurt [but] it disconnects us from reality.” Once we learn how to stop lying to ourselves, “it empowers us to live more freely in the world and be more honest with those around us.”1 And that’s where the magic begins.
HONESTY EVEN WORKS IN YOUR PERSONAL LIFE (HERE’S HOW I KNOW)
Remember that “personal crisis” I mentioned a little while ago? Well, I happen to be somewhat of an expert on getting deeply honest about self-limiting beliefs, since I’ve failed so miserably at it in the past. When I was seventeen, I was sure that I was on the precipice of accomplishing two childhood goals: going to the Olympics as a figure skater and attending Harvard University as my grandfather, uncle, and cousin all had. But spoiler alert: by eighteen, I had come to grips that the Olympic dream needed to die, I had been rejected by Harvard, and I found my emotional well-being spiraling out of control. I was devastated.
It’s amazing how long rejection stays in the mind. Thinking I was over those two massive failures, I spent the next twelve years moving toward “success,” or how I was defining it at the time. When I turned the big three-oh, I cruised past my actual birthday. This isn’t so bad, I thought. Then, suddenly, my age hit me like a Hawaiian wave over an unsuspecting surfer. It was a full-on quarter-life crisis. (Yes, for you math buffs, I plan to live to the ripe old age of 120.)
I don’t know what it was about that age. If you’re over that hump, then you know what I mean. How did you ever get through it!? (As an aside, at one keynote I delivered, an energetic woman in the front row called out that she had turned thirty twice. Having barely survived it the first time, I still remain in awe of her feat.) When I looked around at where I was and who I was, I disliked what I saw. I beat myself up. I wavered back and forth between wanting to double down on my dreams and work harder than ever, and feeling totally beaten down and unable to move forward at all. Perhaps you can relate.
My biggest problem: I wasn’t even sure what my dreams were anymore. I had been so sure of those two goals that when they didn’t come to fruition, I got stuck in a state of subconscious shock. Somewhere shortly after those two failures, I had stopped dreaming—or, more appropriately, I had started subconsciously accepting a second-best scenario. Perhaps I was imagining that I wasn’t good enough or smart enough for greatness. Perhaps that was just the simple fact of my life.
Unfortunately, it took me until a little past thirty to wake the hell up and realize that in some ways, I had been drifting along for a decade instead of marching in the right direction. Or what I thought was the right direction. You see, it’s quite impossible to tell which direction is right or wrong if you have no idea where you’re going. And to be honest, I had no idea where I was going. As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” Where am I? I began to think. How did I get here? How far am I from where I’m supposed to be?
Mind you, by thirty, I had what I’m sure seemed like a successful life. My business partner and I were building a multimillion-dollar business with a team of wonderful people. I had just gotten married to my amazing wife. Everyone around me was healthy. For all intents and purposes, I should have just shut the fuck up and appreciated what I had.
But each one of us measures success in different ways. To me, my achievements weren’t achievements—they were minimum expectations. My accomplishments weren’t triumphs to be celebrated; they were evidence of how I had failed to achieve anything worthy at all.
I had been drifting along for a decade instead of marching in the right direction. Or what I thought was the right direction. You see, it’s quite impossible to tell which direction is right or wrong if you have no idea where you’re going.
Unfortunately, I had become a preacher of organizational honesty who had failed to realize that I had been dishonest with myself—with my hopes, dreams, and fears. I had developed a knack for helping other leaders and organizations get honest, but I had a massive blind spot weighing me down: I had failed to get honest with myself in my own personal life.
#irony, #fail.
It was certainly a soul-searching time. Entering my fourth decade of life put me on the verge of my greatest fear: mediocrity. Something about being in my thirties kicked me into gear, and I finally became brave enough to get deeply honest about my own identity gap in order to reinvent some things in my life. I finally admitted that I wasn’t being honest about myself: my true thoughts, feelings, dreams, goals, and potential. And I wasn’t being honest with myself: I had been harboring self-limiting beliefs, holding back, using negative self-talk, and hiding in the safe zone instead of moving boldly forward toward what I truly wanted in life. In essence, I had unwittingly covered myself in stinky, muddy, bull-poo and then sat there dumbstruck in my self-inflicted mess.
That’s when I realized that there was so much more to honesty than I had thought; there was much more power in honesty than I had ever realized. My entire life changed when I finally unlocked the third level of honesty in my own life, when I was finally able to look at the mirror and be brutally honest with myself.
When we start telling ourselves the truth, we can start reacting to that truth, simple as that. When I started being honest with myself—who I really was, what I really wanted—I started making changes. Lots of changes. I started writing, posting, and networking like crazy. I started applying to magazine columns. I sat down to write this book. I was awarded the 2016 Millennial Move Maker in my home state. I began to get articles picked up in Inc., Forbes, the Huffington Post, Crain’s, PR Daily, and more. I was invited to join the Entrepreneurs’ Organization in New York, as well as the Young Entrepreneur Council. I applied to and got accepted into Columbia Business School. I was invited to do a TEDx Talk. I began doing keynote presentations to spread the gospel of honesty to anyone who would listen, and I started to get invited to some amazing conferences filled with others who saw honesty’s potential.
In fact, I accomplished more in the few years after my thirtieth birthday than I had in the twelve years prior. Doors began to unlock and open. Life became clearer. The tide of my life began to turn, and I saw the tsunami of success—as I newly and honestly defined it—start to build momentum. I was hustling, and it was an honest-to-greatness hustle for what I actually wanted in this life.
HOW THE JOURNEY THROUGH LEADS TO CHANGE
Sure, we had used honesty to grow clients’ businesses, but still, I was floored to see how quickly honesty produced results outside the business world. Seeing the by-products of honesty in my own life reinforced to me why honesty works in the first place. It works because honesty isn’t just a journey inward; it’s a journey through.
This is where the concept of the Hourglass was born. This is how I learned how honesty really works, in life and in business: when you get honest about what’s going on in the community, and when you get honest with and about the people around you, and when you get honest with and about yourself, with your own biases and self-limiting beliefs as a leader . . . in that instant, you’ve changed.
Honest You is a completely different person, with different hopes, dreams, beliefs, and fears. Honest You is willing to change the others around you, to enable the innovators and ignore the status-quo detractors. And that’s how you can bend the community toward you and create industry-dominating results.
This—this Hourglass of Honesty—is the key that unlocks the door to innovation, in business and in life.
Cynical me would never have believed it if I hadn’t experienced it myself. Trust me, people who knew me in high school (as the class asshole) will never believe that I—of all people—am proverbially descending from Mt. Sinai with tablets inscribed with HONESTY. But there it is: Once I was honest about the world around me, honest with and about the others in my life, and brutally honest with myself, there was an instantaneous change in my mind-set. I was no longer “dishonest Peter.” Instead, I was “honest Peter”—essentially an entirely different person, with an entirely different set of goals, dreams, fears, aspirations, abilities, and potential.
The true me.
The Hourglass of Honesty
As an entirely different person, I began to think differently about the others around me. I began to spend much more time curating beneficial relationships that could help me achieve my true goals—the ones I had been suppressing for years. And once I changed my inner circle, those new “others” helped me influence the community around me with new ideas, connections, and opportunities. They enabled me to bend the community toward me and make remarkable things happen within a very short period of time—one of those things being this very book.
Once you get honest about what’s going on in society at large and in your industry, and then get honest about the customers and colleagues around you, and then get honest about your own biases and beliefs, you naturally change. You’re able to see different insights, assess new possibilities, and approach old problems in an entirely new way.
All those outcomes were made possible by the key that starts the engine of change: honesty. And it works exactly the same way for business leaders. Once you get honest about what’s going on in society at large and in your industry, and then get honest about the customers and colleagues around you, and then get honest about your own biases and beliefs, you naturally change. You’re able to see different insights, assess new possibilities, and approach old problems in an entirely new way. In that instant you become an honest leader, one who is willing and able to strategically alter the others around you and produce incredible outcomes in your community.
If you watch for it, you can see the Hourglass all around us, hiding in plain sight. It lives in every leader you’ve witnessed who is unabashedly authentic to who they are—from Oprah Winfrey and Tony Robbins to Ellen DeGeneres and Steve Jobs. These and many others somehow seem predestined for greatness, like they were always going to become stars in their own right. Now I realize that’s exactly the case. Because they were so honestly, authentically themselves, they were able to influence others and the community around them.
In fact, Steve Jobs understood this method perhaps better than anyone else. He famously wrote:
When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much . . . that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.2
Jobs knew that the world could be bent, influenced. He knew that people could be swayed, united, mobilized. He knew that it was not only possible but easy and formulaic if only we could remove that self-limiting cover we love to pull over our heads by fitting in with the crowd and hiding our true selves. And what’s the root of that power? Pursuing one’s honest self. As he advised a group of graduating Stanford students at commencement, “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did . . . As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”3
“When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much . . . that’s a very limited life.”—Steve Jobs
I couldn’t agree more. You’ll know when you find your honest identity; if you pursue it, at least you can say you tried to just do you instead of failing at a life you might not have even wanted in the first place.
As I promised, there’s no rocket science here. The idea is stupid-simple, and something we’ve heard countless times: be yourself, and you can influence the world. That’s what Steve Jobs knew, and it’s exactly what allowed me to help my clients achieve their growth goals. Though, as I’ve admitted, I never truly understood the nuances of why it worked until I was able to be honest with myself and see the results in my own life. Now honesty is a lens I carry with me everywhere, like a diagnostic tool to help me understand why people behave as they do, what they believe vs. what is objectively true, and how to help people and organizations make positive change. Once you see the Hourglass, you can’t unsee it. You’ll recognize it in success stories large and small, here at home and around the world. You’ll see it break down in business faux pas and PR disasters on the news, and the reason will be oh-so-clear to you.
Honesty is a lens I carry with me everywhere, like a diagnostic tool to help me understand why people behave as they do, what they believe vs. what is objectively true, and how to help people and organizations make positive change.
The argument I’m selling you is that there’s an old way of doing things and a new way of doing things. The old way depended on information asymmetry—a fancy way of saying that buyers didn’t know any better and companies took advantage of them in order to profit. Now that we buyers know better, we’re going to choose to do business with honest organizations that make a profit while taking care of all constituents in a sustainable way. If you agree that near-perfect information is rapidly approaching, and if you agree that consumers will make different decisions with near-perfect information, then you sit at an unprecedented time in human history when doing the right thing will unlock massive success for you as a leader—in your business and in your life. But none of that can happen if you aren’t honest enough to see that oncoming wave, assess the people you’ve assembled around you to catch it, and open your mind to ensure that you can ride its ebbs and flows with agile confidence.
This being a book about using honesty to achieve greatness, you have a choice. You can embrace the status quo and keep on keepin’ on, or you can get ahead of this tidal wave of honesty and ride it, as many of the leaders in this book are doing. But make no mistake; the time to embrace honesty is right now, because being honest, by definition, isn’t a reactionary strategy. Early movers will forever be able to claim that they did the right thing before it was forced upon them. If you wait too long, you might find yourself battling a competitor that has embraced honesty on all three levels. Is that a game of catch-up you can afford to play?
Now that you have a working framework for honesty, let’s see it in action. Because as I’ve noted before, this isn’t a book about business ethics; it’s a book about making veritable shit tons of money. And once you see honesty rake in billions of dollars, that’s when it gets truly exciting.
QUESTIONS FOR HONEST REFLECTION
1.To what extent do your colleagues pursue the truth, rather than ignore it? How comfortable are you with pursuing the facts, no matter how painful they might be?
2.What can you learn from getting honest about what’s going on in your community, with the others around you, and with yourself?
3.How honest are you about who you really are, what you really want, and what it’s really going to take to achieve your biggest goals in life?