Field Notes #15
Deadly White Lies
Alongside this Field Note is the promise printed in every workbook — that I will never be modest and never be nice — and the reason you have to make the same promise back. Treat it as a personality quirk of mine, and you will hit a terminal point where the program stops working.
THE TWO EXITS
Modesty and niceness are little white lies told for comfort. Nice, so your feelings do not get hurt. Modest, so I do not sound arrogant. They are deadly because blind spots are found in discomfort, and a lie is an exit from the room where the discovery happens. Can you stay in a room while an exit is standing open?
Both Directions
The cover is a typewriter with FAKE NEWS on the page.
We are trained into both lies from childhood, and the effect is that we constantly gaslight each other, then spend our energy figuring out whether to take one another seriously or literally. My definition, printed on the first page of every workbook: modest is when I lie to you about me, and we both know I am lying. Nice is when I lie to you about you, and I know I am lying.
Honesty runs both directions, and this is the half people miss:
It is not modest to name what you are instinctively great at. I was born with a high IQ, and I did nothing whatsoever to earn it. Pretending otherwise is a performance that costs the room information it needs.
It is not unkind to name what you are not. My son will not let me sing in public, because his voice is his first instrument and mine is not. My wife and my son are athletes; I have no athletic ability at all —only tenacity, enough to get me up a mountain and useless for hand-eye coordination.
Envy, spoken plainly, is a form of truth. That looks amazing. I cannot do that.
Humility and kindness belong in the delivery, not in the decision. Do it elegantly, with care. Do it anyway.
Session Three of My Culture is where this bites: use your words, locate and relate, stop pretending. We demand that of eight- and nine-year-olds and we give adults a pass we would never give a child. Upgrade to third grade.
"I will not be modest. I will not be nice. I will live in reality. I will speak the truth to you and expect the truth back." — Robert (Sherpa) Millar
By the end of this, you will know what you are being asked in return. Too many people apply all of this in private and then discover the discomfort of honesty the moment they step into a room with other people.
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Field Note Card: Fifteen minutes, one take, black and white. Fifteenth of the seventeen method primers. Prescribed as the third of four for My Leadership (1 · 9 · 15 · 3), pointed at again from Session Three of My Culture, and reproduced in a single sentence on every Butterfly Effect introduction page.
To continue through the library, click Field Notes #16 below.
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This one is married to #16. Watch them as a pair — one is modesty chosen for comfort, the other is a distortion mistaken for modesty.
– Robert (Sherpa) Millar | Just Now
