The original title of this post is:

Proudly Washing my Laundry in Public.

I never figured out why washing your laundry in public is such a bad term.

My first reaction is we are all human and we all wear clothes.

And clothes always need washing.

When you wash an item you clean something with the intention of making it useful.

Maybe you don’t do your laundry because you don’t know how to wash your laundry.

People do gardening or clean their car or porch.

That’s a public act.

I mean my clothes are more important than my house or my car.

I mean, imagine if you’re faced with the choice of losing your house or losing your clothes.

Both losses are unpleasant.

Kidding aside, I receive the warning “don’t wash your laundry in public” whenever I’m being honest.

For the longest time, my life had been filled with lies and I had to pretend to get the results I want.

I lived a life of pleasantries and often found myself in situations that I don’t want to be in.

I am always trying to make an effort to unlearn my natural tendency to try to pretend that I’m a good person because I feel that the consequences of dishonesty is far worse than shame.

How to be honest:

1. Start bit by bit

If you’ve been dishonest for a while, you’re going to have a difficult time, but fret not.

Just start being honest about one thing.

Let go of pride, ego or reputation.

Wait that’s pretty hard.

Forget that for a while.

Just start being honest about one tiny thing then do a bit more as you become more comfortable about telling the truth.

2. Phrase your honestly in a nice way whenever possible.

Try to be honest but kind.

See if you can add some humor to soften the blow of your blunt honesty.

Blunt truth hurts like the blunt stair steps hitting your shin when you slip while climbing up a staircase.

I’ve had people tell me blunt truth but the experience was so bad that despite how good their intentions were it only made matters worse.

I’m also guilty of this.

Learn to walk people through some fine points without stepping on their toes is a good advice I got from a job interview.

3. Just say it, admit it, and be excited instead of afraid at their reactions.

In a lot of cases, when I’m honest people cut me some slack for my weakness.

The only time this didn’t work was when I was dealing with a crazy boss who felt that I was there to rob him.

4. Experiment by starting admitting the thing you find hardest to admit

My life’s a mess and I’m just going by counting my blessings.

I want to give up because it feels like shit.

This has gone on for months but I’m really tired of it.

I brainwashed myself to never give up so my hope doesn’t die.

But you know what, if people drag you down like that, you should just let go.

Whatever it is, you’re holding on to is preparation for the next one so whether things go well or not it’s just practice.

If everything is practice then, you should cut yourself some slack.

The future is not set in stone.

If it is, we’ll never know now how things will end.

You’ll start going out with someone you’re excited to see again so keep that great looking smile ready.

5. Don’t expect people to believe you.

That’s the beauty about telling the truth.

People won’t believe you sometimes and that’s a good thing.

You admit that you didn’t finish college and they won’t believe you.

You’ll tell them that you don’t have enough experience and they’ll say you’re being humble. And so on..

You probably know this already and I’m tired of typing and all I wanted to do was to encourage you to tell the truth all the time so that’s it so if you’ll excuse me, I have to get some sleep.

I still owe a few people my first book which I’ll have to edit tomorrow.

From Kevin of April 2020

I found this post in my Evernote. I lightly edited it and published it here.

I feel that I wrote this because I’ve been trying to unlearn some of the sleazy tactics that I learned in sales.

I’m in the process of cleaning my notes so I’m moving as much of my important stuff outside of cloud services.

Practice telling the truth.

Here’s some wisdom I learned later.

The consequence of telling the truth is the best case scenario, no matter how favorable or unfavorable you think it will be.

If you saved something with a lie, you are likely stuck with something that was supposed to die and it will kill you in the end.

See you on the next post.


Thank you for reading.

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