Keep your word. I’m not just talking about the times you say, “Yes, Dad. I promise I’ll do the thing you just asked me to do.” I’m also talking about all the little times you tell someone you’ll do something, help them out, or be somewhere; the seemingly insignificant promises you make every day. Yes, it’s important to keep the big promises, like the ones you make to your spouse, to your country, or to your God. But it’s also important to keep the little promises like, “I’ll do the laundry,” or “I’ll come by later,” or “I’ll call you back.”
The little ones may seem less important, or no big deal if you forget, but the sum total of those promises will far outweigh the marquee promises you make in front of a crowd. This isn’t to say you should cheat on your spouse or become a traitor; big promises also matter. What I am saying is that your word is the sum total of all the promises you make, and that hundreds of white lies and unkept commitments can chip away at that word in ways that are every bit as destructive in the long-term as one big lie.
The little commitments you make and things you say you’ll do may not feel like promises, and they may not carry the same weight as an oath you take before your family, country, or God, but they matter.
For example, if you consistently commit to play golf with your friends on Saturday morning but then party so hard on Friday night that you’re too hungover to play, they’ll think they can’t depend on you and find another to fill the foursome. If you always sign up to bring napkins to the class party but never remember, people will tire of wiping their hands on their pants and decide you can’t be trusted with something so insignificant as napkins. And if you tell someone half-truths and lies of omission, they’ll eventually start to doubt everything you say.
Those are all natural consequences of not keeping your word, self-reinforcing lessons most of us learn as we go along. But there’s also an internal cost to lying and cheating, one that’s almost worse than not being invited to go play golf, attend class parties, or be trusted to be on time. Lying, cheating, and breaking promises leads to more of the same. The more you do it, the easier it becomes.
In his book, “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty,” Dan Ariely studied cheating, lying, and why we do both. In short, we all cheat a little most of the time. There’s a 10-15% margin of dishonestly that most people feel comfortable with, where they can cheat a little and still feel good about themselves. That in itself is bothersome. I hope you don’t lie and cheat 10% of the time. That said, what I found most interesting was that cheating is contagious and gets easier as we do more of it. When we see other people lie and cheat, we start to think it’s okay. And when we lie and cheat a little and don’t get caught, it becomes our new normal. If we continue to cheat, Ariely explains in an interview how easy it is to lose all connection to our moral compass.
“I have had lots of discussions with big cheaters – insider trading, accounting fraud, people who have sold games in the NBA, doping in sports. With one exception, all of them were stories of slippery slopes. You look at the sequence of the events – you look at the end – and you say, my goodness, what kind of monster would do this? But then you look at the first step they took and say, I can see myself under the right amount of pressure behaving badly. Then they took another step, another step, and another step.”
His antidote to the contagion of cheating is surprisingly simple: in a book review by The Washington Post, Michael S. Roth writes, “Mostly, small reminders of basic moral standards tend to improve behavior. Whether it’s the Ten Commandments, an honor code or a declaration of professional principles, bringing moral standards to mind reduces cheating.” Ariely’s research shows that these kinds of reminders serve as moral guardrails, nudging us back to honest behavior, but are most effective as immediate prevention, stopping the little cheating from becoming larger fraud.
Which brings me back to my main point: keep your word, all the time. When you lie a little, it gets easier to lie a lot. Whether it’s because you want people to believe in and trust you, or because you think it’s the right thing to do, keep your word. Every little lie you tell and throwaway promise you make is one more step towards losing your integrity.
In the event you make a promise you have to break, don’t blow it off like it didn’t matter. Before you break the promise, explain why you want to do so out loud to yourself and see how it sounds. Weigh it against your internal moral compass, and ask yourself if why you’re not doing what you said you would. If you’re okay with it, explain to the person you made the promise to why you’re not doing what you said you’d do. Ask their forgiveness and permission to be free of your promise. It’s not a perfect solution, but shit happens and sometimes the shit that happened was out of your control. At least the person you promised will know you take your word seriously.
I’m definitely not perfect, and I don’t expect you to be. I’ve lied, I’ve broken my word, and I’ve cheated. Not like Lance Armstrong cheated, but I’ve fudged a timecard at work. I haven’t made a habit of it, but it’s happened. Not only did I usually feel some natural consequence, I’m not proud of the times I did and I never liked the way it made me feel. (Bad. It made me feel bad.)
Like many of the lessons I’ve written, writing this makes me want to do better, both to be a better role model for you and because my word matters to me.
So, keep your word. Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep, and make sure you keep the promises you do make.
I love you,
Dad
I originally planned to finish this series in twelve months, intending to write one entry a week for 52 weeks. But, other things came up and I didn’t have as much time as I thought I would. We moved, you started a new school, I had other projects, etc. But finally, I’m starting my last entry in September, nine months after I’d planned. Which is the perfect intro to this one.
Time is funny like that. It marches on like a metronome, indifferent to how much you wish it would slow down or speed up. It offers no do-overs, no matter how frivolously you spend it. And it gives zero fucks what you planned to accomplish in the time you had. Once that time is over, you’ll get no more. But, it also stretches out ahead of you into an unknown future, offering untold possibility and infinite choices.
Which is why I hope you both learn to make choices about how you spend your time and understand what those choices mean. Because while there’s never enough time for everything, there’s still enough time to do almost anything.