Episode Transcript

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. How are y’all doing? I hope you’re doing good. I’m doing well. I’m doing better than I deserve, honestly.

So, last episode I talked about quietly versus openly and about failing loud, right. And I actually want to talk about really how to make good decisions, and one of the key principles in life that is required to make good decisions. And that key principle is honesty, honesty at all costs. And What does that mean? I’m going to be truthful, no matter What it cost me, if I’ve screwed up and made a mistake, I’m going to be honest about it. And Here’s why. If I’m dishonest about it, I am now lying to two people, myself, and someone else, right. And you can lie to yourself, even though you know the truth, and you know what’s happened.

And the worst person to lie to is yourself, and Here’s why you can’t learn and move forward, you’re now stuck until you actually are honest about whatever happened. And you’re stuck in this area of life. And you’re stuck here until this has happened. The other thing is, is you are not going to be able to improve or grow until you actually own your failures, right? Most learning, the majority of learning comes from learning from failure, whether you watch somebody else, and they fail, and you learn from that, or whether you look back over your own life, see where you failed, and could have done things differently, and could have improved and been like, Man, if I had just made these few minor adjustments, the outcome that I experienced would have been radically different and better. Right.

The other thing is, you have to be honest with yourself about the actions you’ve taken to change the actions you’re about to take. So honesty is really required to change your future actions, right? You have to be honest, wow, I stay up late all the time. And that is why I’m tired. And it’s interesting how we lie to ourselves. So let me give you an example. Before I started counting calories and logging my food, I was like, Man, I don’t eat that bad. And I don’t eat that much. Like I know I eat pretty healthy while I was being dishonest. I really was because when I started counting calories, it’s like, oh, I’m eating way more cool. I may not just be eating donuts all the time, because I wasn’t. But Im eating way more. And then I’m putting way more bad crap here in there than I literally thought it was.

And it’s so interesting that honesty really results in measurement. So if you want to measure things better in your company, you got to start promoting honesty, right politics, going back to Lencioni and The Five Dysfunctions of Team politics kills honesty, right? Because we’re saying things to keep everybody happy, which then kills measurement, which kills improvement, which kills production, which kills client satisfaction, which kills teamwork, which kills all these other things that happen, right? It’s so hard to find a constraint if there’s a lot of dishonesty involved, right. And it’s interesting, because really, building a business requires deep humility, and the ability to be wrong, you’ve got to be able to be wrong. Otherwise, you’re not going to make the changes necessary. You need to in order to create and build the entity that you want to.

You can’t accomplish your vision life without having humility. And What goes right next to humility is honesty. If you want to make better decisions, you have to be honest, you have to reflect, you have to look back at the decisions and actions you’ve taken, that have produced the outcomes that you’ve currently gotten, you have to look back on those. And then you have to be honest about What you could have done, and What you should have done in the past and then apply it to the future situation that is similar. Because every decision that you make is similar to the one in the past, every decision you make is universally different. There’s no same decision, right? Because today’s a different day than yesterday. And tomorrow is going to be a different day than today.

However, you have similarities, and you have similarities within the circumstances, you have similarities within the principles behind the decision that are going to come into effect and come into play. You have similarities between these things, and you’re not going to be able to learn to make better decisions without honestly and it’s painful, right? It’s something like going to the gym going to the gym is painful when you first start or when you take a break for a while. It’s it’s super painful to get back into things. But once you do it, you really learn to love it and you really see the value it adds to your life and how much it betters your life.

And it’s so important to really see this and to value honesty and to value yourself that you are worth being told the truth by yourself and telling the truth to yourself. So anyways guys, that’s it, and I’ll catch you later. Peace