Knowing who you are and who you could be is the key to maximizing your long-term happiness. Your present and potential provide a map to achieving the greatest improvement and outcomes in life, and honesty is the key to discovering and using that map.
Honesty provides a foundation that determines so much of our joy. Like all foundations, the breadth and depth of our honesty dictate just how much can be built upon it. Honesty is a much broader and deeper topic than it seems, and until you gain a greater understanding of how extensively it weaves through your life and how significantly it affects how you feel and what you achieve, you will be limited in the growth you experience in life and the joy you experience here and hereafter.
If someone asked you what the benefits of honesty were, what would you say? Answers might include: building trust with others, showing integrity, or being more authentic. Whatever you answer, the full benefits of deep honesty go well beyond airy and ambiguous positive outcomes.
Dishonesty consists of far more than just saying something that you know is false, or even intentionally omitting truth. Everything good in life comes through and is retained according to what is true. To the extent you desire anything in or after life, your ability to obtain and retain it will depend on how much truth you know and how ideally you live with respect to it. Dishonesty is deviation from the truth, and includes failure to think, feel, and do the best you know of.
Dishonesty does far more damage than simply degrading your experience to below the ideal. Dishonesty is a poison that accumulates and increases in potency the longer and more extensively you exercise it. The further your thoughts, feelings, and actions stray from the ideal, and the more often they do, the less aware you will be of how often and intensely you do less than your best. By willfully engaging in less than your best, you guarantee involuntary degradation of yourself and your life in ways that will not be obvious to you and in situations beyond those where you intentionally slacked. You will be less capable of detecting what is best, less willing to do what is best, less capable of thinking critically, and less aware of reality.
This book is an argument designed to persuade you to become deeply honest through describing what it takes, arguing the benefits of doing so, and describing the consequences of doing anything less. The book is organized as follows:
- Chapter One describes how dishonesty is a progressively worsening state that begins with neglect and ends with involuntary lies, with consequences of cascading severity.
- Chapter Two shows how honesty is essential to discovering and achieving your potential and how dishonesty prevents you from seeing your faults or developing valuable character qualities.
- Chapter Three explores how you can use honesty to recognize and remedy your faults, which act as barriers to what you desire in life.
- Chapter Four presents the idea of alignment, providing a schematic of how to bring what you think, feel, and do into coherence to more effectively be who you want and obtain what you want in life.
- Chapter Five applies honesty to the question of what you want in life in order to more effectively make decisions and experience greater joy.
- Chapter Six is a guide for deciding who you want to be and honestly implementing your plan.
- Chapter Seven argues the strengths of being who you really are in front of others and the costs of not doing so.
- Chapter Eight shows that some peoples' opinions of your value matter more than others, provides suggestions for how to identify those people, and argues that the opinions of others should be ignored.
- Chapter Nine demonstrates that confronting those who feel, think, or believe differently than you is critical for the benefit of you, them, and everyone else.
- Chapter Ten describes how to use the alignment framework from Chapter Four to deepen your relationship with God by increasing your interactions with and receipt of power from him in ways that only become possible as you become aligned yourself.
- Chapter Eleven explores how you can better understand and achieve the potential that God sees in you.
- Finally, Chapter Twelve challenges you to achieve alignment with God by thinking, feeling, and doing what he would in your place.
The lessons in this book will open you to the broader and deeper experiences in life that are available only to the deeply honest. I hope you accept the invitation.