Chapter 2: Dishonesty Prevents You From Seeing Who You Are and Who You Could Be

Honesty is essential to the ideal life

Honesty is very much tied to the meaning and fulfillment you find in life. It may seem radical to claim that everything of worth comes from honesty, but, by definition, honesty is exactly determinative of progress, improvement, and good in life. When your beliefs, actions, and feelings align with your best present estimate of reality, you are guaranteed to progress towards the greatest joy you could ever have as fast as you possibly can.

Honesty includes a measurement of how effectively you are living to obtain what you desire. Dishonesty is one’s willingness to work contrary to the greatest good given their understanding of how reality is. The more you lie, the less capable you are of living best, based on your understanding of how reality is. Lies erode your awareness of and willingness to live the laws of cause and effect. The more you lie, the less you know and believe, the weaker you become, and the worse you will do and be.

Dishonesty will diminish everything good, true, and beautiful in your life. You can’t be dishonest without losing something. While what is lost almost always includes material objects and measurable outcomes, it is always the case that dishonesty makes you less than who you were before. Living in dishonesty is living in opposition to your own soul. Dishonesty will block rather than facilitate the flow of God’s light into the world. That light makes an incalculable difference in your ability to obtain what you want, and ultimately in the degree of purpose, power, and joy that you possess.

You should want to be honest because everything of worth you obtain in life will be as a result of your honesty. To get the most out of life, you must be honest in all things, all the time.

Honesty is coupled to every desirable character quality

While lying or telling the truth are things you do , their greatest effect is that they change who you are . Honesty and dishonesty fundamentally change who you are, what you do, and why you do it.

They shift every aspect of your inner and outer reality away from what is true and what is best, resulting in something worse every time.

People today think that one’s degree of honesty is one of many independent character qualities. The truth is that the presence or absence of honesty co-occurs with many other character qualities. Correctly identifying the qualities that are highly correlated with honesty and dishonesty helps to demonstrate just how important it is to be honest.

The following table contains a partial list of just some of the qualities that co-occur with being honest and dishonest:

|Honest|Dishonest| |---|---| |Sincere|Fake| |Driven|Lazy| |Deep|Shallow| |Strong|Weak| |Transparent|Pretentious| |Reliable|Unreliable| |Wise|Foolish| |Bold|Cowardly| |Hopeful|Fearful| |Reasonable|Insensible| |Disciplined|Self-indulgent| |Humble|Stubborn| |Joyful|Miserable| |Purposeful|Aimless| |Peaceful|Anxious, depressed, guilty| |Significant|Unimpactful|

As you consider each quality on this chart, you will begin to realize just how important honesty is.

One reason why people fail to connect honesty and dishonesty with the many significant character qualities with which it co-occurs is that they fail to understand just what it takes to be honest. Dishonesty is nearly universal because honesty is so difficult to achieve. Being dishonest is so common that most people would be shocked to realize just how prevalent it is.

Few people have ever experienced—let alone lived—real honesty. Real honesty requires complete consistency, and that is very difficult to achieve. Common examples of attributes that co-occur with honesty are actually just downsized in meaning and value—labels of great virtue pinned onto what are really just slight improvements over outright vice. For example, what most people think of as a deep person is just a slightly less shallow person than most. A truly deep person would surprise you with something new every time you spoke with them, even after knowing them for a lifetime!

Honest people are genuine and sincere. They say what they mean, do what they believe, and think as you would expect them to from outward appearances. They are the same within and without.

Honest people are intentional. They have a single transcendent purpose, and their thoughts, feelings, and actions are fully focused on it. Their goals align with and derive from their values. Their daily actions align with their goals and values. They do not act contrary to their values.

Honest people are driven. Procrastination is the optimization of present feelings. Honest people optimize long-term feelings by being productive. Their daily tasks are focused on achieving their long-term goals. They do not spend their resources in ways that detract from their goals.

Honest people are deep. The substantial relationships they freely offer to others provides a desperately needed break from the monoculture of shallowness that otherwise dominates humanity.

Honest people are strong. Because they always do what they believe is right, they can rely on and receive the power of God in whatever they do, providing uncommon resilience in the face of even the toughest resistance. They don’t quit. They don’t back down. They learn from mistakes and try again after failures.

Honest people are transparent. They say what they mean and they do what they say. While some will bristle at the things that are said and done by those who are free from the deceit of pleasing pretense, the virtuous few treasure their candor.

Honest people are reliable. They operate consistently based on the same set of principles, and are less likely to surprise you with emotional outbursts or flare ups of selfishness.

Honest people are wise. Their courage to face reality gives them a wider lens on what other people cannot see, assisting them in making better long-term decisions by more correctly assessing the available options for action and the long-term costs and benefits of each.

Honest people are bold. They do not follow the crowd, as most by definition do. They do not act differently depending on the opinions or presence of others or for fear of what others might think.¹ They decide what they will do based on their own internal compass, which they will not bend to match the expectations of others. They do what others are unwilling to do because they see value more correctly and in amounts greater than what others can see.

Honest people are hopeful. They do their best even if that means doing more or better than what presently seems worthwhile. They lean hard on the justice of God, fully expecting him to reveal that what is best is always worth the cost.

Honest people are consistent in their exercise of reason and discipline, no matter what they are doing or who they are around. They equally apply their intelligence to every aspect of their lives. They transfer learning across different domains. While nearly everyone does what is right and effectual in some or even most parts of their lives, only honest people will do what is best all the time, in every aspect of their lives.

Honest people are humble. They recognize those who are better than them, seek out their counsel, and yield to their wisdom.² Honest people adapt quickly. They are “quick to observe,”³ humble, and “easy to be entreated.”⁴ They have the ability to improve rapidly when needed. They take advantage of unexpected opportunities. They change their minds immediately when given sufficient reason to.

Honest people are successful in obtaining great joy and meaning in life. When your beliefs, feelings, and actions are always aligned, you are most likely to desire things of greater value, obtain what you want, and receive the greatest possible joy in doing so.

Honest people walk in total peace.⁵ They enjoy the confidence of a total lack of guilt,⁶ because they constantly follow what they sincerely believe is right. They know that they are where they are meant to be, doing exactly what they are meant to be doing, at all times, and in all places. They don’t waver in how they feel about themselves. They are at peace when alone with their own thoughts, because they have nothing to hide from. They don’t struggle with anxiety or depression because they have prioritized their resources to the greatest benefit and are constantly doing their best, and in so doing have freed themselves from what they can’t control. They enjoy the constant assurance that they are on the right path, doing the right things for the right reasons.

Honest people have a far-ranging and deep impact on other people. They provide outsized resources to others by sharing the results of their boosted productivity and their expanded awareness. For example, honest parents will have a markedly greater impact on their children in the instruction they provide, the advice they impart, and the example they demonstrate than dishonest parents.⁷ The same can be said of other honest family members, friends, and work colleagues.

Any person willing to obtain and maintain honesty is an exceptional person; their character will be replete with many other positive attributes.⁸ Similarly, dishonesty is far more poisonous than assumed by many, and anyone who lives dishonestly will possess many other negative qualities. These principles remain hidden to most only because their interactions with others are typically limited to wellregimented, repetitive, shallow activities. When obvious signs of pernicious character qualities do manage to manifest, they tend to be willfully ignored in a subconscious quid-pro-quo that expects the same in return.

Honesty and dishonesty will fundamentally improve or degrade every aspect of your life, including your relationships with others and the world. Your level of honesty will extend or diminish the depth and quality of your relationships with others, enhance or corrode the quality and volume of work you accomplish, and increase or reduce the value others find in you. Each of these effects will be explored more fully in later chapters.

You don’t know what you are capable of

What you are actually capable of likely differs from what you think you are capable of. You likely believe yourself capable of many things that exceed your actual capacity, and you likely believe that you are unable to do many things that you actually could. Without knowing your strengths, you won’t live up to them. Without knowing your limits, you will cause yourself and others unnecessary suffering.

While the progressive nature of character precludes you from knowing the full measure of what you could be except through your successive attainment of the incremental improvements that will lead you there, there are ways to get hints as to the magnitude of growth that awaits you.

Here’s an exercise to help you expand the magnitude of what you think you are capable of that leverages the fact that it’s a lot easier to imagine how bad you could be than it is to imagine how good you could be: Imagine just how much harm you could cause the world if you had chosen to completely focus your whole soul on being the worst possible person you can imagine. Now, take that degree of harm and transpose it onto the side of good. That amount of good is probably far beyond what you imagined your potential to be. Why is it so hard to imagine, if the only difference is the direction in which you aim your whole soul?

You should think about what difference your life will make in this world. Far too many people make the world a worse place through the lives they choose to live, and still more manage to come and go without affecting any significant positive difference. High impact actions typically require sustained and significant intentional effort, and long and difficult efforts are rarely undertaken without a strong belief in an explicitly expected outcome. Every single person has the capacity to leave this world better than they found it, but none will achieve this without an intentional effort. If you want to make a difference with your life, you are going to have to think about what that difference will be, how to achieve it, and have a reason to believe it will be worthwhile.

Where does your understanding of your potential come from?

Most people draw on the examples of others in imagining the potential they see in themselves. They draw complex yet subliminal comparisons across similarities and differences, assuming that the achievements of those they consider similar to them are within their own reach, while assuming that the achievements of those they consider different to them are not. This is not wise. When you compare yourself to others, you operate within several layers of limitation in perception and understanding. What you think you see may not be as accurate as you believe, and what you do not see may be substantial. Furthermore, you are comparing who they are to who you could be, injecting even more sources of possible equivocation either in over- or underestimating your own potential.

Another method of estimating your potential is to extrapolate on what you’ve accomplished in your past. For those who have failed to accomplish much, extrapolation of past performance can provide a much needed wakeup call to vastly increase the intensity and consistency of your actions. But just as poor past performance doesn’t condemn you to poor future performance, neither does good past performance guarantee good future performance. Continuation of growth is required for continued growth.

Neither of these two methods are accurate enough for you to gain a solid understanding of who you could be. It is extremely foolish to assume that your potential is similar to another person simply because you know them, and it is equally as foolish to assume that you can know your capacity with any confidence before doing all you can to push yourself to your limits.

Where should your understanding of your potential come from?

The baseline of your potential isn’t what you’ve done in the past, nor the accomplishments of those you know about around you. The baseline of your potential consists of the best you know of right now. In some cases, the best you know of right now will be much less than what you thought yourself capable of before, and in other cases it will be much more.

The best you know of right now is the best you sincerely believe to be possible given your understanding of yourself, others, and the world. The best you know of right now is your idea of what the ideal human being would do in your circumstances. You construct this idea of the ideal based on what you have learned about the world and yourself and the examples of the best people you know of—whether they are similar to how you are now or not.

Why will your understanding of your potential change over time?

It is very difficult to make sufficient sacrifices for the future when your expectation of your future ideal is rooted in the limits of your present self. If you are a rational person, you will only expend effort up to the worth you expect it to yield. If you calculate potential benefit in terms of your present self, you will not see what you could be as worth the cost. It’s important to realize that the best future outcomes will require you to make better use of the resources you have now as well as make the concerted effort over time required to obtain greater resources than what you presently have. This requires sustained sacrifice over time that will exceed the outcomes you can presently perceive for doing so.

Most people limit their perceptions of their potential to the improvements that would be worthwhile in the short-term. Making long-term decisions based on short-term rewards is a form of dishonesty that people use to excuse themselves from potential that they could otherwise fulfill. For example, a person who is poor now is correct in acknowledging that they have no money with which to help others. However, there are many sacrifices they could make over time that would lead to them having money with which to help others later, and their refusal to engage in those sacrifices is just as sinful as the refusal of the rich to donate their wealth—if not worse, because by making the improvements necessary to have surplus to give others, the poor would also encounter a much better life for themselves.

Because your understanding of your potential best is limited by your present understanding, it will change over time. As you increase in experience and insight, and as you get to know the examples of others, you will refine your idea of what is ideal given your circumstances. The path to refining your idea of the ideal is to live up to the ideal as you presently see it. You will become the ideal version of yourself by consistently doing what the ideal version of yourself would do, even as your vision of the ideal changes over time.

You must achieve your potential to cause happiness in self and others

Joy comes from value.⁹ In order to maximize your joy, you must maximize your value. In order to attain maximal joy, you must discover and attain your potential. The better you become, the more joy you will have. The greater the difference between your potential and actuality, the greater dissatisfaction and misery you will cause and experience. This is a principle so universal that it has been popularized by the famous psychologist Maslow, who said:

“If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.”

To the extent that you fail to achieve your potential, you will cause disappointment to others, lose out on greater joy for yourself, and experience misery upon realizing what could have been.

The misery caused by being less than your best is a powerful beacon toward a higher purpose. Long-term happiness is a measure of how fully we have discovered and fulfilled our potential. Your happiness can be used as a sensitive sensor to indicate how fully you are working towards your potential.

Your potential is unique

The list of ideal attributes is the same for all people. However, because each person has different dispositions and desires, the path towards acquiring them will be different for each person. Where a person begins, what they desire, and by how much will all affect which potential attributes they regard as most desirable, as well as what they are willing to do to develop them.

Each person brings a unique set of qualities to the situations they face. The more different two people are, the more their outcomes will contrast. Your contribution to this life is as unique as you are. There are people who need you to rise up to your potential, because they need what you can uniquely provide for them.

The world needs you to lift what you are capable of lifting. The world needs those willing to push their limits. The world needs you to do more. The world needs you to seek and receive more from God. The sheep need to be fed, and there are sheep out there that need the food that you can uniquely provide.

What happens when you ignore your potential?

Understanding your potential is essential in order for you to grow towards good and away from evil. It is vital to accurately understand the potential you have for good so that you endure what is necessary to actualize it. It is also vital to accurately understand the potential you have for evil so that you do what is necessary to fight it. You must accurately understand where you actually are in order to effectively value what good you have actuated and to make correct adjustments to improve yourself.

Your capacity to contribute to this world is a fundamental part of your joy. You ignore your potential at your own peril, with steep consequences that range across all aspects of this life and after.

Normal dogs were bred to be low-intelligence but affectionate companions. Sled dogs were bred to pull a burden for miles and miles every day. They are energetic and intelligent animals. When put into the situations they were designed for, sled dogs are happy and capable of deep bonds with humans. When you cage or confine a sled dog, depriving it of the duties it was born to do, it gets anxious, mean, and destructive. Like a sled dog, you were designed for abnormal tasks. Like a sled dog, you will be miserable if you do not live the purpose for which you were born.

Though you can run from your destiny, life has a way of helping it find you. In one instructive story, Jesus led Peter to walk out onto the water with him. Figuratively speaking, most Christians sit in a boat still sitting on the shore and claim they hold all the benefits God bestows to those who love him. Were you to pull their boat even into the shallows —as life always finds a way of doing—they would find everything that brings them peace in their simple situations to be insufficient for the chaos life provides. Meanwhile, those who actually believe God and follow him will find him taking them by the hand, leading them by foot on the water to the roughest seas. For them, there is no question of what God’s power is. Without it, they would instantly sink. They have no illusions about what God provides them in life, and they would never find themselves describing their lives as normal.

You were not created to be acted upon. You were created to act. Do not waste away the opportunities before you. You are a child of God. Do not squander your inheritance. Rise up and claim it! Do not ignore your potential. Do not delay your potential. Become who you were born to be.

Lying reduces your ability to know and achieve your potential

The less honest you are, the less likely you are to know and fulfill your potential. To the extent that you are dishonest, you will have an incorrect idea of your potential self-worth. Dishonesty will limit your awareness of how good you could actually be and how to become that way. In the state of ignorance imposed by dishonesty, you do not know how good you could be, or what that would be worth to yourself and those around you.

While you live in self-delusion, you absolutely limit significant growth. You cannot turn away from honesty without turning away from the good you would otherwise do. Truth builds on itself. A building cannot be built taller than the limits of the strength of the foundation. While you hold to incorrect ideas about yourself, you will be limited in how much you can grow as a person. The widespread costs of dishonesty will keep you from recognizing or having the power to leverage opportunities for improvement. The truth will show you your strengths and weaknesses. Reconciliation to honesty is the only way you can live up to who you are and become who you could be.

You see very little of yourself, and tend to see the worst part the least

Human beings perceive the world as they experience it, not how it really is. Without extreme, deliberate, consistent attempts to know yourself, your self-image will be as different from how you really are as your daily commute is from a cross-country road trip.¹⁰ While the unseen emptiness of the United States is beautiful, the unseen but equally vast aspects of your core character are not.

By default, humans are horrible people.¹¹ In order to grow beyond the default, each person must actively search out how they are, how they could be, and address the correction necessary to become better. Because introspection requires uncommon courage, diligence, and honesty, few overcome the base human condition. Do you have reason to believe you are significantly better than average?

Do you see your faults as they really are? Are there negative qualities about yourself that you deny, try to hide, or minimize? Refusing to acknowledge some negative aspect of your perceived self prevents you from embracing the whole truth. Almost everyone has negative character qualities that they ignore rather than address. When you don’t like something about yourself, you can either accept it, change it, or lie about it. All kinds of lies are possible when it comes to negative character qualities. You can lie about their existence, their cause, what would fix them, or how much fixing them would be worth.

How confident are you that you see and correctly appraise the cost of all of your faults? How many of your flaws have you blinded yourself to, and how many have always been beyond your ability to perceive? Would a more observant person see flaws in you that you do not see? Would a wiser person appraise your faults as more pernicious than you do?

Are any of the positive qualities that you claim to possess without sufficient evidence? Do you say you do your best while continuing to willfully violate your conscience? Do you believe yourself to be an honest person, even while at least occasionally lying? Do you believe yourself to care about others, even when you at least occasionally do not? Is there untapped good available in your life that you have not sufficiently prioritized? Do you have habits in need of breaking, or habits in need of establishing?

Which of your continued flaws are actually far more costly than you thought, and what good things present and future will you be prevented from obtaining until they are corrected? Are there sufficiently evidenced improvements that you refuse to make? Are there ideas worth thinking about that you refuse to think about? Are there people worth engaging with that you refuse to engage with?

You can’t see anything beyond how correctly you see yourself

You can’t correctly perceive the world further than you’ve correctly perceived yourself. Your ability to interact efficaciously with the outward world depends on how accurately you perceive and regulate your inner workings. While you remain unaware of your motives, beliefs, and desires, you can’t obtain what you want, you won’t know what is best, and you won’t want it even if you happen to come across it.

You cannot know anyone else better than you know yourself. Any limits you have in how you see yourself indicate limitations in your ability to accurately see others. Limits of awareness, honesty, or wisdom are never just limited to one facet.

To the extent you do not see yourself correctly, two consequences will follow. First, you will fail to see even the most exceptionally good people as different than anyone else, virtually ensuring that you will treat them much more poorly than they deserve. You will miss out on the heaven they could provide you, and undeservedly force them to suffer a great deal from the hell you bring upon yourself. Second, you will find yourself woefully unable to detect or protect yourself from particularly nefarious individuals, imputing to them positive qualities they do not have in place of the poor ones you are blind to.

Your subconscious will avoid condemnation of your past or dramatic shifts to your future

During this life, you have a fantastic ability to lie to yourself about what you do, why you do it, and how you feel about it. Delusion is persistence in an incorrect belief after being shown sufficient evidence to disbelieve it. It is far too easy and far too common to live a life of self-delusion, especially in modern times which offer no shortage of substances, experiences, digital personas, and unmerited prosperity to paper over anything we’d prefer to ignore in ourselves, others, or the world.

Your brain is more powerful than you know, and it will engage in the most elaborate and irrational gymnastics to avoid selfincrimination. Self-incrimination is good, when accurate, because it identifies opportunity for improvement, and improvement always leads to greater joy. In order to consider things that might grant you greater joy, you have to navigate a maze of automatic subconscious reactions, any one of which is sufficient to completely shut down any chance for improvement. Your subconscious will generate reasons why you should ignore or turn away from invitations toward improvement with potential obstacles like these:

• “If this is true, what massive actions would I need to take to respond with proportional intensity?”
• “If this is true, I am a far worse person than I thought.”
• “What would this mean about all those sacrifices I made under a false pretense?”
• “How much good did I leave undone?”
• “How much harm have I caused to others?”
• “If this is true, then those bad things I’ve gone through (or done) are my fault.”

It is astonishing to realize how often humans intentionally delude themselves rather than improve themselves. Perhaps one reason delusion is favored over recognizing and addressing fault is because the dire consequences of delusion are rarely acknowledged. When we engage in self-deception we willfully blind ourselves to the only guidance system we have to direct us toward the most abundant life.

12 Be careful, brothers, that none of you ever remove yourself from God’s continuous interactions with you by indulging desires of distrust toward him.
13 That none of you become insensible to improvement through the blindness brought by willful sin. (Hebrews 3, Author’s Interpretation)

Once you have willfully blinded yourself to some aspect of your thoughts, feelings, or actions, you will usually persist in your inability to notice it anew until and unless you either experience some new or more intense consequence of your willful blindness, or you happen to have the fortune of meeting someone wise and benevolent enough to attempt to show you.

You can only find what you are looking for and see what you are willing to see

To intentionally discover self further than normal people do, you have to be willing to look beyond where normal people stop. Have you ever noticed how the stinky parts of the human body are:

• Not directly visible to the person who owns them.
• Hidden from the sun.
• Among the most sensitive parts of the body.

Why do you suppose that God designed our bodies this way? Perhaps he was trying to show us that the worst parts about ourselves will not be the most obvious to us, nor the most easily addressed, nor the most pleasant to fix.

We introspect based on what we want to see, how we hope we are, and what we desire for the future. This cocktail of unsubstantiated optimism leads to many of the most pernicious problems in the world today. Those who see only what they want to see will never see what they most need to see, and will subsequently lack the motivation or information to achieve what is of most worth.

We have to learn to see things as they really are, not how we with they were. Some never get to the point where they dare to discover themselves. If you are to achieve an abundance of joy and happiness, you will have to brave an introspective journey unbridled by selfpromoting bias.

Human nature vastly over-exaggerates one’s virtues and vastly under-exaggerates one’s vices. By nature, your estimation of yourself is likely to be exaggerated.¹² You almost surely possess vices of which you are not aware, and some of those of which you are aware are likely far worse than you think. In order to become honest, you’ll have to recognize and acknowledge your vices. You likely possess virtues of which you are not aware, and some of those of which you are aware are likely far better than you think. In order to become honest, you’ll have to recognize and live up to your virtues.

You have to correctly perceive the distance between who you are and who you need to be in order to obtain what you desire. In this vein, it is of vital importance to see yourself as you really are.

Universal effects of willfully ignoring what you could know about yourself

Intentionally ignoring aspects of your character requires you to reduce your perception of reality. This cannot be done selectively. Your perception is like a dimmer switch, not a flashlight. When you reduce it on one thing, you reduce it in all. While you willingly maintain incorrect perceptions of yourself—either through outright lying, or simply by ignoring what you fear to look at—you will limit how correctly you can see anyone or anything else.

An important consequence of dishonesty is how it robs you of intimacy with others. Intimacy requires honesty. You cannot know someone or something else beyond the bounds of how you know yourself. The better you know yourself, the more quickly and fully you will get to know others. What you are able to see in others will be determined by how much of yourself you see, how much of yourself there is to see, and how much of the world you see, and how well you know God. Intimacy is a state that exceeds what normal life can offer in unity, companionship, compassion, support, and love. Love requires disclosure. To disclose yourself, you must first know yourself.

You understand all things through how they relate to yourself. How you define yourself—how you understand yourself to be, and what you make of yourself—is critical to your being able to understand what is around you in breadth, depth, and accuracy. To the extent that you are dishonest in anything, you will impede your ability to know yourself, and you can neither show yourself to others nor see who they are beyond the limits of how much you know yourself. Any effort you exert to avoid seeing who you really are creates a greater barrier preventing you from showing your true self to others or seeing as deeply into them. There are no bounds to what this can deprive you of.¹³

Truth builds on itself. If you desire to be aware of more of anything, the best place to start is by coming to see more of yourself, including the parts that are least flattering.

You don’t know who you are

A significant barrier to identifying and correcting sources of dishonesty in your life is a lack of awareness of what you think, feel, and do. Honesty requires the alignment of what you think, feel, and do, but if you have only limited awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and actions, you can be extremely dishonest without even realizing it.¹⁴ Most people are only slightly aware of what they think, feel, and do, why, and what the alternatives are. In short: most people have no idea who they really are.

Many people would struggle with the idea that they have no idea who they really are, even though that is most often the case. It is hard to imagine that you can observe everything about yourself that you do and still not know who you really are. There are two limitations in selfobservation: how much of yourself you see, and how correctly you interpret what you see. Even though each person observes everything they do, the perceptions of the individual depend on how many of those observations are noticed, how honestly they are acknowledged, and how accurately they are understood. Seeing some of yourself is not the same as seeing all of yourself, and seeing yourself does not mean you are seeing yourself correctly.

Knowing yourself takes extreme honesty, applied earnestly and consistently, over a long period of intentional observation and reflection. Until an individual advances in what they notice, acknowledge, and accurately understand about themselves, they can’t obtain the benefits of greater honesty.

Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. (Romans 13:13)

Navigating life without accurate awareness of your inner workings is as unintelligent as running full speed in the darkest night. The real situation is even more dangerous than this analogy indicates. While you can tell when it is literally night, you will be less aware of your figurative blindness the more you willingly turn away from whatever you do perceive in yourself, others, and the world. You have three selfs:

• Who you are in your own eyes
• Who you are in the eyes of others
• Who you are in God’s eyes

The accuracy of your self estimation will vary. In moments of perceived strength, you will tend to over-inflate your self-worth. In moments of perceived weakness, you will tend to undershoot your true self-worth.

Your identity in the eyes of others varies wildly. The direction and extent of someone’s opinion of you will depend not just on how you really are, but on the circumstances under which they’ve observed you, as well as how authentically you have acted in front of them. Each person’s perspective of you will be more or less correct than everyone else’s.

God sees you as an individual. He sees all your virtues, all your vices, and how often you are operating in each. He sees your actuality, but he also knows your past. He sees your potential and he knows how much or how little of it you will achieve.

As you undertake the journey to discover who you really are, you will aim to make your self-estimate as accurate as God’s perspective of you, and you will lean on the opinions of others insomuch as they are already in alignment with God’s perspective. Future chapters will show you how.