Be Who You Really Are To Become Who You Want To Be

Be Who You Really Are To Become Who You Want To Be: Honesty with Yourself, Others, and God

...To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. (John 18:37)

And he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will, even as many as would not hearken unto my voice. (Moses 4:4)

Wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other. (2 Nephi 2:16)

On Sources Cited

Along with verses from the Bible, this book cites sources which are not universally accepted as scripture by all Christians. It is acknowledged that these verses will not be recognized as authoritative by most. However, the intent of using them is to present evidence that the ideas they contain are not plucked out of thin air.

For those curious of the sources cited, the briefest summaries are listed below.

The Book of Mormon is a record of several peoples led from the Old World to the Americas in ancient times. The book records some of their history and sermons from about 2200 BC to about 421 AD, at which time their record was buried by the commandment of God in order to protect it from an allencompassing civil war destroying their society. In 1827, God directed a man named Joseph Smith to the record and inspired him to translate it into English. Just as the Bible is found to be valuable by people of many substantially different faiths, one’s view of the Book of Mormon ought to be independent of one’s view of any of the several churches that recognize it as scripture. The Doctrine and Covenants is a record of the dealings of God with Joseph Smith during his life. While much of the book consists of text of limited utility to those in different times and circumstances than its contemporaries, the book contains many valuable expositions of gospel principles in unrivaled clarity and content. Sirach is a book originally included in the Bible but later rejected by Protestants. It is used here when the ideas contained in its verses are expressed more clearly than elsewhere.

At a minimum, any honest person should be able to read the cited verses in the same way they would a quote from a novel: open to insight and scanning for valuable application to life. All that is asked for is an open mind.

Introduction

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.

Chapter 1: Escaping the increasingly strong chains of dishonesty

Some claim that no one is perfect. If by perfect they mean knowing everything, they are supported in their statement. However, if they mean that no one can consistently act according to their beliefs and desires, they are wrong.

Honesty does not mean unbounded perfection, but perfection with respect to the limits of your present perception. Honesty does not provide an assessment of the objective value of your beliefs or desires or actions, but rather serve as a measurement of self-consistency, up to the limits of your sincere perception of the world and yourself.

Honesty, like so many other internal qualities, is not something determined at birth. Your degree of honesty is completely up to you. No matter what experiences or resources you have or lack, how honest you are is your choice alone, though the consequences that follow are not.

Not only is it possible to be honest—it is obviously the most logical way to be. Honesty ought to be much more common than it is given how vital it is to obtain what each person says they desire. All outcomes are obtained through obedience to the laws of cause and effect. As you increase in understanding of these laws, the degree to which you apply them is determined by your honesty, as honesty controls how effectively you apply your understanding about yourself, others, and the world to get what you want.

Few people understand how common and harmful dishonesty is— in part because their definition is so narrow as to hide most examples and mask most effects. A better understanding of dishonesty begins with a better definition of honesty.

Many would define honesty in simple terms, such as “trying to tell the truth” or “telling the truth most of the time.” The requirements of honesty range far beyond a mere attempt to tell the truth or an average of the truthfulness of what you say. Honesty requires consummate, full-time practice. It is not a measure of what you try, nor a question of how you are most of the time, but how you are all of the time.

Honesty requires more than just abstaining from speaking something that is false. Honesty is the state of reconciliation between what you think, feel, and do to the truth as far as you understand it. Honesty requires absolute reconciliation to your sincere understanding of reality.

Honesty is a measure of alignment between your self-perceived and outwardly-projected senses of self. Honesty requires total freedom from inward and outward deceit. There is no difference in how an honest person views themselves and how they project themselves to others.

Honesty requires full reconciliation of what you do on the outside and who you are on the inside. It requires accurate awareness of your internal processes and external actions.

Dishonesty is not limited to saying things that we know to be untrue. The pernicious effects of dishonesty appear to some degree in all its forms, making it vital to understand its breadth.

The true definition of dishonesty is much broader than what most people consider it to be, and it is only by this expansion that the sheer quantity of lies is manifest, whether they be the ones we create ourselves or those we endure from others.

In order to elucidate the diversity of ways in which people lie, we must first define what it means to be dishonest. Dishonesty is intentional deviation from the truth. The truth is things as they really were, are, and will be, and any intentional deviation from this is a lie.

Willful deviation from reality requires knowledge. It is your sincere but subjective perception of reality that creates the basis against which lies are created, not objective reality itself. The distinction between dishonesty and ignorance is an important one to make, as many dishonest people seek to excuse themselves in the same way as those who truly didn’t know any better. But this kind of self-justification and self-rationalizing is wrong. Dishonesty is always willful: you really are responsible for what you understand to be true.

The laws of cause and effect describe the requirements to obtain each and every possible outcome in and after life. While no one knows all truth, everyone has some estimate of the truth, which is their belief of how things were, are, and will be. Your beliefs are the collection of your estimates of what these laws may be, as far as you are aware. Dishonesty includes the degree to which you are at odds with your beliefs and the degree to which your beliefs are at odds with your observation of reality. It is dishonest to deviate from your understanding of reality in anything you think, feel, or do.

Dishonesty is caused by preferring something other than the truth over the truth. Devaluation of the truth precedes every act of dishonesty —otherwise known as lies. The love of truth is the cure to dishonesty. To be honest is to set the truth as the highest priority. If you value truth above all other things, you can’t lie. For the honest, no cost is too high a price to pay to find, live, and speak the truth.

A person who is dishonest is called a liar, and almost all liars take great offense to the designation. Normal people assume that you must lie often and intensely to be accurately called a liar. The fact is that most people lie, and because most people lie, most would like to think that there is some allowance for lying before one is considered to be a liar.

Just how often can you lie and avoid the designation? For most crimes, a person is designated a criminal after a single infraction. It isn’t the case that someone is a murderer only after killing many people, a rapist after claiming many victims, or a robber after burgling many places. How many times can you lie without being a liar?

Just how intense does a lie need to be before the person who utters it is a liar? Liars would have you believe there is some threshold of grace under which acts of dishonesty are waived. Is this true? To be dishonest is a question of dishonesty’s presence or absence, not its quantity or quality.

Liars would have you believe that they aren’t liars as long as they aren’t lying right now. Is this true? Would you be an honest person if you had continuously lied until now, even if you were telling the truth right now? Or could you be called honest if you were lying right now, even if it was the first time you ever had?

Liars would have you believe that the only way to lie is to state something that you know is false. Is this true? Defining the condition so narrowly does nothing to narrow the results. To lie is to act, feel, or think contrary to the truth, as far as you understand it, and this spans behavior much broader than simply saying what you know is untrue.

Liars are offended when you call attention to their dishonesty, even if they have no problem admitting other faults. In general, the more a person has rationalized their sin, the more offended they are at being called out on it, and most people have extensively excused themselves for lying. Most people hate being called liars a lot more than they hate lying itself, and this can only be because they incorrectly judge being called the title worse than performing the act.

The common allowances for lying—as with most other sins—are less about reasonable consideration of their effects and more about writing norms around the preexistent popularity of the vice. There is no such thing as a lie that doesn’t harm the one perpetuating it and everyone exposed to it. Liars may scoff at the label being applied to what is (to them) normal behavior, but this doesn’t make their behavior any less harmful. Any degree of dishonesty comes with the full range of penalties that dishonesty brings. The effects of dishonesty come by degrees, each of which remove you further from the benefits of honesty —benefits which make all the difference in and after this life.

Honesty and dishonesty are not acts, but states entered into and maintained by honesty or dishonest acts. When you willfully ignore, distort, or deny any aspect of yourself or the world around you, you fall into a lower state of existence, where you remain until you admit and contend with the consequences of doing so. One who enters a state of dishonesty instantly begins to experience the full range of consequences of dishonesty, and instantly distances themselves from the full range of the benefits provided by honesty.

Honesty isn’t a question of how honest you are in the moment. When you ask yourself if you are dishonest, you are not asking if you are dishonest most of the time, but rather whether you are ever dishonest. Even a little dishonesty is enough to poison your life in ways far beyond what you are capable of noticing. Lies are never little. A little bit of dishonesty is enough to adulterate the entirety of your character, like sewage added to drinking water. Just one dishonest thought, feeling, or action is enough to place you into a state of dishonesty.

Maintaining a state of honesty is nothing like maintaining a healthy body weight, where the gradual nature of changes to one’s body composition allows great tolerances in the occasional indulgence. To live in the truth and not be a liar, your life must be free from any dishonesty; you must be honest in all things, all the time. The honesty of a person is not measured by how honest they are during the spans of time when it is easy, but how honest they are in the rare moments when it is difficult. Almost everyone is dishonest at least sometimes, and a surprising number of people are dishonest most of the time.

As you come to understand just how little it takes to be dishonest, you will come closer to realizing that, in all likelihood, you are a liar. As you come to understand the true cost of being a liar, you will find the necessary motivation to escape from this state.

Honesty is an exceedingly difficult state to achieve and an exceedingly easy state to fall out of. Honesty takes a long time to obtain, and only one moment to lose. Being honest requires you to be constantly ready and willing to do anything and everything needed to meet the demands of consistency and truthfulness in every moment. You never know when a challenge to your honesty will come or what it will cost you. The best defense is to decide ahead of time that honesty is worth any price.

Honesty isn’t natural. Honesty requires a person to intentionally engage in behaviors that are contrary to human nature, and to do so continuously.

By nature, you will think and act so as to maximize how you feel in the moment. To overcome the natural emotive approach requires intentional and consistent effort. Honesty requires you to use reason to align how you think and act to reality, as far as you understand it, no matter how bad it feels nor for how long it feels that way.

By nature, your thoughts, feelings, and actions will be arbitrary, discordant, and only partially known to and acknowledged by you. Honesty is achieved to the extent that your thoughts and feelings— including your beliefs, desires, and motives—are known, acknowledged, and aligned with one another.

Honesty requires wisdom, but humans are not naturally wise. The more complicated the situation, the more wisdom is required to correctly estimate the long-term cost and benefit of each choice. Few people are willing to exercise the humility required to admit that a situation is beyond their ability to handle well, and that this is the case more often than most would like to admit.

Honesty requires accountability, but humans rarely accept responsibility for past mistakes and do not tend to apply lessons learned from reflection on past experiences to future decisions. Dishonesty makes you feel better right now independent of the need to have chosen well in the past or to choose better in the present. Dishonesty provides you with the ability to claim that a better path wasn’t available, or that you had no way of discovering or executing it, which is much easier than admitting that most things in your life are, above all else, a result of your choices.

Honesty requires accurate valuation of choices, but humans tend to boost the value of the present over the value of the future, irrespective of the actual differences in the outcomes of the options provided. They will naturally boost the value of a present reward and the inconvenience of a present cost over both at a future date. While we all have the ability to prefer greater future outcomes to lesser present ones, this requires self-denial, and that is a hard thing to find in the modern world.

Honesty requires difficult choices, but humans tend to prefer the path of least resistance. The best path is almost never the easiest. What generates the greatest long-term outcomes also tends to cost the most in the short-term. Almost no one feels good while paying a great price, and almost no one will do anything that is uncomfortable or hard if they can avoid it, no matter what future benefits it might provide.

In short, dishonesty is designed for one thing: the miscarriage of justice; to feel better than one deserves, to feel good while doing bad, to enjoy the fruits of accomplishment without the requisite work, to avoid the penalties of poor choices, and to enjoy short-term feelings through pretending contrary to reality.

Dishonesty is not a trait only found in the worst people. It is normal to be dishonest. Almost everyone today is almost completely disjointed in their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Consider the wide differences between the following.

What they say they want versus what they actually do.
What they say they want versus what they actually want.
What they should want, given what they believe, versus what they actually want.
What they say they believe, versus the beliefs they demonstrate by what they do, why they do it, and how they feel.
How they see themselves versus how they really are.
Who they appear to be to others versus how they see themselves.
What they say to and do around others versus what they really think and feel.

How few people consistently feel, think, and act in accordance with each other and with reality as they understand it to be? One who feels differently than they think or act, thinks differently than they feel or act, or acts differently than they think or feel is dishonest.

Lies have a compounding effect. The intensity and enduring power of the consequences of dishonesty increase as long as you remain in that state. Dishonesty causes problems to grow bigger and spread wider. There are internal and external effects of dishonesty, and both grow in intensity and reach the longer and harder you deny reality. The more dishonest you are and the longer you wait to become honest, the more the penalties compound. The consequences of dishonesty increase with each repeated lie in every moment until and unless you reconcile to the truth.

While you remain out of reconciliation with the truth, you expose yourself to an ever-present weakening that is working against you, even in moments when you are not thinking about it, eroding your confidence and degrading your outcomes, all the while making you more numb to the process. It is fitting to think of dishonesty like radiation: as long as you expose yourself to it, you will suffer from it, and the more you expose yourself to it the more and faster it will hurt you. Unchecked dishonesty spreads through your life like a cancer that strangles out a shocking array of good things in your life. Dishonesty is a condition that increases automatically, like a boulder rolling down a hill increases in speed as it descends.

The longer states of dishonesty are maintained, the more difficult they are to escape from. Every impedance you place between you and the truth has outsized effects and increases faster than expected, making the path to correct your lie longer, and the costs of doing so higher. The increasing difficulty of escaping a state of dishonesty is why such states are scripturally described as the “chains of hell”.

The chains of hell have bound up individuals as well as groups of people throughout time. In a vision given to Enoch describing his time, he.

Many people are similarly wrapped in the chains of hell today.

The escalating entrapment of the chains of hell is further described in scripture with the analogy of thin entrapping cords that thicken with time and repetition.

In the state of dishonesty, you will do increasingly more harm while it becomes increasingly more difficult for you to realize the harm you are doing. With every lie that entraps you, Satan gains greater power over you to use you for his purposes, since your declining awareness makes it easier for him to conduct more overt attacks on what is good beyond the limits of your awareness, including empowering you to say and do things that inflict harm far beyond what you could do by yourself.

As you remain in a state of dishonesty, you will find that individual unaddressed lies and your general dishonesty will both grow according to the same predictable pattern: Lies of neglect turn into willful lies, and willful lies turn into involuntary lies.

A negligent lie is any unconscious failure you commit in measuring up to the ideal of which you would be capable. We are accountable to raise our thoughts, feelings, and actions to their highest potential; to align them as fully to reality as we know it, and to aim them at the most valuable outcomes for ourselves and others. The specific and general effects of doing less than your best will always become apparent over time, and always lead to regret for what could have been. Freedom from guilt here and eternal satisfaction hereafter requires you to do all you can to become the best person you can. In every way that you fall short of your potential, you commit lies of neglect.

Feelings. Failing to raise our feelings to their highest potential is one way to enter into a state of dishonesty. Our feelings will be their best as we intentionally recognize and prefer what maximizes longterm joy, even if it causes short-term suffering.

It’s impossible to maximize your long-term feelings while you spend your resources maximizing your present feelings. It is astonishing to consider how much energy the average person spends in artificially stimulating their short-term feelings. While reality ebbs and flows in the pleasure it provides, synthetic alternatives provide a cheap, unbroken stream of shallow and fake contentment. From sensenumbing drugs to scrolling social media, modern society offers an endless array of highly effective ways to ignore our internal and external realities. While all of these interventions can be used to support what produces optimal long-term feelings, they are overwhelmingly used as an end in and of themselves, to the detriment of long-term feelings.

Making choices that prioritize present emotions over long-term outcomes is dishonest, and the danger of promoting emotion over reason cannot be overstated. The scriptures describe this as “open rebellion against God” and “obey[ing] the evil spirit.”

Emotions can distort every step of the decision-making process. Emotions can block perfectly plausible options and distort the cost or benefit of those that are considered. Emotions can cause preference for an option other than what logic suggests is best. Bad choices are often obvious to outsiders, but invisible to those who make them because they are in emotional rather than rational states. Every time you cede your rational capabilities to your emotional condition, you are diminishing your ability to reason about future situations and your strength to prefer the long-term best outcome to the one that feels good right now.

In order to maximize your long-term feelings, you have to acknowledge that your long-term feelings are based on the utility of your short-term choices. If you feel terrible, investigate the quality of your past decisions and improve the quality of your present decisions.

Actions. Failing to raise our actions to their highest potential will put us into a state of dishonesty. It is a rare person who shapes their actions based on the greatest good they could do. Instead, most people simply do the least good they can get away with.

Too often, modern people make decisions based on how visible their thoughts, feelings, and actions will be to others instead of whether or not what they are doing is for the greatest good, so far as they understand it.

Deciding what is good based on the reactions of others alone is a form of willful negligence. No matter how valuable the opinion of another, you are never free from the personal responsibility to evaluate the utility of any choice you make.

A popular form of negligence is committed by those who consider morality to consist of short lists of things that are bad and good while holding all other things as inconsequential. The problem with this perspective is that it guarantees the dishonest state of willful neglect. Those who live this way view themselves as good people, but their lives are actually incubators for deceit. They are developing and sustaining lies for the greater part of every day. They lie by ignoring most of their day, because everything matters—not just the short lists they pay attention to. They lie by refusing to think critically and situationally about what they consider to be good and evil. If their idea of what is actually best differs from the moral rules they’ve received from others, then what they consider to be good is actually evil, and what they consider to be evil is actually good.

Those who refuse to exercise their ability to better understand what they do, why they do it, and what alternative options exist are living in a state of active dishonesty, even though they do not know this.

Thoughts. To fail to raise our thoughts to their highest potential is to enter into a state of dishonesty. Our thoughts not only include what we actively think about, but how well we are able to think and what we believe. What we think, why we think it, and how well we take advantage of potential improvements to each determines a great deal of how much happiness we experience in life. For example, our ability to obtain the best outcomes stems from the quality of our beliefs about reality: the options that exist and the cost and benefit of each. These are purely matters of thought.

It is common for people to lumber through life without thinking about what they are doing, why they are doing it, or whether a better option exists. By intentionally allowing yourself to act without making your intention conscientiously explicit, you enter into a state of dishonesty, choosing to decrease your awareness until and unless you begin to think about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and whether a better option exists.

A willful lie is a conscientious contradiction between your thoughts, feelings, or actions and your honest perception of and interaction with the world around you, to include your actions with other people. Contradictions can occur between categories, such as acting in a way that does not align with your beliefs, or within categories, such as holding beliefs that you know are contradictory to other beliefs that you hold. While this characterization of willful lies may be new to you, the applications of it are not. Who hasn’t simultaneously held contradicting feelings, such as desire for two mutually exclusive things? Honesty requires extensive recognition and effective resolution of such contradictions.

A willful lie is distinguishable from a lie of neglect by whether it is rebellion against information you already possess or not. Willful lies are responses to what you are already aware of.

Those who engage in willful dishonesty think of it as a way of getting something good that they couldn’t have if they played by the rules of their conscience, but nothing good can be obtained through dishonesty. No good thing comes from evil. Lying to yourself may indeed bring to you what you immediately seek, but it comes with a price that will eventually have to be paid. Acting against your own sense of what is best will always do more damage than obedience would. Everything you do in secret has an effect on everything else you do.

Willful sin causes inevitable harm in the form of future blindness. Any conscientious rebellion against what you believe is best attenuates your ability to perceive and obtain what is valuable. Every time you act contrary to your understanding of what is best, you impede your ability to perceive what is best, you attenuate your desire to do what is best, and you weaken your ability to do what is best in the future.

Those who sin willfully incrementally lose their ability to see how obvious and involuntary their lies become, or the damage they do to themselves and others by continuing them. To the extent that you turn away from the best you know, it is not just that your thoughts, feelings, and actions will decay, but that your awareness of this decay will be so dimmed that you probably won’t even realize it is happening. In some ways, the choice to engage in willful sin and the effects that follow are a lot like leprosy. The disease not only decomposes the outer flesh, it also dulls the body’s senses, leading victims to accidentally cut themselves or break bones, and leaving them unaware of the putrid smell of their rotting flesh. Leprosy is a disease caused by a bacterium that is fairly easy to prevent through a reasonable degree of personal and societal hygiene. Those who work actively to discover and minimize lies of neglect will significantly mitigate the temptation to lie willfully.

There is a popular but false belief that, in order to be dishonest, you must be aware of the fact that you are being dishonest. In fact, involuntary and willful lies differ only in one’s awareness of them. Involuntary and willful lies are the same in that they are contradictions between your thoughts, feelings, or actions and your honest perception of and interaction with the world around you, to include your actions with other people, but differ in that you are not aware of your choice to lie.

While you remain in a state of dishonesty, your ability to detect whether you are lying or not diminishes. In this way, involuntary lies are as much of a choice as willful lies; the former are caused by the latter.

The more you lie, the less of a reason you need to lie. Once you are willing to lie about one thing to a certain degree, you are willing to lie about all things up to that degree. With more frequent or intense lies, you will feel less guilty about lying. With each lie, you feel less guilty about lying. As you slip further and further away from the truth, you will be able to lie with less and less intentional effort. Eventually, a person becomes capable of telling the most insidious lies without the slightest inner resistance or realization. They lie as easily as they breathe—with no need to think before acting, and without any activation of their sense of guilt.

When you get to the point where you stop noticing at least some of the lies you tell, you have become a pathological liar. Pathological liars don’t have to think about lying to do it any more than you have to think about your heart in order for it to continue to beat. Through repeated choices to lie, pathological liars reach the point where they can’t help but lie. They subconsciously generate lies sufficient to avoid any thoughts that would make them feel bad, including hiding memories of things they did or said and replacing the real reasons they did things. They will only notice their lies when someone more honest points them out, causing a temporary boost to their damaged conscience, and causing a sense of guilt for the first time in a long time. This almost always triggers an outpouring of wrath rather than gratitude and contrite repentance.

Never underestimate the terrible state of a person who can honestly excuse themselves when called on their lies by saying “I didn’t lie intentionally.” Pathological liars are morally much worse than intentional liars. A pathological liar doesn’t notice when they lie because their conscience is so seared that that can lie without any internal disturbance whatsoever. If one’s conscience is so inhibited that they don’t even notice lying, they have not only lied about many things many times, but they are capable of terrible moral transgressions without any necessary additional decay in character. You should exercise great caution around such people. The fact that so many people openly deny objective truths today may leave you seeing those around you very differently than you have until now.

It is hard to correctly understand how extensively dishonesty affects you. Willingly ignoring what you have the ability to perceive impedes the full breadth and depth of everything you perceive and think. Most problems in your life and in the world exist because of a lack of honesty.

As humans, we have tremendous potential for good in the lives we live, from our personal happiness to making the world a better place for others. Unfortunately, in almost every aspect of life, our inaccurate ideas about and approaches to life inhibit the good we could otherwise do. Our internal experience and the world in which we live provide a steady stream of signals that indicate ways in which we could think, feel, and act to obtain better outcomes, but we are limited by the choices we make in how we perceive and respond to them.

Making good choices is a process that depends on the breadth and accuracy of information you are aware of, your ability to reason through it, and how much you desire what is best. As you intentionally resist or ignore what you have reason to believe is best, your existing awareness of information, capabilities of reason, and capacity to act will wane. As you ignore what you see, disbelieve what you have sufficient reason to believe, or refuse to do what you believe is best, your ability to see, evaluate, and do what is best diminishes.

The effects of continued or successive dishonest choices will cascade in your life, spiraling into worse and worse decisions with larger and larger consequences, until much of what you value in life is destroyed.

The destruction of escalating deceit are not limited to the loss of previously obtained positive outcomes, but also your very character. The cumulative effects of several successive lies can cause a shocking degree of degradation in a previously upstanding individual. As their awareness of their dishonesty diminishes, they will think, act, and feel in ways that they would have never allowed themselves to before.

Whenever you find someone who has done something terrible, you will find preceding choices of successively worse judgment. Unfortunately, the perpetrator is typically the last to notice; the power that corrupts their judgment also corrupts their self-awareness. Their descent into becoming a much worse person occurs in a way that is invisible to them.

Lies cannot make anything better. Dishonesty is the choice to turn toward greater misery by turning away from acknowledging reality. You cannot turn away from reality to any degree without reducing good and causing outsized harm.

No matter how glamorous they seem, the expected benefits of dishonesty evaporate in context of the long-term consequences that inevitably follow. A lie can be enticing for those who ignore or do not know the long-term negative consequences it will bring. Lying in any way will always bring with it more sorrow, pain, and other negative consequences than whatever you avoided by lying. In the end, it is always apparent that lying was a poor choice, but most never learn or accept this lesson, no matter how many times they experience it.

The benefits of any lie are always far exceeded by their eventual cost. When you knowingly lie about reality, whether through denying obvious signs of a needed course correction, making false excuses for your failures, or acting contrary to what you say matters to you, you will always make things worse. Everything that comes from dishonesty is worse than everything that doesn’t.

Dishonesty blocks opportunities both for increased joy and reduced suffering. It is hard to overstate the ability of a little dishonesty to spiral into what seem to be permanent and debilitating mental and emotional problems.

Liars use lies to bypass their conscience, but there is nothing you can do to avoid the guilt, depression, and anxiety you experience by doing so. Any attempt to use dishonesty to silence the discomfort you feel in your present state will magnify—not erase—the negative emotional or mental states it temporarily avoids. You will always feel depressed, anxious, and fearful while you feel, think, and act contrary to reality. The more intense and enduring your dishonesty, the more guilt, overwhelm, depression, and anxiety you will suffer.

By choosing dishonesty, you forfeit the joy and peace of mind that comes to those who do the best they know how at all times and in all places.

All humans have the ability to choose to increase or decrease their awareness of themselves and their surroundings. Frequently, unintentional ignorance in the present is caused by willful ignorance in the past. Awareness cannot be partial. You cannot see much of anything while there are yet things you are unwilling to see. As you voluntarily turn away from your perception of yourself or the world, you decrease in your ability to see yourself, others, and the world accurately. When you do anything less than live up to reality as you sincerely perceive it, you damage your ability to remain as aware of reality as you presently are.

It is dishonest to ignore or reject the measure of reality you have the capacity to perceive and respond to. To the extent that you do not notice or respond to reality, you are not just being dishonest, you are also diminishing your awareness—something that carries the most serious and wide-ranging penalties. Essentially, the largest and leastoften identified consequences of dishonesty are actually consequences of reducing your awareness.

You can’t lie without reducing your awareness of the truth. Lying in one thing dims your vision in all things. When you ignore or reject reality in anything, you diminish your awareness of it in everything. Lies in specific situations will always rot your ability to see the truth in all situations. Even if the present effects seem negligible, the future effects will not be. Lying can even cause you to forget that you have lied, making it extremely difficult to correctly recognize the consequences of having done so.

Most people are so well-trained in subconsciously detecting feelings, thoughts, and actions that would cause them shame that they can ignore them before even consciously noticing them. Their normallyfunctioning awareness instantaneously darkens to the degree it needs to in order to avoid their glaring deviation from how they see themselves or would like to be seen, just as quickly as a welder’s mask darkens in the moment the arc begins. Unlike a welder’s mask, their awareness will not fully and instantly return after what they don’t want to see stops. People tend to willfully ignore what is unflattering often enough to render them progressively less capable of seeing everything about everything, not just what they do not want to see.

By nature, humans strongly weigh present consequences as more important than future consequences, regardless of their duration or intensity. This is dishonest. Those who weigh the present more heavily than the future will make choices that have negative long-term outcomes, and as a result, will experience greater and greater misery as life advances. You need to face the truth of what long-term consequences imply, no matter how difficult it is or what extremity of actions they suggest.

Too many willingly tread in paths that they know have such tremendous future costs that they are not worth whatever benefit they presently offer. Simply consider how many waste the prime of their lives in the pursuit of things that rarely last, to the neglect of those things which almost always do. How many women spend their youth rotating between promiscuous partners, only to struggle to find a quality person willing to marry them thereafter? How many men delay professional preparation only to find themselves without sufficient time left to earn what is required to have a high quality life and family? How many people live in cities known to seismologists to regularly experience apocalyptic earthquakes? The examples abound.

One form of dishonest appraisal of long-term consequences is acting contrary to them, but another is to fail to identify them in the first place by evaluating the worth of something only in present terms. For example, how many parents have investigated the effect of public school on promiscuity, gender dysphoria, obesity, addiction, self-harm, mental illness, or adult earning potential?

Once confronted with the consequences of their choices, so many claim that no one warned them, when in reality, they simply ignored the plentiful warnings. God is limited in what he can warn us about by factors that include our honest recognition that he knows better than we do. Those who despise correction will receive far less of it.

The penalties for willfully ignoring or rejecting reality include a total inability to recognize the most consequential and obvious consequences in life, ranging up to matters of life of death.

Your awareness helps you discover what you want and how to obtain it. Lies successively weaken your capacity to determine what is best by reducing your awareness of what options exist and your ability to accurately estimate the cost and benefit of each. Every choice is a selection among options, and to the extent you are unaware of the choices available, inaccurate in your calculation of net benefit, or inconsistent in your preference for what is best, you will fall short of the ideal in what you think, feel, and do.

In order to see what is best, you must know the available options and the long-term cost and benefit of each. To make better decisions, you need greater awareness. The more of reality of which you are aware, and the more accurate your perception, the closer you will grow to knowing what is best in every situation.

As our world continues to grow in complexity, your ability to recognize, extract, evaluate, and act on information becomes more important. A little honesty is sufficient to determine what is best in simple situations, but as the complexity of a situation increases, the degree of honesty must increase geometrically in order to obtain the greatest outcomes. While complexity makes it more difficult to know what is right, it also makes it more difficult to know what is wrong. The more complex the world becomes, the easier it becomes to lie and the harder it becomes to detect a lie. Complexity provides more opportunities to obfuscate the truth and increases the amount of wisdom necessary to detect a lie, all while increasing the short-term benefit (and, importantly, the long-term cost) of lying.

Every lie you live will reduce your awareness of information, reduce your ability to differentiate between truth and falsehood and erode your ability to correctly compare value between alternative options. The more you lie, the more trapped you become by your dwindling ability to detect what is true, valuable, useful, and good.

As your awareness declines, you will be less likely to choose the options that lead to the greatest long-term benefit because you will have a less accurate idea of the options that exist and what they are worth than you would if you had greater awareness.

Lying weakens your faith. Faith is a principle that means much more than just belief in religious ideas. Faith is a measure of how much you are willing to believe and do when given sufficient reason to. Like awareness, a person’s faith will grow or diminish all at once. A person’s faith grows or diminishes in general depending on how they use or deny faith in specific instances. Specific acts of faithfulness will increase faith in all things for the one who does them. Similarly, specific instances of faithlessness will diminish faith in all things for the offender.

Faith manifests in the goodness and longevity of the outcomes we obtain and the intensity of the obstacles we overcome to do so. The more dishonest you are, the more you will shrink from opportunities to live life fully, no matter how much evidence you have that living life fully is worth the cost. Dishonesty reduces tenacity, achievement, and meaning in life.

The more you live in the truth, the more reasons you will have to live with intention and tenacity, both of which are required to find and maintain deep meaning in life. You can’t have self-respect, confidence, or improvement without seeing and admitting how you really are, perceiving and striving towards what is better, and achieving things that increase your objective and subjective merit. Those who live life most sincerely and zealously will find themselves growing in confidence that what is best is worth the price, and they will continuously desire and do what they perceive as best, even as their capacity to do more and the cost of doing so increases.

Acting below your potential reduces your potential. When you act, feel, or think contrary to the best you know, you also choose to be less than you were before. Doing less than your best makes you worse. You can’t do a little less without being a little less, and you can’t do a lot worse without being a lot worse. You can’t pass on obtaining more without becoming less than you were. If you aren’t honest about the good you already know and have, or the evil you know you need to improve, you can never receive more or better.

Lying reduces your power to contend with the challenges of life. For example, the Book of Mormon provides an account of a persuasive but evil man named Korihor who was trampled to death by horses that he couldn’t hear coming as a result of his chronic lies (see Alma 30). In speaking what he knew to be false, he lost the ability to speak anything. By turning away from religious truths he did not want to hear, he lost the ability to hear anything else. His lies had resulted in losing his ability to contend with the world. Eventually, he was overcome by what was previously within his ability to overcome. Though the details vary, this pattern repeats itself in the life of all chronic liars.

As life continues, it gets harder. As it does, it will challenge your beliefs and test your character. A key purpose in life is to discover the information and character traits that are necessary to overcome what presently overcomes you. Truth is successive, and contending against it removes you from the path of improvement—improvement required in order to withstand the demands of life. Reality can’t teach you more while you live in delusion.

God does not work in the realm of lies, and his desires for you cannot be realized in the paths of dishonesty. God’s path for each individual includes protection from what would otherwise overwhelm and destroy you, but remaining in this path requires you to consistently do the best of which you know.

While faithful living will cause you to grow to face greater challenges, dishonesty guarantees missed opportunities for improvement, subjecting you to being overcome by what you otherwise would have avoided or weathered well. While God promises you the capacity to overcome or avoid the challenges that face you, the promise only applies inasmuch as you seek and obey him in all things.

While you are dishonest, you can’t also be rational. Lies rationalize what would otherwise be obviously irrational behavior. You can’t turn away from your ability to reason without losing some of your ability to reason.

Lying makes you irrational and stupid, and can do so permanently. Any lie will curtail your access to God’s spirit, which is what powers your understanding. Even “little” lies corrupt you.

The more you lie, the dumber you will become.

Korihor provided a good example of how lying dulls one’s rational ability. He received a mission to preach from a supernatural visitor who first said people had gone astray from God but also said that there was no God (see Alma 30:53). The message he was given to share was that it was foolish to believe in Christ because “no man can know of anything which is to come,” (Alma 30:13) but he also taught that “[God] never was nor ever will be.” (Alma 30:28) This message consisted of elements that were obviously mutually exclusive. If there was no God, how could anyone go astray from him, and why would it matter if they did? If no one could know the future, how could anyone proclaim that Christ would never come? Neither Korihor nor his followers caught the contradictions, because none of them were seeking what was true. Instead, they were searching for beliefs that made them feel justified in doing what made them feel good in the moment.

Those whose highest priority is how they feel right now are particularly susceptible to proliferating lies about what they are doing, why they are doing it, what alternative choices exist, and the cost and benefit of each. For example, Korihor liked the idea of being important, and his followers liked the idea of doing whatever they pleased without feeling any guilt. When the devil told him that he had a special mission to “reclaim [the] people, for they have gone astray,” he happily taught the words he had been given: that “whatsoever a man did was no crime” (Alma 30:17) and “when a man was dead, that was the end thereof.” (Alma 30:18) He continued to teach the words given to him because they made people follow him and made him feel good, not because he had sufficient reasons to believe they were true.

It’s only possible to exchange rational arguments with honest people. Our rational and emotional facilities are typically contrary to one another. A liar will not easily admit the real reasons they do things. Those who try to help them either waste their time arguing against false reasons made up on the spot or repeated denials of their actual motive. When you are in an emotional state, you can’t be helped rationally. When you prefer emotions to reason, you remove yourself from the influence of others who might use persuasion to assist you in more correctly seeing the available options and cost and benefit of each.

Sustained lies will damage your rational capability to such a degree that they can and do cause severe mental degradation. In many cases, mental degradation that is often regarded as the effect of old age is actually just the long-term effects of willful dishonesty, as shown by the magnification of delusions established long before old age. As modern people age, they increasingly cling to increasingly irrational surrogates for the enduring meaning they fail to encounter in their lives until their personalities are dominated by delusions that are so obvious and intense that they are difficult for others to deal with. They lose access to the ability to learn and grow beyond the asymptote of their willful lies, lose the ability to see and feel anything else, and everything about them decays to fit into that prison cell of their own make. These symptoms can be averted in the lives of people who break the chains of dishonesty while they still can.

Dishonesty robs you of confidence. Confidence in public comes from discipline in private. You lose something every time you deviate from who you really are. You can’t do less than your best without gaining guilt and losing your self-confidence. Those who walk in dishonesty are hollow shells. They don’t realize how substantial the effects of their constant self-betrayal are on their daily lives.

The inviolable honesty of God provides an anchor that justifies extreme effort on our part and provides strong consolation against disappointment. We access both benefits through our own inviolable honesty. As you are brutally honest with yourself and all others, you will find the confidence only available to those who stand on the surest of foundations: the truth, as far as you presently understand it.

Without the kind of confidence that only comes from deep honesty, the uncertainty and challenges of the modern world will overcome you. In absence of honesty, we will experience despair in place of hope.

Dishonesty is a weak attempt to sidestep God’s justice, but God’s justice is inescapable. You can’t ignore God’s justice when your choices suggest future punishment without weakening the resolve it would provide you in cases that would result in your blessing. Courage comes in large part from the confidence those who do their best have in their eventual attainment of worthwhile outcomes in spite of apparent and significant challenges. A person who lives so as to avoid God’s punishment will not have God’s courage.

You can’t intentionally deny God’s justice in one thing without disbelieving it in others. The less you trust in God’s justice, the smaller the sacrifices you will be willing to make for fear that the results will not be worthwhile. The more you lie, the less power you will have to engage in opportunities that require greater sacrifice. Without firm belief in God’s justice—including a life lived in accordance with it— you will never pay the high price required to achieve great things in life. The most powerful source of confidence in life is belief in God’s justice coupled with the sacrifice of obedience to God. One way of measuring the strength of your faith is by the degree of sacrifice you are willing to make for a worthwhile outcome.

Your conscience is a vital guidance system gifted to you by God that protects you from threats beyond your ability to anticipate. While most people at least try to avoid directly violating their conscience, most are also skilled enough to know how to disable it through deceit. While an active conscience limits evil from accomplishing much, dishonesty impedes its function so thoroughly that great damage can be done to the individual directly and, through them, to others around them. When you lie to yourself, you create a window in which you can do what you know is wrong without immediately feeling as bad for doing it as you would if you were honest about it. However, the guilt will return in amplified force at a later date, and lying can do nothing to avert the increased consequences of the choices you make while doing so.

Your conscience is not a static resource. Through the expansion or contraction of your awareness, your conscience will successively improve or diminish: You can strengthen your conscience through exercising it, just like a muscle, and it can atrophy through misuse in the same way. The more you subdue your conscience, the weaker it will be. You can’t keep your conscience gagged and bound, expecting to untie it occasionally in times of perceived need. The more you work against your conscience, the weaker it becomes. When you turn away from your conscience in any way, you weaken both your ability to see what is right and your strength to do what you believe is right, making it that much easier and more likely that you will do worse things later. Every time you lie, you will damage your conscience further, making it easier to lie again or tell a bigger lie.

If you have thoroughly damaged your conscience, realize that it will take time to restrengthen. Don’t expect your ideas of right and wrong to be accurate while you regularly lie, and don’t expect them to suddenly become accurate the moment you stop lying all of the time.

Once you lose awareness of lying, you have entered a state that will be very difficult for you to escape. As you dissociate from reality, you separate yourself from the information and feedback that God has designed to keep you in the path of greatest joy and away from unnecessary suffering.

It is highly likely that you are more deeply immersed into a state of dishonesty than you previously thought. No matter how seriously you are embroiled in dishonesty, there is a way back. While you can instantaneously decide to be completely honest, it will take time before you will be “perfectly honest and upright in all things.” The more dishonest you have been, and the longer you have been dishonest, the harder and longer a process it will be.

Some will be discouraged as they begin to see just how little they see. Recovery from involuntary lying is a process. You can’t directly act on what you can’t see. It takes time to develop or recover the ability to re-sensitize your conscience, perceive more information, and gain the wisdom necessary to process it into better decisions. The journey into honesty begins with whatever improvement is visible in your life. No matter how dishonest you have been, you will always be aware of some way in which you can improve. This glimmer of light, no matter how dim, is your lifeline to attaining the full benefits of honesty. As you consistently do everything you know is best, your ability to see what is best will expand, and you will grow more and more towards the benefits of full honesty.

Returning from a state of involuntary dishonesty requires great diligence. While dishonesty is a state that is passively maintained, honesty is a state that must be actively and intentionally maintained. To escape a dishonest state, you must address all dishonesty in your life, as far as you can see it, and continue to do so continuously through time as you gain the ability to perceive more and reason better.

Honesty is a full-time affair. As you learn how to tell the truth, ensure you do it all the time. Exercising honesty unevenly works about as well as trying to be healthier only when you get sick. You grow more honest through being honest all the time, just as you grow healthier by being healthy all the time.

The remaining chapters in the book will detail how to live with deep honesty.

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

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.

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.

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. 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. Honest people adapt quickly. They are “quick to observe,” humble, and “easy to be entreated.” 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. They enjoy the confidence of a total lack of guilt, 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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Joy comes from value. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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. 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 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

Chapter 3: Discover and Acknowledge Your Faults

In spite of easier and more abundant material prosperity than ever before, modern people seem to be more miserable than at any other time in history. Much modern misery comes from unacknowledged truth. When it comes to your emotional experience, the way the world is matters, but not as much as how you choose to respond to it. While so much of what happens within and outside of you is not your choice, you always get to decide how to act on and react to everything in and around you.

Modern people increasingly respond to what they do not like by ignoring it or lying about it. So many problems that individuals face today are the cascading and compounded consequences of failure to acknowledge painful pieces of truth now long forgotten.

You can’t be ashamed of the truth without removing yourself from the path to greater blessings. You can’t be as successful in contending with reality while living lies as you would be were you to acknowledge the truth. You can’t solve a problem beyond your comprehension of its cause. You can’t learn from mistakes until you correctly identify and effectually address the shortcoming that caused them.

Unexpected negative outcomes can be a powerfully noticeable sign that you have overestimated your capabilities. Those who willingly attribute to themselves value beyond their merit suddenly experience surprising and extreme negative consequences. Unexpected consequences are an indication that you do not correctly understand cause and effect in the domain in which you encounter them. The most common approach is to treat the problems that arise through unexpected consequences like once-offs, where if you can just get through it, you’ll be back to normal. The appearance of an unexpected outcome always indicates a shortfall in your understanding of yourself, others, and the world. Always adjust your beliefs, desires, and actions when given sufficient reason to.

When you refuse to think, feel, and do your best, you open yourself to manifold problems that you have the ability to prevent. An unfortunate number of problems faced by people today both individually and societally are completely preventable, but persist only because those suffering from them refuse to acknowledge and solve them.

Many problems are easy to identify and solve if you are honest, but very few people are honest. Persistent problems tend to be those that require acknowledging truths we would rather not face.

It’s difficult to accurately identify problems and potential solutions in a world lacking radical truthfulness and transparency. In our modern world, you don’t have to look far to find examples of blatant lies about the causes of common problems.

Homelessness. The homeless reliably prefer their situation to alternatives, and will only prefer something other than homelessness when the cost of being homeless increases relative to it.
Under- and unemployment. Nearly all people are employable, just not at the wages they feel entitled to.
Suicide. Those who kill themselves are not “victims of suicide.” The victims are those they selfishly leave behind.
Obesity. Obesity is not a disease, but simply the choice to overeat.
Mental health. So-called mental health problems are not caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, but negative thought patterns and behaviors—things that can be changed by choice. The challenges of life are increased—not reduced—by drugs that reduce one’s perception of them.
Poverty. Poverty is caused by poor life choices, not lack of resources or opportunity. The perpetually poor neglect opportunities to improve themselves and their surroundings, spending their money on things of low worth and low future value. They do not invest in the future. They prioritize the present.
Racism. Racism is a practice, not an outcome, and cannot be solved by practicing more of it. Any program that boosts or reduces the merit of a person based on their skin color is racist, no matter its intended outcomes.
Youth degradation. Children need full-time parents, the ability to play outside, education without Marxist indoctrination, and freedom from pornography, social media, and junk food. Almost all modern problems present in the youth are absent from children raised in environments approaching normal home life prior to 2008.

Similar blatant lies exist in the specific context of the lives of families and individuals, where problems like religious beliefs, finding a spouse, having children, maintaining a marriage, raising children, obtaining and succeeding in a career, and so on all follow the same pattern of obvious solutions requiring the acknowledgment of difficult truth.

Few people possess the honesty to identify and solve today’s problems, no matter how simple they may be. Instead, they either blame other causes or people, or insist that the solution is something other than whatever it is they would rather not change. An added benefit of inflating the problem is that the larger the solution, the less guilty anyone feels in failing to solve it.

Prior generations placed more value on telling the truth, being authentic, and aligning with reality. Modern people are far less grounded in reality than their ancestors. Most people in history were farmers whose survival required them to discover and abide by the laws of reality.

The cheap energy, unbounded money printing, and complex technology of the modern world has made the connection between cause and effect much more difficult to see than it was in prior generations, providing a fertile ground for greater delusion than ever before.

In prior times, poor choices carried more immediate obvious consequences. Historically, suffering tended to increase with increasingly bad behavior. In modern times, the flow of wealth and complexity of cause and effect insulate people from most of the bad decisions they make, even when those decisions are repetitive or consequential. Bad ideas, bad feelings, and bad behavior are thereby allowed to propagate through the life of the individual and through society as a whole.

In our society, almost all people are insulated from almost all consequences, living in wealth paid for by the virtue and productivity of other people, while some of the worst people are promoted to the greatest wealth, power, and fame.

The effect of insulated consequences in the modern world is that modern problems continue growing larger and larger, both at the individual and societal levels, guaranteeing an eventual explosive confrontation with suddenly unavoidable problems that have increasingly grown beyond the capability of normal people or society as a whole to solve.

As you transcend the degenerate and ascend into experiences that fewer people have, you will begin to see an abundance of negative consequences to poor choices presently hidden from your perception, both in your life and in the lives of others.

Honest people assume responsibility over every aspect of their lives. An honest person takes responsibility for both their successes and their failures. They do not blame others for what is within their ability to change. They also honestly take credit for their contributions.

A common way people avoid admitting fault is by blaming someone else for who they are, how they are, and what they do. Consider how often people dishonestly discuss obesity, suicide, sexual sin, mental misery, drugs, and every other harmful choice as anything but a choice.

Be responsible for your life and what you use it for. Don’t blame other people for things that are your fault.

As long as you make others the scapegoat for your own unhappiness, you will never be happy. While you incorrectly ascribe your undesirable situation to factors outside of your control, you will never address what you can do to improve your situation, overcome the problems that presently overcome you, or remove the avoidable suffering they cause in your life. Blame shifting can’t provide any longterm improvement to your inner or outer circumstances. Like every other lie, it can only temporarily delay consequences whose eventual price is magnified by lying about it. It is the truth that makes you free, not deflection.

Before blaming others for your situation, first ask whether there is anything that you could do to change it. It is almost always the case that the critical portions of the situations you do not like are wholly within your control. Even in the extremely rare case where your situation is completely out of your hands, your reaction to it is still 100% your choice. What are you going to do about it?

The path to happiness lies in first doing what lies in your own power to fix those things about yourself you know are contributing to your lack of happiness.

The key to greater meaning in life lies in assuming greater responsibility. Anything that reduces your personal responsibility for what you do and why you do it will negatively affect your life more than anything else. The key to meaning lies in the choices you make and the reasons you make them. Your choices can only improve as you pay more attention to and improve how and why you make them. These improvements come in proportion to the responsibility you assume, as any lack of responsibility translates into reduced recognition and implementation of potential improvement. The more responsibility you assume, the more improvement you will achieve. The more responsibility you assume, the better your decisions will be. The less personal responsibility you assume, the less likely you are to make good choices.

What you do and why you do it are always fully your choice. The experiences you’ve had and the choices of others absolutely influence the ease or difficulty of that choice, but they don’t make the choice for you. No matter the role played by others or the challenges of your situation, you always have the power to choose. God created “both things to act and things to be acted upon,” (2 Nephi 2:14) and you were created to act. You are an independent agent, endowed by God with the freedom to choose.

If you ever do less than your best, you alone bear full responsibility. At any time you have the full power to choose what to do and why to do it.

Some of the most important facts are those you least want to acknowledge. You have to detect and acknowledge what isn’t real in order to find what is.

Many of your ideas about your self-worth are based on illusion. Your faults are the difference between your overinflated self-worth and your actual self-worth.

Overestimation of self-worth is a problem of eternal significance, as it prevents you from improving toward who you could be. You will never become what you think you already are. While you overestimate your value, you will prevent yourself from becoming more valuable than you are. Without knowing your weaknesses, you can’t grow out of them. Those who are not aware of their faults can never address them. You will have to adopt a lower image of how you are in order to adopt a higher image of what you could be. To attain what could be, you must first accept what is. Accepting what is requires letting go of what is not. You have to recognize who you are to effectively plan how to become more and better than you presently are. You need to know where you are in order to effectively find and follow the path to where you want to go.

Improvement requires you to first admit who and how you really are. Human adults, by nature, have massive barriers put into place to hide who we really are: what we do, why we do it, and how we feel about it. We avoid identifying faults because we suppose that recognizing faults reduces our perceived value. The problem is that your actual worth is never reduced by recognizing flaws—only your artificially inflated perceived value.

Don’t hide from who you really are. Strip yourself of the pretense or delusions that cause you to see yourself as more than you really are. Without accurately recognizing your weaknesses, you won’t take advantage of opportunities to improve or recognize the need for help from others, and you will unwittingly enter situations that are guaranteed to overcome you. If you ignore contending with your flaws, the day will come when the consequences of doing so eclipse the benefits of not doing so.

Whether the idea for the change comes from your mind, your interaction with the world, or your interaction with others, and no matter if the change concerns your thoughts, feelings, or actions, no improvement will ever occur while you believe there is insufficient reason to make it.

Self-improvement is progressive both in your ability to detect your flaws as well as in your ability to implement improvements. There is a set of faults which you already have the ability to see, but actively ignore, and these must be acknowledged and addressed before you can see additional faults that lie beyond your present ability to perceive.

The first step to overcoming any fault is to notice it. It is possible to become the kind of person who rejoices at the discovery of a fault. Recognize that every fault discovered is the key to something better. You have to detect and acknowledge what isn’t ideal in order to do something about it. Everything better than what you presently have requires recognition of the flaws in what you already have. As you admit and confront the faults you presently see, you will gain the ability to see more.

Before every improvement comes the realization that a better option exists. Seeing the possibility of something better requires admitting the reality of something worse. Improvement can’t occur before the difference between what is and what could be is identified.

Elevate the priority of finding and fixing faults by understanding them as barriers to what you want.

Most people simply will not find the motivation to improve if they merely see their faults as an abstract moral issue. Character flaws are less arbitrary and more consequential than commonly assumed.

Character flaws are often seen as separate from most other things in life. The truth is that character flaws have long tentacles that wind around nearly everything in your life. While these connections are not frequently acknowledged, they are easy enough to see, and until you do, you will lack the interest and intensity required to fix your flaws. The problems you face in life reveal the problems in your character. Your character flaws are more obvious than you pretend they are. Fix them.

The apparent consequences of our flaws are more than enough reason to fix them. While the costs of fixing flaws are readily acknowledged, the costs of leaving them unaddressed are not. Like the lion who needed to pull the splinter from its paw, it is going to hurt momentarily, but it is also the path to the least long-term pain.

Most avoid fixing faults because they suppose that the work required to do so will take away from something more important to them. The truth is that addressing faults is actually the most direct action you can take toward getting more of whatever it is you want.

Everyone has unmet desires. Some desire many things, some only a few. Some have a strong desire, and some only a little. Whatever it is you want, and however much it is you want it, you need to realize that the reason you do not have it is that you are not yet the kind of person who gets it.

It is essential to understand that your faults are among the barriers preventing what you want. In order to become the kind of person who gets whatever it is you desire, you must address every part of your character that is different than that kind of person. You should impart to fixing your faults the same intensity with which you desire what you do not yet have. If you want to change, you have to change what you want. In this case, you have to learn to desire everything needed to attain what you want, and detest everything preventing what you want.

Addressing obvious flaws is non-negotiable for building an abundant life free from unnecessary suffering. To get better, you have to identify and discharge what is worse.

We live in a society that pretends that you can be one way and feel another way. This is a lie. If you want to feel better, you actually have to become better. You can’t hold to what makes you feel bad and still feel better.

In recent years, the idea of celebrating your flaws has become vogue. For example, consider how many guilty people post celebratory confessions on social media. In this ritual designed to alleviate the guilt of all involved for willingly doing less than their best, the poster will describe how poorly they are performing, knowing they will be propped up by affirming replies from legions of similarly-flawed people seeking alleviation of the same guilt.

You can be yourself without celebrating your flaws. Don’t flaunt your faults. Not only do you encourage the continued suffering of those who know they need to be better than they are, you also prevent those who would have improved from even trying, all while ensuring everyone is less likely to ever figure out the root cause of their selfinflicted malaise.

Virtue exists in purging the vices that you have, not in admitting that you have them. Until you actually improve, you won’t feel any better, and bragging about your faults will just encourage others to remain in their own. It is not possible to enduringly experience better feelings without first making consistently better decisions. To encourage anyone otherwise is to prolong and worsen their suffering while increasing your own.

Those encouraged to celebrate their disease aren’t likely to find or even bother looking for its cause and cure. In general, it’s unwise to look for relief from those whose job depends on the perpetuation of the problem that ails you. People like Brene Brown sell a way to feel better about the less-than-best choices you make instead of feeling better by making better choices than you used to. While persuading people to celebrate their flaws is an easy way to gin up book sales and speaking engagements, it is extraordinarily harmful. Too many professions exist today that claim to solve problems when they actually only provide temporary treatment for surface symptoms. Such occupations have untouchable job security, as desperate people will willingly part with any amount of money for the promise of better outcomes without the need for better choices, and their perpetually unsolved problem will keep them coming back.

It is impossible to avoid suffering that comes from the choices of others, but you can minimize avoidable suffering by making better choices. It is possible to avoid suffering that comes from your own choices. Regret, guilt, and shame all stem from choices that were less than the best we knew at the time.

An honest person acknowledges fault as soon as it is realized. They admit what they did and why they did it to God and anyone affected by it. They don’t deflect, move goalposts, or revise history or warp reality to make themselves feel better or avoid change.

Honest people don’t just say they are sorry. They immediately make the changes necessary to prevent committing the offense again in the future. They fully recognize any harm to themselves or others, and do all they can to to make restitution for the loss they’ve caused.

People are overly compassionate to their past selves, not realizing that compassion for your past can only come at the expense of your future. Anyone unwilling to condemn their past self for willingly choosing what was less than the best they knew would do it again if they had the chance. So many entrap themselves in fairy tales about the past, making it seem better than it really was by either deliberately maintaining what they know is an illusion or by artificially inflating what they know wasn’t as good as they wish. Honesty about your past is the key to securing freedom from guilt. If you refuse to denounce your past foibles, you won’t find the present peace that comes from separating yourself from them.

You can choose to feel good about your past or be better in your future, but you can’t do both at the same time. Any lies about your past blind you to the reality of the present and possibility of the future. While you are chained to your past self, you cannot grow into a better person. Lies about your past mistakes trap you in a cycle of repeating them.

You will only find peace in the present through condemning the mistakes of your past. Analyzing what you got wrong in the past is essential to making yourself better in the future. The breadth, depth, and accuracy of your understanding of the present is limited by the breadth, depth, and accuracy of your admissions of the past.

While you still agree with or excuse the mistakes you made in the past, you retain the guilt that comes with them. Admit your fault, change your principles so it will never happen again, and trust in the forgiveness of Jesus.

Repentance frees you from the guilt caused by past mistakes. Repentance requires three actions.

1. Confessing what you did or didn’t do.
2. Change so that it never happens again.
3. Doing everything you reasonably can to prevent others from making the same mistake.

Part of repentance is boldly and unceasingly warning others not to repeat the mistakes we have made by teaching them the consequences of doing so. For example, the Lord told Ezekiel.

He reiterated this to all his disciples in modern times.

Many people avoid doing what they can to help others avoid the same mistakes they’ve made because they are afraid of losing a reputation that they do not deserve. This is dishonest, and in addition to the penalties of dishonesty, it precludes the freedom from guilt enjoyed by those who have met the requirements to have their past sins forgiven by God.

Those who appraise their worth beyond what reality justifies are emotionally-oriented and will act irrationally to preserve their unmerited self-esteem. Those with overestimated self-worth do not find value in themselves, but in a fake, imagined person. This avatar must be viciously defended, as life provides no supporting evidence for its worth.

Don’t allow fear of the loss of your present self-image to keep you from being yourself. Any self-esteem based on hiding or ignoring who you really are will always fail when the challenges of reality reveal your true self.

Conceited people avoid anything that suggests that they are less than they purport to be. Don’t do this. When you value your self-image more than the truth, you’ll interpret any correction as loss. If you define yourself based on falsehood, you place how you feel at a higher priority than how you actually are; you will act out of a desire to avoid negative feelings, you will do so without thinking, and you will do so contrary to reason. You will flee from, ignore, and attack anyone and anything that reveals you for who you really are. You will even do so when it results in harm to yourself and others.

The deep distortions in which dishonest people engage is the reason that they so deeply despise those who live the truth. Truthful people are living contradictions of their continuous lies, and the only way that the dishonest can avoid the cognitive dissonance caused by their very being is to silence, discredit, or destroy them.

While the haughty interpret correction as an attack on who they are, the humble recognize it as the path to becoming who they could be. The humble view correction as an empowering gift. Those who love truth above all have an intrinsically fluid self-worth; they freely adopt new truth, because they assess their value in terms of how truthful their present beliefs, feelings, and actions are, not in appraisals detached from reality or based on some past estimate of it.

An honest person has no reason to hide from greater selfawareness. They have the means to test new information against their own thoughts, feelings, and actions, and they have the means to improve by integrating any potential improvements they can perceive. They have the ability to question their identity and change it in response to sufficient evidence.

A dishonest person, on the other hand, has every reason to hide from self-awareness. First, dishonest people prefer to smooth over the undesirable portions of their lives through willful delusion rather than reconcile themselves through deep and painful change. Dishonest people can warp their perception of reality by actually editing their memory—often in real-time—in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. For themselves and those who make them feel good, they will impute positive qualities and deny negative ones, no matter how much evidence contradicts the former and how much substantiates the latter. For those who make them feel bad, they will impute negative qualities and deny positive ones, no matter how much evidence contradicts the former and how much substantiates the latter. They will even twist the properties of the world around them that deviate from what they wish they were. Those who stand for the truth are hated by the dishonest because the things they say and do contradict the dishonest distortions of reality in ways that are harder to ignore.

Humility is required to correctly compare yourself to others. Without accurate comparison to others, you will miss out on examples of those who demonstrate the possibility of and path to something better, as well as important warnings to protect you from harm from them.

Amazing people rarely know they are amazing. While this is sometimes because they do not accurately identify or appreciate their virtues, it can also be because they falsely assume that others share their virtues. Good people often assume everyone is at least as good as they are in the same way bad people often assume everyone is at least as bad as they are. The best way to discover this potential disparity is to treat others as you would like them to treat you. Those with exceptional virtues will find it easy to treat others well, but will quickly notice that they are under-appreciated or taken advantage of. Everyone else will see the experiment as having too high a cost to even begin.

Many miss out on opportunities for improvement by incorrectly assuming they know or are better than others when they are not. Do you presume that there is always something more you could know or be better at? Do you demonstrate this presumption through searching for improvement and recognizing it when you find it? How often do you assume that you are more knowledgable than someone else at something? How often do you begin conversations with the assumption that you know less than the other person? When conversing with someone who obviously knows more than you, do you listen more than you speak, and ask questions more often than making statements? Do you ever pretend that you’ve always known something even when you only just learned it from the person you are speaking to? Do you exude more confidence than you should given the evidence that you have? Are you quick to criticize an alternative point of view, or do you provide ample opportunity to better understand its merits?

Inflated self-valuations are almost always the result of the unrecognized and unremitted blessings from other people. What share of how much you enjoy came from other people? Do you accurately recognize just how little you deserve the good things that you enjoy?

You likely live in a place where your security, relative peace, prosperity, technology, and every other resource you enjoy is heavily subsidized if not fully paid by someone else. Do you really have the right to claim that any good that you do is anything more than what any halfway decent person would do in your place under the same circumstances, having been undeservingly gifted so much by others?

Overexaggerated self-valuations are nothing new. For generations, the Israelites reveled in being designated a chosen people, but reflected far less often on who had secured this blessing for them or the conditions required for its continuation. Modern people would benefit by learning from their mistake.

Until you accurately perceive just how much of the good in your life is from other people, you’ll never have as much joy as you otherwise could. Joy comes from value. You will naturally appreciate the things you have earned. Unfortunately, much of what is presumed to be earned is actually due to the contributions of others, and you can’t appreciate a gift that you perceive is owed to you. Until you correctly assess the contributions of others to the good you have, you will underestimate the worth of every good thing that you enjoy in which they had a part.

The Lord taught that we should assume that we are worse than we think until proven otherwise.

The world preaches a very different message.

Modern society has been steeped in the belief that all people are equally valuable in spite of any differences between them. For example, Oprah-famous author Brene Brown wrote.

A human has unlimited potential value, but no inherent or implicit value. Our worth is limited to how much like God we have become, and that change only happens by defying our human nature. No one is “fundamentally worthy of love and acceptance.” A person is not automatically valuable. On the contrary, the value of fallen humans lies only in their potential to become something better. The worth of a soul is its potential to become more like God. Without intentional improvement, a human will assuredly do more harm than good.

Worthy describes one who has paid the price of something. Worthiness can’t be determined by the edict of non-participants, but only by the parties who actually pay for the thing they appraise. Imagine how foolish it would be for a third party to proclaim the price of some possession in the absence of anyone willing to buy it for that price—and yet our society does this across many applications every single day: from enforcing a minimum wage to declaring that everyone is beautiful.

At the root of the lie of intrinsic value is a desire for all things to be equal—something that can only be achieved by bringing down the value of all things to the lowest common denominator. Value is an inescapable question of hierarchical preference: a thing’s value is always measured by the other things people will sacrifice in exchange for it. If all things are equally valuable, nothing is valuable. When it comes to people, a person who has a positive quality must be more valuable than one without it, or else the positive quality has no value. You can’t believe that people have intrinsic value without diminishing their potential virtue.

What we refer to as our character is the sum of the qualities describing how we are. Your character has been around much longer than you probably realize. Your character qualities are part of your spirit, and your spirit existed before you were born. In this life, your character continues wherever it left off before you were born.

Character qualities develop long before an individual encounters a situation where they are externally demonstrated. Your character can change, but it is heavily influenced by what it was before. What a person thinks, feels, and does issues from deep within them, according to a character that has been established through every previous thing they did, said, thought, and felt. Your life to this point provides a long list of demonstrations of who you really are. Each day of a person’s life is a demonstration of the running effects of their character, with the long-term effects of their long-term character prominently featuring in things big and small. Just as an apple with a rotten core will disintegrate from the inside out, a person with a rotten heart will give and experience corruption in all that they do. Meanwhile, a noble person will exude nobility in all they do and incline all around them toward greater nobility. An organized person will have an organized life, a hectic person will have a hectic life, an ambitious person will have a life full of accomplishment, a virtuous person will have a virtuous life, and so on. The constant expression of character traits coalesce into ever more noticeable arcs in life. While God’s provision for faith dampens the immediate consequences of choices, the cumulative outcomes of a person’s life overcome this obfuscation, more clearly demonstrating their character traits.

You can learn to see the clues that you create daily that indicate the content of your character. Your interactions with the world are a much clearer indication of how you actually are than what you think or how you feel about yourself.

Character is not as hidden as people think or wish. Life is designed to reveal truth, whether we like it or not. Though this world is complex enough to provide frequent opportunities to hide who we really are from ourselves and others, we cannot forever withhold our true selves.

All things constantly emit clues about their true nature through how they are through time and across circumstances. Truth, by its very nature, is self-revealing. Alethia, the word for truth in Greek, literally means “what can’t remain hidden.” A thing cannot help but demonstrate how it is throughout its very existence.

The gift God provides us of choosing to improve ourselves also allows us to choose to ignore the signals that suggest we need to. Most people have no idea who they really are because they strongly resist the many signs their interactions with life give to that end. They cleverly ignore many of the products of their hearts and minds that indicate a need for improvement. They don’t want to know what they are really like, because they already know they aren’t how they wish they were. These are long standing human tendencies. Jesus pointed them out to the people during his earthly ministry. They were clearly capable of critically examining the clues around them, yet conveniently ignored the signs that contradicted what they wanted to believe.

We have an ingrained resistance to all information that suggests we are less than how we wish we were, and we need to learn to overcome this in order to attain our potential. Every restriction we place on our willingness to see or make potential improvements will limit the extent to which we can achieve our potential.

Life has a way of showing us a lot more about ourselves than we presently see if we will just be more honest about it. Many people today waste untold amounts of time, money, and other resources on retreats, therapy, and many other approaches to discovering what life is already abundantly showing them, and then are surprised when they still can’t find what they claim to be looking for. No amount of external help will overcome an unwillingness to see yourself as you really are.

Each character trait has certain situations where it is most evident, just as a gemstone has a certain cut that best reveals its features. It is in these demonstrative situations that we come to know people for who they really are. For example, David’s kingly courage was present long before his kingly position. As a shepherd, he bravely defended his father’s flock from a bear and a lion, even though no one was there to witness the feat. David’s kingly qualities were only widely noticed once he became an actual king.

Short of the ideal situation, a character trait will still find a way to be expressed, albeit to a lesser or more hidden degree. While a person’s true character is hidden, people constantly emit clues about their qualities.

Because a thing must be what it is, the true nature of a person can remain masked only so long. By definition, the truth will be revealed. Like dammed water, a person’s true character will find or create a way out through any tiny hole or crack, finding its way into expression in whatever way available.

Often, the public demonstration of our private choices and attitudes is anything but subtle. Expressions of character are like tracer rounds in a machine gun, which draw a glowing line that connects the barrel to the target. The events and outcomes of life will manifest who you really are, no matter what you may think of yourself.

Because your inward qualities and secret desires will shine openly in your life across time and circumstance, it is worth whatever sacrifice required to discover and improve them.

Who you really are, deep down inside, is defined by what you think, feel, and act. Your character is what you actually think, feel, and do, not what you wish you thought, felt, or did.

Instead of defining who they are by how they have actually thought, felt, and acted until now, people like thinking of themselves in terms of how they wish they were, ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

Do you confuse your potential with your actuality? Do you claim motives that are contradicted by your actions? Do you give yourself credit for attributes that you are on your way to developing, or worse, that you only hope to one day develop?

How you wish you were isn’t a good way to measure your present value, but it is a wonderful way to increase your future value. Instead of using how you wish you were to determine your present value, use it to determine your present behavior.

When you surprise yourself by believing, thinking, or feeling less noble than you wish you were, recognize these moments as opportunities to self-correct. When your behavior deviates from how you wish you were, enumerate changes you need to make to align yourself to your ideal and commit to making them.

When people base their self-image on actual evidence, they tend to pay attention only to the good qualities or the highlight reel of their best moments. Tremendous efforts are expended to hide certain unflattering internal and external qualities from others, and far too often from oneself. When your self-image is skewed towards your best behavior, your self-appraisal is as inaccurate as calculating the cost of a car based only on the days you spend no money on it.

Your true character is the integration of all your attributes: everything from the best to the worst. This is not to say that your selfappraisal ought to be an average. The disastrous character failures that generate almost all of the worst parts of everyone’s life come from exceptionally bad departures from their standard behavior. For example, murders and rapists do neither on the average day. In like manner, even the staunchest liar doesn’t lie all or even most of the time. A person who is good most of the time is not good all of the time.

While it is too strong to say that all that matters in measuring a person’s character is what they do at their worst, it probably matters more than anything else. The truth is that your worst behavior tells more about who you really are than anyone would like. Who you really are, deep down inside, is defined by what you think, what you feel, and what you do, including (and perhaps especially) in your worst moments. We can—and do—erect all sorts of flattering facades, but in our worst moments we fail to maintain them. When our facades drop, we show who we really are, for better or for worse.

We absolutely have to pay attention to how we feel and act at all times and in all places, especially when we don’t like it. People and situations that bring out your worst do the best job of showing how you really are. Don’t hide from your worst performances; use them like training camps—places where you face unusual challenges to develop exceptional strength that you will carry back into normal situations.

Your conscience shows you who you really are by manifesting how well your choices align with your beliefs. It is easy to say that you are doing your best. Do you feel the slightest bit of guilt about anything? If you do, rest assured that you do not actually believe you are doing your best about that thing. You will never feel guilty about something about which you believe you’ve done all you can. To maintain a clear conscience, you must measure up to the best you can be.

We each have a powerful capability for analyzing faults in people. The problem is, we all have an ingrained tendency to avoid using it on ourselves. Learn to introspect as if you were someone else looking at your life as an impartial observer.

Judge yourself as you would judge another. Treat yourself as you would treat others. Don’t have one standard for yourself and another for others. Never criticize another person for a fault that you have. Hold yourself to at least the same standard you apply to all others.

Too many—particularly the gifted—ease their conscience while.

doing far less than their best by correctly identifying that they are doing better than others. Most supposed Christians are content with who they are because they compare themselves to other equally fake Christians, not to Christ.

Instead of comparing yourself to those who are worse than you, compare yourself to those who are better than you. Compare yourself to Christ, and you will find plenty of ways in which you can still grow. God did not send you here to be better than average. He sent you here to be better than you were, and more like he is. If you know of deviations between you and him, you still have important work to do.

The only way to gain significantly greater awareness of your inward self is through looking. Life will offer you many opportunities to learn more about yourself, but it is rare when they rise above the din of the ever-available abundance of distractions that fill modern life. To discover more of what life has to teach you, you’ll have to become more perceptive to the clues life constantly provides.

More numerous valuable lessons are available above and beyond the few that present themselves to you. These can’t be learned through passive practice, but require active introspection. Introspection requires you to take action to prioritize it in spite of the daily demands of life. Prioritization of self-discovery will look different for each person, and will probably take different shapes depending on your phase of life, but will commonly feature some way of asking how you could be better, actively and honestly interrogating your life across daily, monthly, and longer time scales. You’ll have to find the time to pay more attention to your life, whether this is through taking advantage of incidental quiet moments to reflect, engaging in a specific routine by waking up earlier, going to bed later, or displacing some present activity. You’ll have to think more about what is going on within you and outside of you, reflecting regularly on recent events and looking forward to those to come.

Many people will claim that they don’t have the time or emotional energy to engage in introspection. These same people will spend orders of magnitude more time wallowing through the negative effects of their character deficiencies or ineffectively talking through them with others without ever getting to real change. Introspection is unavoidable for anyone who wants to become better, and it will take a lot less time and cause a lot less pain than the alternatives. It might even cost a lot less money. In fact, by sharpening your inner self, you will actually find yourself with more time and resources than you have now, because your efforts throughout the day will yield much greater progress and meaning.

Chapter 4: Align your Beliefs, Feelings, and Actions

Honesty is a holistic quality that can be divided into how you think, feel, and act. These three facets of your behavior are incongruent by default, and always will be until a person becomes deeply honest.

Your thoughts, actions, and feelings in life are like waves. To the extent that how you think, feel, and act differ from one another, they work against one another. When waves all flow in the same direction at the same time, they boost each other. Your life can be as focused as the light in a laser. Normal waves of light flow in many directions and out of sync, but laser light is coherent, meaning that the troughs and peaks of the different waves occur at the same time. A laser is only more intense than normal light because all the photons work in concert. When you align how you think, feel, and act, you boost each aspect of who and how you are.

Dishonesty makes your life incoherent, injecting deviations between your thoughts, actions, feelings, and the world around you. While you remain unaligned, your thoughts, feelings, actions, and experiences in life will all work against each other. Each of the following are examples of incoherence.

Desiring something different than what you believe is most valuable.
Saying you want something different than you actually do.
Acting in ways other than the best you know to obtain what you desire.
Making choices other than what you believe will bring about the greatest long-term benefit.

While you remain incoherent.

You will not have the strength necessary to accomplish what you otherwise could.
You will not have the meaning necessary to endure the challenges you otherwise could.

While your thoughts, feelings, and actions remain incoherent, you will never have the inner peace that you could if they were aligned. Many say they want peace, but don’t understand that they will never find it by only seeking to change what is outside of them. Greater peace always requires internal improvement. Can any amount of external peace overcome internal discord? A house divided cannot stand.

The path to greatest happiness lies in aligning yourself to what you recognize as best, within and without. Can you have inner peace while your desires, beliefs, and actions are warring against each other? Of course not. Yet, do any who claim to be searching for inner peace actually pay attention to, let alone align their thoughts, feelings, and actions? As you recognize and correct any incoherence between your beliefs, feelings, and actions, you will find the strength, meaning, and peace that eludes you.

In recent years, “authenticity” has become a popular word describing special intimacy to be shared with people you care about very much. It is treated by modern people as some high moral virtue akin to sacrificing your life for a stranger. Authenticity is rare, but not because it is some supreme virtue, but because most people are dishonest.

Authenticity actually just means to be yourself. To be authentic is to be veritable—to be as described and perceived; not false, unreal, or imaginary. Authenticity is the integration of self through alignment of the inside and the outside. To be authentic is to be candid—to freely share and live according to what you really think and feel.

It ought to be easy to find someone who is authentic. Any decent person should be. It isn’t the case that being authentic makes you a virtuous person, it’s that being inauthentic makes you a terrible person. It is not acceptable to be inauthentic, because to be inauthentic is to be duplicitous, deceitful, misleading, fake, and false. Pretending to be who you are not, either by withholding what you really think and want, or by feigning that you want something you don’t, is a deplorable way to treat others. If an accomplishment so basic ranks among your highest attainments—let alone aspirations—you stand in need of a serious retooling.

One of the reasons that authenticity ought to be more common is because it is the obviously optimal way to obtain whatever it is you seek. Authenticity doesn’t require altruism, just common sense. To lie is to move away from whatever it is you desire. Because reality is governed by laws of cause and effect, any willful deviation from your estimate of how things really are is a choice for worse outcomes, less confidence, and more negative surprises. Dishonesty always removes you from reality, and this is always bad.

The pernicious idea that reality is subjective is a cancer that has metastasized in the modern world. The insistence by modern culture that reality is whatever you want it to be creates cascading implications, each with cascading consequences.

There is no law of cause and effect.
You deserve whatever you desire.
Any negative experience is someone else’s fault.

Today, we find people challenging objective reality in ways so extreme that doing so just a few years ago would have resulted in them being committed for insanity. Here are just a few examples.

They pretend that men can choose to be women, and women can choose to be men.
They pretend that men and women are the same, and that they are interchangeable.
They pretend that people don’t age, and that older people are interchangeable with younger people.

Those increasingly encouraged to dissociate from reality under the lie that reality is just a social construct unsurprisingly suffer from unprecedented amounts of mental illness and general inability to cope with even normal challenges in life. Those who deny reality are doomed to accumulate the involuntary effects of choosing to ignore it.

Denying reality will cause you future pain in terms of consequences that could have been avoided as well as regret over the loss of better outcomes that could have been yours if you had been more honest.

Joy comes from meaningful progress towards worthwhile goals.

Many deceive themselves, pretending that anything other than learning and living according to the truth can result in happiness. No matter what you seek, dishonesty cannot draw you nearer to it; it can only offer empty promises based on what is not true, and therefore cannot enduringly occur.

A dishonest person cannot make as much progress towards goals that are as worthwhile as they could if they were honest. To the degree you think, feel, or act contrary to the truth, you cannot effectively aim, no matter what you are aiming for. To intentionally act contrary to the truth, as far as you know it, requires you to believe that throwing a dart away from the target will result in something closer to the center than actually aiming. Of course, this is absurd. Yet, all dishonesty is at least as absurd for those who claim to believe in objective reality.

One specific facet of your feelings is your desires. Desire is treated as a well-guarded secret in the lives of most people. What you desire, how much you desire it, and why you desire it should not be any mystery at all—not to you, and not to those around you. If your desires aren’t totally obvious to those around you, it’s unlikely you are consistently or sufficiently acting in a way that accords with what you think you want. Hiding what you want from others will also likely limit your ability to get it, since your ability to obtain what you seek will almost always depend on others, to at least some degree. To the extent you do not know or do not divulge what you want, how much you want it, and why you want it, your ability to identify and utilize the people and other resources crucial to achieving your aim will be diminished.

Do, say, and think according to what you really desire, and be open and transparent with others about it.

Don’t lie about what you want for the sake of what others will think or how they might push back. If you believe they are correct, you should upgrade your desires to something better. If you don’t agree with the opinion of others, their opinion shouldn’t matter to you. If you find yourself caring about opinions you don’t agree with, it’s a strong sign that you don’t yet desire what you think you want as much as you need to in order to overcome the obstacles preventing you from getting it. You can either care more about what you say you want or what others think about it—not both.

Almost no one on this planet aligns their actions with what they say they desire. It is a great travesty when a person doesn’t know what they desire, how much they desire it, or why. Yet, it is not uncommon that this is exactly the case. For most, life is a passive mix of whatever comes their way and whatever they feel in the moment. Even for the few who make an effort to pursue a specific aim, regular deviations away from what they say they want and towards something different are the norm. Not surprisingly, this leads to unproductive suffering and never ends the way people would say they wish it would.

You should strive to become an integral person, which means that everything you do is to get what you want the most, and that everything you do is the best way to get what you want. No one ever obtains integrity without taking the time to make an explicit plan.

What do you want? Answer the question truthfully, not with what someone else expects you to want. Honesty is a question of intentional alignment to understood value. What you desire should be what you believe is most valuable given your understanding of reality. The value you find in different possible actions is attained from your beliefs. In aggregate, they provide a menu of potential actions that you can rank according to expected outcome based on your desires.

How do you plan on getting what you want? What will it require, and are you willing to do it? If you don’t know, what are you willing to do to find out? It’s dishonest to expect what you don’t believe has any reason to occur. Don’t pretend you are pursuing a goal when you don’t have a plausible plan to achieve it. Without a plausible plan, you can’t tell the difference between meaningful progress in a worthwhile goal and ineffectual busyness. With a plan, you will know what you are aiming for, what you are willing to pay to obtain it, and how to recognize when you need to make a change to what you want or how you plan on obtaining it. Your beliefs should tell you how to obtain what you desire. If they don’t, you need new or better beliefs that include causes that lead to the effects that you seek.

What are you actually doing? Honesty requires that you actually follow through with your plans without excusing deviations for ease, convenience, or comfort. Do what best aligns with what you really want. Live so as to deserve what you desire. It is dishonest to expect what you do not deserve, according to your beliefs of cause and effect. Your actions ought to be those that you believe will bring about the greatest progress towards your most worthwhile goals. How do you identify whether your plan is working or not? How effectively are you working towards the outcomes you desire? Is there a better or less expensive way? Don’t overlook the little choices in your life. You turn away from the big improvements by turning away from little improvements, and you turn toward big improvements by turning toward little improvements. The outcomes of your decisions compound as they chain together. Make the most of the little things, and you’ll see big improvements in your life.

How focused are you? Life has a way of filling itself, and those who do not choose an aim and intentionally order their lives toward it will find themselves at least as occupied as anyone else, just with results that provide far less joy to them than if they had been more intentional. How many things do you do that have nothing to do with what you want? Each distraction reveals itself to be more important to you than whatever you should have been doing. Apportion your greatest effort to what is most important, and the least effort to what matters the least. Care the most about what matters the most, and the least about what matters the least. Structure activities in the form that makes the most sense, all the time. Avoid the tendency to fill the empty spaces in your life with things of little value. Busyness is not progress. Figure out what you actually want, and work tenaciously towards it.

How much are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want? It is dishonest to desire something without desiring what is required to get it. Too often, we divorce the outcome from the path required to obtain it, desiring the outcome but not what is required to obtain it. The honest fully attach the desire they have for an outcome to the sacrifices they sincerely believe are required to obtain it. They use the motivation they have for what they want to find out how to get it, and to pursue it until they do. How you allocate resources provides an easy test for how well your actions align with your desires. Do you prioritize what you want the most above all other activities? How often do you desire something different than what you say you want? How often do you refuse to do what you believe is required to get what you want?

The Lord taught the importance of aligning what we do outwardly with what we think and feel inwardly. He said.

In scripture, “words” is a metaphorical descriptor of an individual’s outward actions. You speak “idle words” when your outward actions are misaligned with your thoughts or feelings. Instances of “speaking an idle word” include.

Pretending to be someone you aren’t.
Doing something you don’t believe in or desire.
Not doing something you believe in or desire.
Saying something that you don’t believe to be true.
Not saying something that you believe to be true.
Holding a self-worth higher than your actions or desires merit.
Criticizing someone for doing something you also do.
Criticizing someone for something less bad than what you do.

All of the preceding behaviors are examples of hypocrisy. A hypocrite is someone who claims to think, feel, or act differently than they do. All forms of hypocrisy make you a liar.

Hypocrisy is a problem because it precludes sincerity, which precludes the spirit, which is required for inner (or any) growth. When your outward actions and inward thoughts and feelings are misaligned, you condemn yourself to lesser outcomes in life than you could otherwise have, because you will never choose what is best without intentionally aligning how you think, feel, and act. Hiding from yourself or hiding yourself from others may provide some positive outcome in the short-term, but never as much as expected, and never for very long. The price of dishonesty is always more than the benefits it brings.

Because God is just, all hypocrites will eventually be brought to judgement. To be brought to judgment as a hypocrite is to receive the consequences of what you actually think, feel, and do, and not what you tell yourself or others.

To avoid being a hypocrite, live in accordance with what you actually believe and desire. “...Provide things honest in the sight of all men.” (Romans 12:17) Think, feel, and act according to what is best, as far as you can figure it out. Do not participate in rules or systems that you do not see as right or valuable. You don’t have to play games you don’t care about or live by rules you don’t agree with. Don’t allow yourself to be corralled into systems, restraints, and incentives you do not agree with. Don’t do things you don’t care about. Don’t waste your time with what doesn’t contribute to what is important to you. Don’t allow other people to dictate your morality to you. Always do all you can to learn about as much as possible about reality—including from others—but always trust your own idea of right and wrong above the edicts of others.

A critical part of what you think is what you believe. Your beliefs describe what you do and why you do it. Your beliefs are your model for how reality works. Your beliefs are a description of the world in relationships of cause and effect. Your beliefs are limited by how much of the world they describe and how accurate they are.

Most people can’t list out what they believe because they’ve never really thought about it. If someone were to ask you what you believe, what would you say? How much of what you would say would be what you have carefully thought about and live up to? How much would be made up on the spot, how much would be something you wish were what you believed, and how much would be what you expect the other person wants to hear, even if it’s something you don’t believe at all? An honest person knows what they believe and why, lives their lives in accordance with their beliefs, is aware of alternative beliefs, and changes their beliefs when given sufficient reason to.

It is important to consciously define your beliefs. Subconscious beliefs can act as an unseen anchor that prevent you from accepting and acting according to better beliefs. Even when subconsciously held beliefs are better than any available alternative, you will never live them fully until you are aware of them. With every belief that you make explicit, you make identifying a superior replacement easier and acting against it more difficult.

Morality is always a personal issue, because it is conditioned on your own personal understanding. Don’t do things you don’t agree with. Act in accordance with what you believe, not what others believe. Learn that convention, habit, and edict are poor reasons to do anything. Strive to understand the purpose in everything you choose to do in life, and push back against all things or people that inhibit the purpose you choose.

A person’s possession of a belief doesn’t imply that they consistently live up to it. Your actual beliefs are not what you profess to believe, but what you demonstrate by what you actually choose to do, think, and feel. Honest beliefs prescribe behavior. A person’s lack of honesty determines the distance between their professed beliefs and actual actions. A perfectly honest person feels, thinks, and acts according to what they believe, and they believe what they think, feel, and do.

When you are honest, life serves as a mirror that shows you who you are. Life provides you with the daily opportunity to reconcile what you believe, what you feel, and what you do. You constantly face situations where you have the opportunity to live up to what you believe, do, and feel against opposition. Each such decision point provides you with an opportunity to show that you are who you believe and represent yourself to be, or to choose to be someone less. If you live up to what you believe, you will accumulate evidence that you are really that way.

How well do your outward actions align with your professed beliefs? Suppose it were illegal to lie. How would you prove that you actually believe what you say you believe? How closely would your choices align with your professed beliefs in the eyes of a judge? How would you fare if your professed beliefs were compared to your actual actions by those who know you best? Under this standard, most people would be condemned. For example, the majority of Christians would stand condemned for living lives contrary to Christ’s example and teachings.

In order to make your beliefs into a description of behavior, you have to realize that they are a tool for measuring value. An honest person actively asks themselves what is best at all times and in all things. They use their beliefs to assess cost and benefit of everything.

One reason that so many struggle to live their beliefs is that they use them as a rigid list of what is good and what is bad. This artificial representation pits desire against belief, when they are designed to work in concert with each other. Real morality is to live according to what is best, and what is best will never be some rigid set of rules externally given. Instead, what is best is determined by your understanding of the value of all potential choices. When you aim for what is best, your desire accomplishes your morality, rather than fighting against it.

As your understanding of reality increases, you will come to see the set of choices available and the cost and benefit of each more clearly. Your model will grow to include detail about things that must co-occur and things that can’t co-occur, as well as things that require prerequisites. All of these details will factor into the value you appraise in certain options, and this will, in turn, change what you desire and how much you desire it. Always be willing to override your prior understanding of what is best.

As you come to adopt a more robust understanding of right and wrong as a gradient instead of two discrete lists, you will more easily reconcile your beliefs and desires, because you will be freed of the need to do what is right through the exercise of brute force willpower. Instead, your desire for what you see has the greatest value will automatically increase as a result of explicitly thinking about what is valuable, why it is valuable, and what other options exist.

The modern assumption is that how you feel comes from the world around you or the physical processes in your body. Those searching for an answer to why people are significantly more depressed, anxious, and less happy today than at any other time need only recognize that never has a society more effectively convinced people that have so little control over who or how they are or what they do in life.

The truth is that how you feel comes from what you want, what you do, and what you think, relative to your experience in and with the world. The beliefs and actions you choose will strongly influence how you feel. Your desires come largely from what you believe, and your feelings largely come from how well your actions align with those desires.

To the extent that your actions or desires are out of alignment with your beliefs, or your beliefs are inaccurate or incomplete, you will experience more frequent and intense negative feelings such as pain, anger, guilt, and unhappiness. Your mental and emotional state is very much subject to the degree of alignment between your thoughts, feelings, actions and your perception of reality. The fact that dishonesty creates physiological stress is shown by the fact that lie detectors don’t measure lies—they measure impaired breathing, increased heart rate, and perspiration. Your body language and even your voice change when you lie!

While the presence of intense negative feelings is obvious, their root source is less so. Some clues can help you decipher whether your negative feelings might be from dishonesty rather than something else. Do you find yourself hesitating to do what you believe is best? Do you lack motivation in doing what you believe is most important? Do you struggle to start, focus, or finish what you choose to do? Do you apply anything but your best effort toward obtaining what you say you want?

Honesty is the key to accomplishing amazing things while being totally free from anxiety, depression, and guilt. You will always feel greatest possible peace, confidence, contentment, and joy when you are acting in full alignment with reality, as far as you know it. If your desires, beliefs, and actions do not align, you will experience frequent and possibly intense emotional distress. The only way to resolve this distress is to align these three classes of behavior. Maximizing your understanding of reality and aligning your actions and desires to it will maximize feelings of satisfaction, happiness, purpose, and peace.

You can say or think you desire something, whether you really do or not. Your feelings are an indication of what you really desire. How often do you find yourself wanting what you believe is bad? How often are you unexcited or even repulsed by what your beliefs indicate is good? You will only feel bad about what you claim to believe is good or good about what you claim to believe is bad when you don’t really believe what you say you do. You either need to be more honest about the evidence you’ve seen in favor of your current beliefs, need to find stronger evidence for your current beliefs, or you need to find new beliefs.

If you are honest, what you desire and by how much is informed by your beliefs. When you are honest, you desire what you believe is most valuable. Do you ever complain while in the path most likely to yield what you say you want? Do you find yourself doing something other than what you feel is most important? These are all signs of a mismatch between your beliefs, actions, and desires.

If you find yourself preoccupied with something, investigate whether there are actions available to you that would affect the outcome, and whether those actions or the changes they cause are more important than whatever you might do instead. If no actions are available to affect a change, or if those actions or their expected outcome are a lower priority to you than something else, the only honest thing you can do is focus on something else instead.

Focusing your concern on the most important things you can actually change so extensively improves your outcomes while limiting your stress that doing so cannot be recommended highly enough.

It’s important to remember that your feelings flow from your beliefs, your actions, and many other things outside of your control. As such, they ought to be subordinated to the rational process, rather than promoted to something above it. Your feelings are a source of information, but they aren’t facts. If you don’t have facts to support your feelings, honesty requires you to soften or abandon your position.

While the feelings of a person whose beliefs and actions are aligned will be optimal over time, there are many times when doing what is best requires you to feel bad in the present. Life will provide a stream of situations where you have a choice: feel better now and worse later, or feel worse now and better later. These decision points will consist of opportunities to say, feel, or act in a way that is out of alignment with your sincere understanding of reality. Don’t succumb to the temptation. Although deviating from alignment will make you feel better in the moment, the consequences will be worse than remaining aligned. Embrace opportunities to feel better later, even if they require you to feel worse now.

Generation Z provides an example of those who choose to prefer the present over the future. Generation Z survey respondents overwhelmingly defined “wealthy” as the ability to live comfortably without financial concerns, and yet they notoriously overspend beyond prior generations, debt-financing luxury lifestyles typical of affluent empty-nesters. These kinds of people will never reach the point where they can afford not to be concerned about finances later because they aren’t worried about their finances now.

It is through your willingness to face short-term discomfort that you will minimize long-term discomfort. As you consistently opt to remain in alignment, you will find that you face fewer moments where remaining in alignment causes you any mental anguish.

Every interaction you have with a thought, a feeling, or the external world creates or extends a process. These processes—called open loops —expend emotional energy, whether you pay attention to them or not, and only cease to do so when they are resolved. An illustrative example of an open loop is a new table for a waitress. The people become her problem whether she is attending to them or not until they pay their bill and leave. Just like a waitress, we have to juggle our limited resources around all open loops.

In modern times, most people deal with most open loops in ways that do not actually resolve them, either mistakenly thinking they are closing them or by intentionally ignoring them. Technology has facilitated this by lowering the price of opening loops while providing several imitations of loop-closing that fail to provide the benefit of actual loop closing. You open many loops every time you open and scroll through social media, creating thoughts that will continue to occupy your emotional energy—at least subconsciously—for some time after you put down your phone. Emails and texts proliferate open loops that fail to close when unanswered or ignored. Online arguments create many open loops, and they don’t close through anything other than a valid counterargument or acknowledgment of agreement. Snarky responses, blocking, ghosting, or knowingly insufficient counterarguments—including lies—leave loops open, whether you like it or not.

You can choose to ignore open loops, but open loops will not ignore you. Open loops consume resources, even if we do not consciously realize they exist. What you refuse to address consciously will engage you subconsciously. As such, you should be extremely careful not to pretend that ignoring open loops is the same as truly closing them. For example, it is important to note that emotive evasions of rational discourse are not counterarguments, but deceitful attempts to dismiss what is presented without having to disprove it. Here are some common emotive evasions.

Describing your emotion (“you disgust me,” “I am disappointed that you would say that,” etc.)
Expressing your offense (“how dare you,” “who do you think you are,” etc.)
Denigrating the other person (“who hurt you,” “where is your degree,” etc.)
Ghosting.

You’ll notice that nearly everyone who engages in these tactics suffers from anxiety and depression. Every instance of this kind of evasion creates an open loop that will subconsciously eat away at your peace of mind until it finally fades away or unless you address it by coming back to the argument you dismissed and either making a real and sufficient counterargument or changing your belief to accept what you previously rejected.

The world around you will present a constant source of conflict with your inner self. This will only increase as you gain understanding and the world continues to fulfill its End Time destiny. For example, modern culture constantly pressures individuals to deny realities that they know to be true—whether through experience or logic. It likewise pressures people to affirm ideas which they know to be false.

Outward pressures will present the choice of living up to what you believe or face external threat, whether loss of status, wealth, or wellbeing. While this compromise can come in overt forms, it usually occurs more subtly: in the form of saying or doing something you don’t believe in, or refraining from saying or doing something you do believe in.

Opposition between your internal compass and external threats is by design.

Resist the temptation to betray what you believe is right internally in order to keep what you have externally. What you lose by betraying yourself will be much greater than whatever you lose for being who you really are. You can’t think, desire, or act against your sincere understanding of what is best without damaging your eternal access to what is best, and that loss alone is greater than anything it costs to avoid.

The Lord delights to save those who are persecuted for following him. If you lose your job, your friends, your parents, your siblings, your children, your spouse, your health, your wealth, or even your life for standing up for what you believe is right, remember the Lord’s promise.

The fulfillment of this promise may take time, but the confidence you have with God in knowing that you have lived up to what you believe is instantaneous.

Learn how to push back against the world by remaining who you really are in spite of external pressure. Seek people, places, and activities that increase the volume of your inner self. Learn to recognize people, places, and activities that decrease that volume, and do what you can to minimize the time and intensity of your exposure to these influences. Always choose the light within.

We were designed as creatures that can think, feel, and act. When we attempt to live in a way that separates these influences from each other or when we choose to act in ways that deviate from how we truly think and feel, we remove some of the most important regulation mechanisms available to us. In these cases, we remove ourselves from the path of greater awareness, greater outcomes, and greater joy, refusing to see limits to them that would have been revealed if we had kept our feelings, thoughts, and actions aligned. Think of the many situations in modern life that separate the mental, emotional, and physical aspects of your being. For example, social media and video games are mental and emotional experiences devoid of the physical. Pornography is a mental and emotional experience separated from the physical world.

One of the main problems with dissociative activities is that they can powerfully inhibit our ability to appraise value. While some good and useful practices, such as reading, are necessarily dissociative, you should exercise caution in ensuring that any such activity is actually the most valuable thing you could be doing with your time.

Chapter 5: Decide What You Want and Why You Want It

Each moment in life presents you with an opportunity to consider and move closer toward what you want. For something ever-present from the moment you reach sufficient maturity to make decisions, you might be surprised just how complicated it is. The choice present in each moment includes how much you choose to think about what you want, the time frame you are willing to consider, the options you are aware of, and what each choice is worth. Indeed, the choice is more complicated still, because every choice is connected in time to every other choice. Every choice of how you think, feel, and act now will change what options are available to you in the future.

Long-term happiness requires that you reach and maintain a state where you know what options exist, you have an accurate idea of their cost and benefit, and you choose the one that will provide you with the greatest long-term value. Across time, the joy you obtain will increase with.

1. The accuracy of the set of options you consider.
2. The consistency with which you choose what is best, and.
3. The length of the time scales you optimize over.

The problem is that none of these qualities will increase automatically. First, you do not know what options exist because the available options aren’t always clear, and change in complex ways over time and across circumstances. Second, you do not have an accurate idea of their cost and benefit because they, too, change according to circumstances, and can easily be incorrectly estimated. Third, you would not presently choose what has the greatest long-term value, because it requires an immense amount of intentional learning, experimentation, and humility to learn what is valuable.

Improvement consists of choosing actions that yield greater longterm value than what you would have done otherwise. In order to improve, you either need to improve the accuracy of the value you appraise in the options you already knew about, see new options beyond those you already knew about, or become better at choosing what will provide you with the greatest long-term value. Your awareness is the key to providing the information necessary to improve.

Awareness is the composite of our understanding of what was, is, and will be. It includes our beliefs about the potential of ourselves and all other things and people, the actions that would bring about that potential, and what those outcomes would be worth.

Awareness is the key to addressing the first two barriers to long-term happiness listed above, and is at least a prerequisite requirement to overcome the third. An understanding of the cost and benefit of each option reduces the problem of achieving long-term happiness to a willingness to choose what has the greatest value—a property rarely described by the word faith, but which is its actual definition.

The set of options and the cost and benefit of each are not fixed. They differ according to circumstance—circumstances that vary across people, but also for the same person depending on the choices they have made up to and in the present. The options available to you, their cost and benefit to you, and the accuracy of your perception of that cost and benefit all depend on who you are and who you will become.

Accurately understanding the cost and benefit of available options requires you to know who you presently are and who you could be. What you can do right now is a function of who you have been until now. If you do not know who you are, you cannot know what your present options are. Those with particular capacity or resources can do what those without them cannot. What you can do in the future will be determined by who you are until then. If you do not know who you could be, you cannot know what your future options are.

A sizable driver for who you are and who you will be comes from what you desire, and by how much you desire it, as these will strongly influence your decisions over time. What you want and how much you want it will actually change quite a bit as you become a better person. Your character determines what you are willing to do and why. The better you are, the more accurately you will appraise value, the more valuable the valuable things will seem, and therefore, the more you will be willing to do to obtain them. If you don’t know what you desire, and by how much, you can’t know what would give you the greatest long-term joy, and even if you were to choose that path, you would likely quit when obstacles arise.

Many outcomes in life—particularly those most valuable—tend to require long, dedicated paths. One can only follow so many of these in life, both because doing so expends limited time and resources, and because choices in life often limit the subsequent choices available in life. Desires change over time. If you are not aware of your potential and are not in the course that yields the kind of person you want to be, shifts in your desires will occur at unpredictable times and unpredictable intensities, making any long-term initiatives unlikely to succeed, and leaving less time remaining to try anything else.

To the extent you do not know both who you are and who you could be, you are less likely to undertake and endure the narrow path required to obtain your present and future potential.

A better understanding of how awareness expands and contracts is required in order to more fully understand the damage dishonesty causes. It is impossible to retain the same degree of awareness over time, as awareness is always growing or diminishing. Awareness increases when you attend and best respond to the information available to you, and decreases when you ignore, reject, or otherwise inadequately respond to the information available to you.

Dishonesty is one of several forms of awareness-shrinking response to information. You can’t lie without decreasing your ability to calculate what is best. To seek anything but what has the most value is dishonest because it creates a disconnect between what you believe to be the most valuable and what you most desire.

Dishonesty reduces love for the truth. Only an honest person can fully derive the value of truth, which requires living it completely. As long as you remain misaligned from the truth, you will lack the motivation to undertake the costs to obtain what is of greater value.

We expand our awareness through perceiving more of what we sense and living up to all we perceive. As sentient beings, we are constantly exposed to information from within and without that registers across the many senses. However, what you sense is not the same as what you perceive. You can think, feel, see, hear, taste, or do something without noticing or acknowledging it. To perceive something requires you to first pay attention to it. While sensations can come to you involuntarily, your attention requires your choice. As you choose to actively attend to your senses to a greater degree than you have before, you will find yourself with much more information than you previously had.

“Living up to what you perceive” is a shorthand phrase that refers to sincerely integrating all new information available into the information you already have. Living up to your perception is about changing your thoughts, feelings, and actions as needed to align yourself with the best outcomes according to your new understanding of reality.

The strength of your preference for greater value will determine how much of it you obtain. Turning away from value harms your ability to detect value. Your ability to estimate value is dependent on what you look for. To the extent that you do not prefer what is most valuable, you will not see what is most valuable. To the extent that you do not seek what is best, you will not see what is best. Your ability to perceive the value of what is valuable will degrade according to the frequency and intensity of the lies you live.

Your efforts to obtain value will determine how much of it you obtain. What is better always comes through what you presently perceive as best. All dishonesty deviates you from the best path possible given your present understanding. To deviate from the best path presently possible is to deviate from all better paths, all of which are accessible only through the gate of the best you presently know. You can’t act against your idea of what is best without doing more damage than alignment with it would bring. When you lie, whatever you encounter will be less than the best reality has to offer for those who intentionally aim for the ideal. Dishonesty always carries a higher cost than the truth.

Though most have not heard about it, the need to attend to sensed reality is something that secular thinkers have spoken about. Less often spoken of is the need to live up to what you perceive in order to perceive more. For now, the religious domain seems to be the principle source of information about the need to live up to what you already sense in order to sense more.

One problem preventing many from fault correction with the same intensity as what they desire is that few people have explicitly identified what it is they want, let alone how much they want it. As you can imagine, this disconnect creates many problems, including the failure to see your faults as barriers to what you want. Without identifying what you want, you are unlikely to take the necessary steps to get it, including the character flaws that will absolutely prevent you from doing so. Without identifying how much you want it, you are unlikely to displace the many things that prevent you from having it, including those impeding character flaws.

In the wisdom literature, we are counseled to be intentional and honest about what we pursue in life.

Explicitly consider what you want. What options do you have to choose from? What is the cost and benefit of each? Which option yields the greatest long-term benefit?

Consciously choose what you want. Rationally, your selection should be the option that yields the greatest long-term benefit, but if you truly desire something less, recognize and own the consequences of your suboptimal choice.

Most people spend a lifetime learning to hide from their innermost desires. Because we can’t feel guilty about what we do not know, some fall prey to the temptation to intentionally blind themselves to what they do not want to see.

In order to want better things, you first need to achieve accurate clarity on what you want now and why you want it. In scriptural parlance, the hidden nature of what you want and why you want it is described variously as excess fat or skin around your heart—the seat of your desire. For example.

The process of coming to see what you want and why you want it is described as circumcising the heart.

Can you confidently assert that you understand the depth of your motives?

The Lord can help you understand what you really believe and want, and why.

If God can reveal your desires, why hasn’t he? Maybe he has, but you just haven’t noticed. The foregoing scriptures don’t necessarily indicate God’s revelation of your real desires with overt obviousness—though he could. What is guaranteed is that he will at least reveal your true desires to you through your own intentional, honest, rational analysis of your behavior and motives.

While few understand it, the spirit of God is the mechanism of our rational understanding. Rational internal conversations are facilitated by the spirit of God, and so can accurately be described as a dialogue with God.

The more you treat rational analyses as conversations with God, and the more you treat their results as his word, the more your wisdom will expand, and the better you and your life will be.

Here is the process for analyzing past decisions. Consider past actions. Ask yourself what you did, why you did it, what other things you could have done, why you didn’t choose them, and whether what you did was the best way to do what you intended to do. Consider what would have benefited the most, what you can do to change your decision if necessary, and what you can do to make better decisions in general in the future.

God knows what we feel and what we think, and he can help restore our vision from the natural blindness we experience through a lifetime of occasionally turning away from what we perceived but did not want to acknowledge.

Your motive is why you want what you do. Motive is the key not only to what you seek, but how you will seek it: the mode in which you will pursue it, with what intensity, at what cost, and against what odds. With a strong enough motive, you can obtain and endure anything.

It is foolish to tread through life without carefully considering and committing to a good motive. Most people bumble through life without intentionally choosing and aiming for what they want.

While it may be uncommon for an individual to have explicitly calculated their motive, it is still absolutely vital to a happy and successful life. As with many things, the popularity of a choice does not indicate its merit.

With a defined motive, you can check whether what you desire is worth the cost. Almost no worthwhile goal will cost as little as you initially estimate. As you proceed toward what you seek, you will invariably encounter a greater cost than you expected. If you know the worth of what you seek, you can easily calculate whether continuing is worthwhile, or whether you should seek a lesser (or at least less expensive) outcome.

Why do you do what you do? Is there a better way of achieving your objective?

The benefits of understanding why you do what you do simply cannot be experienced in any other way. Honesty and all its benefits require the introspection of thinking about what you do and why you do it. Furthermore, to the extent that you possess evidence that suggests that what you are seeking will result from the path you are taking to obtain it, you will be empowered to endure actions that might otherwise be too difficult.

By inspecting whether your present path is the best way to what you seek, you will frequently discover a better way. Often you'll find through introspection that the present path is not the best path because it won't deliver what you expected or because there is an alternative path that leads to your goals more quickly.

As you sincerely consider your motives, you may notice that there are much better ways of getting what you say you want, but your ability to notice this or make a change will depend on your honesty. There are often hidden constraints that make both less likely. A common hidden constraint consists of an unwillingness to recognize any option that will intersect, expose, or accentuate a flaw in your character. For example, you might say that you care about a loved one, but withhold something they need to hear because you are afraid they will withdraw from your or punish you if you do. These situations give you the opportunity to reconsider and demonstrate the priority order of what is important to you. In the example given, do you care more about what you provide to your loved one, or more about what you receive from them?

You will find that achieving what you say you want will frequently reveal a new fault or reveal a higher cost to one you already know you have. In the previous example, actually minimizing the suffering of your loved one requires you to turn your cowardice into courage and your selfish desire to maintain what you get out of the relationship into a selfless desire to help them, even if they hate you for it.

Asking why you do what you do and whether it is the best way to arrive at what you seek can generate extensive feedback on improvements you can make to more directly or effectively pursue what you desire.

Prioritization is essential to living an aligned life. Prioritization is an extremely effective way to better use the resources you presently have for greater meaning than you presently have. While you can make changes to increase the resources available to you, these changes typically require time to bear fruit. Changes to how you use the resources you have can be made immediately.

You can’t have everything, but prioritization ensures that whatever you have is the best you can get. Everything you seek has a price denominated in what you go without in order to do so. Whatever you want will require the sacrifice of other things—either what you already have, what you could have instead, or both. Prioritize what you want, and ensure that what you prioritize as the highest carries over to the short- and long-term decisions you make. Sacrifice all lesser things to all greater things and give your best effort to what is most important.

The greatest things carry the greatest cost. The greatest things in life can only be obtained by those who seek them with their full heart, mind, and strength. Anything that can be obtained with less than full purpose of heart will necessarily be less than the best available to you. In order to obtain the greatest things in life, you’ll have to decide that you want them more than anything else. You will have to prioritize everything that has value, and decide what you want the most.

As you improve your prioritization of what is most important, you will experience drastic increases in the quality of outcomes you experience in life, their duration, and the meaning you experience along the way. Surprisingly, this rarely if ever requires radical differences in what you do. As you more intentionally prioritize your life, you will find that most things experiencing a downgrade in priority still get done, and those that don’t are always replaced by much more important things that more than make up for their loss.

A substantial treatment of prioritization, including practical strategies for organizing your short and long-term plans based on what is most important, can be found in the author’s book Joy on Purpose.

Too many people pursue what they want through behavior they have every reason to believe cannot provide it. It’s important to differentiate between desires and wishes. The difference is found in your actions. You can wish for something without doing what you believe necessary to get it, but you can’t really desire a thing without actually working for it to the best of your knowledge. For example, it is easy to say that you want to go to heaven, but very few people live like they want to go to heaven, as evidenced by how few people follow the example of Jesus Christ.

Wishes without an intent to act require the severing of the link between cause and effect. You will never experience anything that doesn’t have a cause, and you will never permanently obtain anything for which the price has not been paid. Fulfillment of desires requires finding the set of causes that produce the desired effect.

How will you obtain what you want? If you do not have and live a plan toward getting it, you don’t really want it—you just wish you had it. The more valuable what you desire, the more likely a careful and correct plan will be required in order to obtain it.

We are all free to interpret our desires as we wish, choosing what actions we believe will lead to their fulfillment. A tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering comes from people who dishonestly desire outcomes that are either not available to them, or for which they are unwilling to pay, or which they would absolutely not find joy in obtaining or possessing.

In life, you can’t have everything you want. The span of possible outcomes is finite, limited not just in absolute availability, but further constrained by the capacity and willingness of each individual. Reality is governed by laws of cause and effect defined before the creation of the world. These laws enumerate all possible outcomes. Every outcome has a prescribed path. All possible outcomes are not open to all people, and even those that are typically require a greater price than most are willing to pay. You can only have the things that are available to you and which you are willing to pay for.

When you choose to desire possibilities that are not available to you, you are living in a manner contrary to reality, and this is as dishonest as it is guaranteed to cause misery.

It’s also dishonest to dissociate the outcome sought from the path to it—desiring only the outcome, and not everything required to obtain it. For example, those who don’t want to be responsible for the maintenance of a home nor the fiscal discretion needed to save for the same don’t actually want a home, and a single person not willing to pay to find and keep a spouse worth marrying doesn’t actually want to get married, even if they say they do. Most suffering comes from people thinking that they’re choosing what they want when actually they’re choosing how they want to get it. You can’t usually obtain what you want if you are only willing to do what you want in order to get it. If you are only willing to do what you find pleasant, you will probably never get what you want. Those who pursue what they are not willing to pay the price for will either be miserable because they never get it or miserable when they do.

Very frequently, you will have to choose between mutually exclusive desires. So often, we seek two or more things at the same time with conflicting costs. In every such case, you will have to choose which you want the most, because pursuing both will guarantee you obtain neither.

Only pursue lesser things to the extent that: 1) you have already apportioned all helpful resources to your primary objective, and 2) you have high confidence that any other pursuit doesn’t detract from the first, as effects can be hidden. Attempting to pursue mutually exclusive ends will never succeed and will often result in obtaining exactly none of the intended aims. Whenever there are conflicts, you need to know which of the competing things you seek is most important to you.

How can you know if you are pursuing mutually exclusive desires? Look at how well aligned your actions are with what you say you want. Do you act in ways that don’t lead to what you say you want? Is there a better way to obtain what you say you want? How do you use your time and money? If an AI bot analyzed your texts, email, and social media, would it correctly guess the desires you claim to have, or would that content point to something else?

Appraisal of the value of something will vary from one individual to the next depending on the extent of their understanding of reality. However, all of us have the instant capacity to reconcile to the value we see in things based on our present understanding. Few do.

Instead, most people “call evil good, and good evil,” putting “darkness for light, and light for darkness...bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” by desiring “that which is of no worth” and “which cannot satisfy.” These value inversions are not limited to religious contexts.

They also numerously occur in normal life situations in situations great and small. You invert value when.

You pretend that easy things are hard, and that hard things are easy.
You pretend that you help your adult children by removing them from the demands of life.
You pretend that valuable things are easy, and that difficult things aren’t valuable.
You pretend that fat people are healthy, and that ugly people are beautiful.
You pretend that single mothers provide an equally valuable environment to children as married mothers, and that single mothers raise children better than single fathers.
You pretend that mothers who work outside the home are at least as beneficial as mothers who dedicate their time to their families in their homes.
You pretend that a man who supports his family sufficiently for his wife to remain at home is of equal value to a man who does not.
You pretend that a homosexual couple is capable of the same experiences as a heterosexual couple.
You pretend that a woman who has had many sexual partners is the same as a woman who does not have sex until marriage.
You pretend that a dating pair who share a dog is the same as a married couple raising kids.

A related dishonest practice is that of refusing to honor the good and call out the evil. Again, this is not limited to religious contexts, and occurs on a regular basis any time you refrain from commending what is worthy of commendation or criticizing what could be better. To be honest is to reflect reality as it stands, and inflating the value of anything beyond its actual value is as much “calling evil good” as denigrating the value of something beyond its value is “calling good evil.”

To act according to the truth requires you to seek what is best, as far as you understand it. To align completely with what is best is to choose and obtain the greatest outcomes possible for yourself. What could be better? Anything less is “more or less than this,” and is “the spirit of that wicked one who was a liar from the beginning.” (D&C 92:25)

Lying isn’t just a case of devaluing the truth as a whole, but in every case consists of specific examples of valuing something lesser more than something greater. Dishonesty requires you to intentionally devalue what you perceive to be more valuable.

It is dishonest to aim anywhere except the ideal as understood. Dishonesty is the degree to which you think, feel, or act differently from the best you know. It is dishonest to think, feel, or act against your understanding of what is best. It is dishonest to choose something you perceive to be of lesser value over something of greater value. It is dishonest to embrace something of lesser value when something of greater value manifests. Honesty requires you to choose what has the greatest net benefit, and it requires you to actually enjoy doing so. Anything different indicates that you are in rebellion against the truth, and prefer something above it.

When you live in a way that is less than the best you know, or you do things whose costs outweigh the benefits, you are engaging in something contrary to your best interests, and this is dishonest. These infractions can happen on matters large and small. For example, all addictions are instances of the lie of preferring what has less value over what has more value, but so is every form of procrastination.

As you become more honest, you will find that every choice you make is the selection of one option from many possible alternatives. Among the available options will typically be those you will not consider. It is important to distinguish between problems that have no solution and problems with no solution you are willing to accept. If you treat the latter like the former, you will be unnecessarily miserable. If you truly value avoiding options you refuse out of hand more than you would a solution to the problem, avoiding the options you do not like should make you happy. If not, you are showing yourself dishonest, as you clearly care more about solving your problem than you do avoiding the option at hand. But it never happens this way. Instead of seeing yourself as intentionally avoiding the best option, you will perceive yourself as having no option or waiting for a better one to materialize. It rarely if ever does, and hoping for one to materialize without a sufficient reason to believe it will is dishonest. Refusing the best available option will cause unnecessary misery in at least two ways: 1) You will agonize as you go without what you desire, and 2) your misery will increase as you realize with time that you have missed out on the opportunity to obtain what you want, as the originally available options dissolve with the passage of time without the appearance of anything better.

Here is a simple test to determine if you suffer from the dishonesty of dismissing options out of hand: Imagine for a moment that you could have anything you desire. What would you choose? Now, would you be willing to do anything to get it? If not, consider the possibility that you don’t actually want what you say you want. Remember, in this scenario, you were asked what you wanted more than anything. If there is anything you aren’t willing to do to get it, then you either have to admit that you are either a dishonest person or you want something else more (in this case, not doing whatever you aren’t willing to do to get it).

Define what you must become in order to obtain what you desire. In order to obtain what you seek, you must plot a course of character changes from who you are now to who you must be in order to obtain what you desire. All journeys begin with where you presently stand. Until you know where you are, you can’t navigate towards where you would like to be. You can’t plot a course to your intended destination without first knowing where you are on the map. In order to become the person you must be in order to obtain what you want, you first must figure out who you are right now.

Desire is the gateway that incentivizes all improvement. Who you would like to be is driven by what you want to get. Getting requires growth. Your ability to obtain what you want will depend on your willingness to become who you need to be to obtain it. As you become a better person, you will be able to afford better outcomes. The better you are, the more resources you will have to obtain what you want.

Almost all people hold subconscious motives that drive how they think, feel, and act. These motives almost always work contrary to what they think they desire and why, and constantly rob them of the peace and effectiveness they might otherwise have in life. As such, it is vitally important to discover and improve your own motives.

We would like to assume that our motives are as plain as our works. Self-styled Christians like to think that you can judge a person by their fidelity to the short list of outward works they feel are important to practice or avoid.

It’s just not that simple. While Jesus did, in fact, instruct us to judge others by their fruits, he did not teach to do it in the way so many supposed Christians do. External works are not good or evil of themselves and can’t be judged without discovering the doer’s motive and understanding. For example, Jesus pointed out how the religious leaders during his life did things that seemed righteous but had evil motives, and how he did things that the religious people thought were evil, and yet had the purest of motives in doing so. The accuracy of self-judgment falls at least as short as judgment of others.

A person’s motives can only be refined inasmuch as they are plainly manifest, but when we hide our true beliefs and intent, we cut ourselves off from the corrective influence of reality and the improved outcomes improved aims would bring.

Motives are extremely important to accurately identify and honestly upgrade because they play such an early role in chains of downstream thoughts, feelings, and actions. Our motives are the strongest source of meaning and value in life, and when they are corrupted, they are the strongest source of emptiness and suffering.

Lies about motive are easier to tell yourself and others because they are completely internal and often hidden under layers of complexity. Human nature will ascribe motives other than our real ones to justify decisions that are more in line with our actual but less-thanhonorable desires. We ascribe good motives to poor decisions in an attempt to pursue baser motives without the guilt that should accompany them. A hallmark of such decisions is that those who make them will ignore pieces of information that suggest an ulterior motive or better option.

Often, we pretend to some benevolent motive when we are actually being selfish, or a rational motive when we are being emotional, or long term preference when we are preferring the present, and so on. One rule of thumb that can expose a dishonest motive is to identify and cross examine it. For example, if you think you are being rational, ask whether the path you’ve chosen is emotionally easier than the alternative? If so, you may want to reconsider what your actual motive may be.

How consistently do you live your motive? Motive is an all-ornothing affair. When you only apply your motive at certain times or certain situations in your life, you will find yourself actively fighting against what you say you want, rather than boosting it.

A constant motive is referred to as “making your eye single” in the scriptures: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22) When your desire becomes unified in all times and in all places, you will experience a shocking increment of productivity, power, and meaning in your life.

The alternative to a unified motive is to be “double-minded”.

Double-mindedness is so serious that it is described as a heinous sin. Consider how James describes it as the opposite of purifying your heart, which literally means to adopt a focal desire.

Double-minded people are volatile. They are inconsistent and unprincipled. “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:8) Their fragility stems from the fact that in order to maintain mutually exclusive desires, they must live in a state of constant denial of reality. Because any person, information, or situation that calls attention to what they really want causes a cascading collapse of every part of their delusional life, they live in a state of self-imposed blindness to rationality. They live by every fleeting emotion, passive subjects to their physical body’s response to their environment. They are “like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.” (James 1:6) You can’t predict their actions or rely on their character, other than to assume it will be bad. Because a double-minded person reacts to rational invitations for improvement with emotional responses, they can never move forward until they become honest about what they desire, and reprioritize the truth over feeling good. One who is in an emotional state literally can’t reason until or unless they calm down and stop interpreting the truth as a personal attack. Their counterarguments, which almost always involve deflecting arguments against the person who dared to try to help them, are almost never valid, relevant, or true.

As you flicker between motives from moment to moment, you are actually practicing a form of dishonesty, and while doing so, will open yourself to all the negative effects of doing so.

Be honest with yourself about what you really want. Don’t lie about what you want or why you want it. There is no point pretending that you want something other than what you do.

What do you want the most? Do you prioritize it above all else? If you prioritize something other than what you want the most, you will get something other than what you want the most. Any effort outside of your prioritized desires will necessarily lead to less than what you want the most, guaranteeing disappointment. While you pretend you want something other than what you truly want, the best you will get is what you are pretending to want. It is more likely that you will obtain neither, since many outcomes require full focus that a divided desire cannot provide.

Be honest with others about what you really want. If you feel like you need to hide what you really want, you should consider the possibility that your shame is suggesting you should want something better—something you would not be afraid to reveal to others. If you are not proud of what you really want, the way to fix that is not through pretending you want something else. Instead, seek what you truly want with your full focus, and you will quickly either find reasons to want something else more, or you will find reasons to be more confident in publicly admitting what you truly wanted all along.

If what you desire is good, the best way to obtain it is to be honest with other people. Those who desire to obtain what is best can only do so through emulating how God is, and he is honest. Sometimes, our reluctance to say what we really want isn’t so much because we think it is worse than what others will tolerate, but because we know it is better than they will tolerate. We should still be open with others about our desires even when we are ridiculed for them, especially if that ridicule come precisely because they are righteous. How else will the desires of others improve except through the beacon of your example? Those who hide their desires don’t realize how easy it is for others to see their true motives. Those whose desires are revealed to be something other than what they pretended are always thought less of by those who find out. When those hidden desires are evil, this is obvious, but it is as true when the hidden desires are good, in which case the discoverer will see you as a coward who didn’t love God or their neighbor enough to live true to the good they knew of and could have done.

The easiest and fastest way to see your own motives beyond any limits in your perception or honesty is through another person who sees enough about you to correctly describe them. It is indeed possible for someone to see you better than you see yourself. The scriptures are full of accounts of when Jesus and his servants knew more about other people than the people knew about themselves. Consider the following Psalm, where a discerning observer describes the hidden qualities of a generic wicked man.

One reason so few people see so little of the motives of themselves and others is because awareness of motive, like all awareness, only grows with continuous honesty, and fades away with repeated deceit.

The fact that it is possible for someone else to see more about you than you see about yourself does not make it probable that you would listen, no matter how true their perspective was or how much evidence they presented. In the event you find someone with the wisdom necessary to see beyond what you do, it is highly likely that you will strongly disagree with what they describe about you because it will be so much worse than how you see yourself. How would you feel if someone told you that you flatter yourself so much in your own eyes that you are constantly bringing upon yourself terrible but fully avoidable suffering? What if they said that everything you say and do is a lie? What if they said you are not nearly as wise as you could be, and you don’t do as much good as you could? What if they said you are constantly scheming about how to get more than you deserve, that you incorrectly think you are better than everyone else, and that you love to sin?

Do you know anyone who would take such a chain of criticism well? Do you know anyone who would believe such criticisms, no matter who made them? Would they believe it, even if told by Jesus Christ himself? How much less if told this by one of his servants? How much less if told this by an otherwise normal person who happened to be right?

Only ask God for what you truly want. Hiding your desires from God will only make it that much harder for him to bless you. The Lord said his ability to help us is limited by our willingness to be honest about what we really want.

Pretending you desire something better than you do shows contempt for God, who sees all things, and shows an immense lack of trust in him.

Chapter 6: Change Who You Are

Who you are is the key to everything important and meaningful in life, including.

How you feel.
Your ability to obtain, retain, and accomplish what you desire in life.
Your resiliency against challenges.
The good you are willing and able do for others.

Your character is what you think, how you feel, and what you do, the running sequence of choices you have made until now. However, your past decisions do not determine your future so much as they form the basis from which you will build it. No matter who you have been until now, you have the power to choose who you will be in the future. While your present identity is determined by your past, your future identity is defined by what you think, feel, and do today.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your character. With such high stakes, it is worth any cost to become the best person you can be.

All human motives can be split into two competing objectives: feeling better right now or becoming better right now. These are almost always mutually exclusive because feeling better in the shortterm tends to come at the expense of feeling best in the long-term. Feeling best in the long-term requires doing whatever you need to in the present to become the best you can be in the future.

Humans are naturally opposed to what is actually best in the longterm at a fundamental, unconscious level. Almost all people are almost always motivated by the desire to feel better right now at the expense of feeling best long-term. Dishonesty is used as a tool to this end.

People lie in order to feel better in the present than they otherwise would. People will warp or ignore their thoughts, their feelings, and their actions in order to feel good right now. Dishonest people seek to maximize present pleasure regardless of how much they diminish future pleasure. They will ignore, distort, or deny any aspect of themselves or the world around them as they see it to feel better right now, even if it guarantees feeling worse later. A much more honesty approach is to face the truth in all things and change what you wish was better.

Honesty requires you to notice and respond to signals indicating the need for improvement. Your experiences provide evidence that shows how correct and complete your beliefs, desires, or actions are, exposing the need for improvement in one or more of these areas.

As more of reality is revealed to you, and the more honest you become, the more you will notice limitations in the beliefs, actions, and feelings of yourself or others. You will notice problems you and others face that you did not notice before, and you will be more likely to find solutions to them than you were before. You will also notice potential improvements that you and others could make that you did not notice before, and better reasons for making them.

Pay attention to what bothers you in life. While some simply ignore what they don’t like, it is common to complain about undesirable situations. Much rarer than either approach is to actually search out a way to improve undesirable situations. Begin with those you find most unpleasant.

It is dishonest to fail to respond to signals from your life that indicate needed change. How do you react to what you do not like in your life? Do you fix it, or do you ignore it? Do you seek out new actions and reconsider alternatives you were previously aware of?

When you live dishonestly, it becomes more difficult to notice and triangulate the signals that boost your confidence or indicate a need for improvement. Reality can’t teach you until you act as you really are. Creation is designed to reveal to you every single way that you could be better, but just as sunlight can only cure what is exposed to it, it can only do this to the extent that you honestly live as you really are.

Most people learn early that they can draw a curtain over the mirror of life experience by ignoring the evidence it provides. Change your beliefs, feelings, and actions whenever given sufficient reason to. Any denial of what you see will lead to greater difficulty in seeing anything else. The more evidence you ignore, the less of the mirror you see. You can’t ignore your faults without also losing sight of your strength and potential, leaving you less willing to recognize or live up to what you could be and do if you were more honest about yourself.

Be honest about what life reveals about your limitations. Honesty is to your character as cancer detection is to your body. It is your mechanism to sort out what benefits you from what harms you. When you are dishonest with yourself, you willingly give away the mechanism God has given you to lead you to the most joy and happiness by turning off your ability to see what harms you. The more dishonest someone is, and the longer they remain so, the less they notice what should be very obvious about themselves, others, and the world.

Unmet needs or wants are a great resource in discovering hidden flaws. It is sometimes the case that people think they already have what they seek when they don’t. This causes an obvious problem, because you will never pay any additional price to obtain what you already assume you have, and whatever you don’t already have carries a price beyond what you have already paid.

In most cases, people are well aware of their unmet needs or wants. However, few people realize what the root cause of their unmet needs or wants is: What you lack in life stems from what you lack in character. The common assumption is that all outcomes can be reached from whatever arbitrary path you happen to be on. This is, of course, not true. Outcomes always result from the path chosen. The path includes your character. Deficiencies of certain qualities in your character will always prevent the outcomes that require them. If you are lazy, you will not obtain the outcomes of the diligent; if you are greedy, you will not obtain the outcomes of the generous; if you are short-tempered, you will not obtain the outcomes of the patient, and so on.

If you lack something that you want, it is possible and probable that one of the character qualities you are missing is knowledge— specifically, the knowledge of how to obtain what you want but do not have. It’s common for people to pretend to know much more than they do, to be more confident about what they believe than they should, and to be less receptive to new ideas than they should. If you don’t know how to obtain what you want, find someone who already has it, and ask them for their advice on how to obtain the same. It’s dishonest to do any less.

It’s a rare oddity for a person to have a written plan for their lives, though most at least have some vague wishes. You will never achieve your potential without making and executing a plan to do so. Are you less important or less complicated than a building? In both buildings and people, a written plan is essential in order to maximize what can be accomplished. It is impossible to make optimal decisions or work efficiently without the ability to prioritize competing options of action. It’s impossible to prioritize well without considering expected impact. You can’t achieve a large goal without decomposing desired outcomes into the steps required to obtain them. No substantial construction project is ever undertaken without a detailed plan. Why should you expect to have a successful life if you aren’t willing to pay at least as much attention to it as any architect would a construction project?

What is your purpose in life? What kind of person do you want to be? What is important to you, why, and by how much? What goals do you want to achieve? What do you have to do and not do in the short and long-term to achieve them? The answer to these questions is your plan for life.

A life plan shows where you are right now and where you are going. With a life plan, you can constructively map the motivation provided by large, long-term goals into each and every moment, empowering you to do more and feel better in every moment of every day.

A life plan frees your character from the gravity of your past, defining what you need to do today to become what you want to be. Instead of being trapped by your self-image, you actively engineer it, task by task. You can embody any character you choose through building a life plan that describes it. From paper, you can instantiate it into a real person.

If you want help in designing a plan for your life, read the author’s book Joy on Purpose.

It is possible to spend great effort in what you think is making you a better person, but in reality is only changing surface-level behaviors. Much of what people think of as deep changes are really just cosmetic changes to your exterior.

Too many people invest energy into making outward changes that aren’t reflected in their inward selves. These are they “which glory in appearance, and not in heart.” (2 Corinthians 5:12) When you only make superficial changes, you will find that your unchanged core values repeatedly resurface, usually in times of duress or pressure, but sometimes in quite normal situations.

A person who pretends to have changed will expect those around them to treat them as if they’ve changed, while those same people are the ones who will have to suffer as the person repeatedly reveals that they haven’t.

The correct order of change is from within, not from without. In the tabernacle of Moses, sacrifices increased in sacred importance the closer they occurred to the Holy of Holies: first in the outer courtyard, then on the altar of incense before the veil, and last on the mercy seat of the Ark itself. This pattern of sacrifices increasing in importance as they become more internal is something that we all ought to learn from and live by. In your life, the outward sacrifices that you make through the actions you take should lead to ever-more-internal shifts in your thoughts, motives, and feelings. While this sort of inward improvement is triggered by outward change, the goal is to propagate the light within you so that it flows into outward improvement. The goal is to increase the light without by first increasing and then propagating outward the light within.

It does not please God when you attempt to fix yourself from the outside in.

Do ye suppose that God will look upon you as guiltless while ye sit still and behold these things? Behold I say unto you, Nay. Now I would that ye should remember that God has said that the inward vessel shall be cleansed first, and then shall the outer vessel be cleansed also. (Alma 60:23)

No amount of outward zeal will correct or excuse persistent inward misalignment. There is a prominent lie in both secular and religious life that as long as you publicly obey certain external standards, you can be free of the guilt of being less than the best you know you could be. This is not true, and the prevalence of misery, lack of confidence, and lack of meaning attest to this fact.

It is honesty in the deep and hidden parts of ourselves where meaningful progress is made.

Changes limited to the surface always leave obvious clues. When deep changes occur, the change propagates through all connected surface-level behaviors. When shallow changes occur, related surfacelevel behaviors do not change. For example, Jesus pointed out that the pretentious Pharisees cared much about their outward appearances, but regularly practiced behaviors that showed how corrupt their hearts still were.

Ordering some parts of how you are is not the same as ordering all parts of how you are. You truly have to subject your deepest self to the light of your own ability to reason. You have to intently examine and improve your core values and your fundamental understanding of the world and of yourself. When you do this, “...all things are clean unto you,” (Luke 11:41) and you have a clear conscience that empowers you to 1) confidently do hard things, 2) accept and cherish compliments, 3) appreciate and enjoy the good you do in the world, and 4) appreciate and enjoy the good in others.

Honesty doesn’t just require adherence to your beliefs, but also dictates how you form and modify them.

Beliefs should not be unthinkingly adopted or received dogmatically. Most beliefs are inherited from family or adopted from friends. There is no reason to block beliefs from these sources, but in order to be honest and to gain the kind of confidence required to live a set of beliefs to their full benefit, you need to know what other alternative beliefs exist and choose the ones that have the strongest evidence. Are your beliefs the best in outcome and evidence compared to available alternatives?

The set of available beliefs will be found in other people. While we can try to generate our own beliefs, it’s unlikely we will even begin to replicate the set of beliefs already possessed by others. Are you aware of what other people believe and why? Where conflicts exist between your beliefs and theirs, have you thoroughly and honestly compared the strength of each side’s argument, and do you hold the stronger of the two? When you meet a credible person who disagrees with you, do you respond by launching into an argument, or do you carefully and open-mindedly listen to their reasons?

Beliefs should be compared using reason. It is dishonest to believe something without sufficient reasons. As Paul counseled, “...Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” (Romans 14:5). Belief is not an alternative to understanding, even in religion, where it is frequently treated as such. You should be able to explain why you believe what you do, and your reasons should make your belief better supported than any alternative of which you are aware. If you do not understand an idea—whether secular or spiritual—you should ask God, do all you can to use the earthly resources available to you to learn more, and try to understand it.

Honesty requires you to live up to your present beliefs, but only until and unless you’re given sufficient reason to let them go. Honesty creates an interesting dynamic, because on the one hand it requires tenacious fidelity to your beliefs as they presently stand, but it also requires instant change to your thoughts, feelings, or actions the moment you encounter sufficient reason to! The Lord instructed that we accumulate and use wisdom by becoming wise as serpents but harmless as doves. In a similar fashion, we must be as tenacious as a cat who digs its claws into the lap from which it does not wish to be removed while being as quick to change as a dove who is startled.

Is your confidence in a particular belief based on actual evidence or is it arbitrary? When your belief is strengthened by new information, honesty compels you to sacrifice more to adhere to it and do more to share it with others. The stronger the evidence you have for your belief, the greater the burden of proof becomes for any alternative. When your belief is weakened by new information, honesty compels you to reduce your confidence in it. This means being less willing to sacrifice to adhere to it, less likely to argue in favor of it with others, more open-minded to alternatives, and doing more to find them. When your belief is destroyed by new information, honesty compels you to abandon it. Beliefs can be contradicted through reason or evidence. For example, if you act according to a belief, but fail to obtain the outcome it promises, you have every reason to abandon it. As another example, if you continue to practice a religion whose core doctrines have been refuted, you are being dishonest. It is dishonest to persist in a belief after it has been contradicted, even if you have nothing to replace it with yet.

Do you change your beliefs when given sufficient reason to? One test of your honesty is to ask how long it has been since you have changed your mind on what you would consider a core belief, changed your behavior in what you would consider an engrained habit, or changed to feel differently about something you’ve seen the same way for a long time. The most foundational beliefs, the most habitual actions, and the most sincere feelings can all change, and are likely to as you learn who you are and live up to who you could be. One may squirm at the realization that absolutely nothing is certain—but this is neither nihilist nor does it imply weak positions. In actuality, this kind of complete intellectual humility is the only way to come to the strongest confidence and the most complete and correct perceptions of reality.

Life will provide you with feedback about your beliefs as you live them. New information can either strengthen, weaken, or destroy a belief. As you gain experience and understanding, you either have to replace your beliefs, actions, and feelings with new and better ones, or hold to them with less confidence, sincerity, and honesty than you had before. If you want to be honest, you have to change your mind when confronted with sufficient reasons to. The Lord lamented that so few people were willing to believe the sufficient evidence he provided for the new ideas he taught.

Don’t fall prey to the same temptation. If sufficient evidence exists to support an idea, believe it. Throw out every belief whose cost is greater than its benefit, whose sufficient reasons have eroded, or that has been superseded by something better. Learning requires you to change how you think, feel, and act. If you aren’t changing, you aren’t learning.

Your suffering is a composite of the effects of the choices of others and your own. While there is only so much you can do to change other people, you have full control over the component of your feelings that is due to your own choices in life.

Our society tells people suffering from miserable feelings that they can’t help it, they are victims, and they are just as valuable as if they were not experiencing these feelings. These false beliefs cause many to miss the cue for improvement that misery provides. As long as you think that you can’t help how you feel, you are a victim, and there is nothing you can do to change your situation. If you believe this, you will prove it true by failing to make any of the changes that would prove it false.

Most suffering comes from resisting newly revealed misalignment of your thoughts, feelings, and actions from reality. For example, unwanted feelings can come in response to the revelation of lower selfvalue than you previously thought, or a greater cost or benefit than you assumed for something or someone you desire. The alleviation of all such suffering is fully within your power through changing what you expect, what you want, and what you do to realign yourself with your updated view of reality.

Modern culture teaches that your feelings are something that happens to you. The truth is that how you feel in any moment is primarily the net result of your choices up to that point. Your feelings don’t happen to you—you generate them through your choices. If you experience depression, it’s because you are making choices that generate depression. If you experience anxiety, it’s because you are making choices that generate anxiety. If you lack meaning, it’s because you choices generate meaningless activities.

Seeking to resolve miserable feelings without making changes to the choices you make is an impossible endeavor. If you can’t address the cause of the problem, the best you will accomplish is masking the symptoms through distracting drugs or experience—all of which will cause their own problems, most of which are much worse than the symptoms they mask.

Changing your feelings is always a question of changing your choices. Seek choices that generate the feelings you desire. You will almost always find that the future feelings you seek to experience are generated through a willingness to endure feelings you don’t want in the present. For example, to increase meaning long-term requires you to complete many seemingly meaningless tasks on a daily basis, as great accomplishments always require discipline over time.

Society tells you that you are no less of a person for struggling with these unwanted feelings and, increasingly, that miserable feelings are actually virtues. As long as you believe this, you will not do what it takes to resolve them, and you will not accept the solutions to these problems even if they were offered to you. Even if you are not willingly making these decisions, they are still primarily a result of your choices. Until you exercise your full ability to track down which decisions are causing them—including seeking and accepting the help of those who might seem them more clearly than you—their persistence does make you a worse person than you would otherwise be, both in terms of your quality of life and your quality of character.

Honest living requires change anytime there is reason to believe that the present path doesn’t lead to the desired outcome. Recognize the parts of your life that are less than what you want, and find something better. If you aren’t getting the results you want, you need to either make a change to the recipe you are following or find a better recipe.

If you wish to improve your situation, you must improve yourself, and the place to start is by asking what you could do differently to obtain a better outcome. Whenever you find yourself in a situation you don’t like, ask these simple questions.

What actions can you take to change the outcome?
Are there changes needed inward that precede those outward changes?
How many of these possible actions have you taken?

Some situations are easier to see and understand than others. Don’t suffer continuously for faults you have the power to see and fix. If you aren’t sure what you can do to change your situation, the best thing you can do is find someone who might be able to see more about it than you do, especially if they have succeeded in the change you are attempting. Short of this, you can also experiment with changing different parts of your life to see which might be causing the problem.

Whatever you do, don’t get stuck in analyses paralysis. Don’t become one of many people who get stuck endlessly planning for what they never end up doing. When overdone, planning can actually cause more harm than good.

In life, recognize situations where you need to shoot in order to aim. Such cases are a lot like firing the MK-19 grenade launcher, a large automatic weapon where the delay between shot and explosion requires aiming adjustments to be made as you shoot. In like manner, upgrade any action that fails to deliver the intended results.

Feedback comes through action. Action generates information. The bolder and more enduring the action, the stronger the signal of whether to continue. Make moves as bold as reasons suggest to be necessary, and adjust just as boldly for just as solid reasons.

Although our natural ignorance ensures that what we initially believe to be best will be less than what is actually best, there is no reason to remain so ignorant and certainly no reason to ignore what would be abundantly obvious if we were more honest.

What you want is based on your understanding. When you learn more about the world or yourself, what you want will change. Too frequently, people persist in pursuing their old desires even after their desires have changed.

If what you want changes, change what you want. What you want is not some inexorable edict carved in stone. Rather, it’s the flexible interpretation of your accumulated experiences and beliefs. What you want should be as flexible as your experiences—which will continue to grow—and your beliefs—which ought to be improving in accuracy and coverage over time.

The following tactic, employed early and often, can help you discover when your actions are out of alignment with your actual desires. Ask yourself.

1. What do you want?
2. Why do you want it?
3. Is there is anything better? If there is, pursue it instead.

As you pursue what you want, you will discover that both what you pursue and the cost to obtain it are different than what you believed. Discontinue pursuit of what is revealed to cost more than you believe it to be worth. When you discover that what you seek is worth less than you thought, find something better to take its place.

Your surroundings affect your long-term outcomes and short-term feelings much more than most realize. The people, places, and situations around you can boost or attenuate the good in your life to a shocking extent.

Find people, places, and situations that provide you with opportunities to improve, reasons to improve, and examples of improvement to follow. Avoid people, places, and situations that tune out, diminish, or obstruct your ability to discover and become more than you are and to do better than you do.

Intentionally seek what is best in life. Thinking, feeling, and acting the best you know now will increase your ability to think, feel, and act even better in the future. Dedicate your whole soul to the best purpose you can think of and do the absolute best you can imagine doing. If you consistently pursue the best path you imagine, you will quickly become a person of higher quality than you ever considered possible, adorned with outcomes far greater than anything you had before.

Intentionally choose decisions that yield the greatest long-term outcomes, not just what feels good right now. You will never become who you could be by merely doing what you feel like doing right now. Those who direct their life based on how they feel in the moment will find a constant influence guiding them to make worse decisions than they otherwise would. Those who regularly betray their potential for what is easy, quick, or popular will find their potential eroded into chains that severely reduce their remaining possibilities in life. As you make the best decisions you can presently, you will grow in your ability to make better decisions in the future.

As you more consistently live up to the best you know, you will either gain courage in or find the limits of your present beliefs, actions, and feelings. There is no other way of finding out who you really are, who you really could be, how to become that way, or why you should try than by always feeling, thinking, and acting as you really are all the time.

It is normal to oppose changes, even when they have a clear net benefit. Ideally, you will develop sufficient faith to make all changes that result in increased net benefit, as long as they don’t displace something with even greater net benefit. While you are developing that faith, you can increase your willingness to make improvements by increasing the accuracy of your cost / benefit calculations.

It is exceedingly common that apparent improvements will yield long-term net benefit far greater than initially expected. More time spent in analysis can make the best choices more obvious.

Detail what you will change, as humans tend to inflate the cost of ambiguous or undefined actions.
Compose a detailed, plausible plan to achieve the change. A single step is much less overwhelming than an entire process.
Define the outcomes of the proposed improvement. Humans tend to fixate on the cost of change outside of the context of the benefits brought by the change.
Enumerate the short- and long-term costs of remaining the same. What opportunities will you miss? What problems might occur?

The time commitment for this process suggests you use it for particularly confusing or important improvements, but you will find that the more you do, the faster you can complete it and the more broadly you can use it.

As important as it is to learn to take the time necessary to make important decisions wisely, some people get caught in the trap of taking more time than they should to make decisions. In these situations, never-ending analysis provides a synthetic but unhealthy substitute for action. A very simple but powerful tool to prevent analysis paralysis is to stop when there is no new information to consider.

Chapter 7: Show Your Real Self to Others

All of us operate in the presence of countless social filters that influence what we think, feel, and do. You are conditioned from a young age to develop and apply a filter to prevent the expression of anything that would exceed the tolerance of the masses in what you say or do in public, and you develop a similar but individualized filter for each person you come to know personally. The filters become so well established that by the time you reach maturity, you’ve long-since forgotten you have them.

Each of us has a different willingness to maintain sovereignty over what we think, feel, and do, and most exercise very little. For example, a famous set of experiments by a psychologist named Asch showed that only 25% of people will act outwardly according to what they believe to be truth contrary to public opinion, and the constraints of the experiment make this a best case scenario. Far fewer still will live authentically when it costs more than just soft social disapproval.

Popular opinion and public persecution are effective filters on authentic behavior, but they are not measures of righteousness. All Christians ought to be “...perfectly honest and upright in all things....” (Alma 27:27) How many Christians are distinguishable from others in how honest and upright they are?

Most weigh their willingness to stand for what is right by how much it would cost them to support it. You ought to be who you really are and stand up for what you really believe no matter what it costs. The fact that this does not happen is further evidence that beliefs tend to not be based on reason. If you only believed what provided the highest net benefit, you would never set aside your beliefs because of their cost. Only beliefs held by convenience will be set aside for convenience.

One of the Ten Commandments reads: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” (Exodus 20:16) This commandment is much more widely known than it is understood. While bearing false witness clearly includes saying what you know is false, it is also about how truthful you are in how you publicly portray yourself. A “witness” in the scriptural languages was not limited to what you said, but the full demonstration of what you did. A false witness includes any difference between what you believe and what you say, do, or feel. A false witness includes how you interact with others, including how you present yourself to them.

A true witness is one who is always how they really are. While a true witness will do all they can to improve in every way, they demonstrate their virtues and vices, their strengths and weaknesses. As they do, they best situate themselves to become aware of and be more disposed to improvement and to help others through the demonstration of their strengths. For this reason, it is good to be a true witness, whether you are good or not, and doing so will lead to greater righteousness, while bearing a false witness is always detrimental.

Your ability to retain and grow the amount and accuracy of truth that you presently see doesn’t just depend on how well you live up to it in your own life, but also how effectively you persuade others to do the same.

You don’t realize that every single time you inhibit what you really think, feel, or would otherwise do, you are voluntarily assuming some measure of the consequences of dishonesty in your life, causing great harm to yourself and others.

The alternative, which almost no one has the courage to implement, is to authentically express what you think and feel, and faithfully do what you otherwise would in every situation. If the pushback you receive in doing so is invalid, then continue thinking, feeling, and acting just as you did before, no matter how much it offends others. If the criticism you receive in doing so is valid, do not respond by hiding your true self, but by changing your true self. You can tell the difference between hiding and changing by analyzing how you subsequently think, feel, and act in subsequent situations free from the oversight of those who would correct you.

What if everyone knew everything there was to know about you? What would it be like if anyone who saw you instantly knew all your virtues and faults? What if everyone else knew everything you thought, felt, and did? What if everyone knew what you really wanted, how much, and why? Would this result in people seeing you as more and better than they do now, or less and worse? Would it make you change how you are?

People frequently think, feel, or do worse when they don’t believe anyone can see. If all things were known, many seemingly highvalue people would lose value in the eyes of others. How many hidden past mistakes and ongoing indulgences would be revealed? How many seemingly kind people would be shown to be willing to cause major harm to another for their own slight benefit?

Many good thoughts, feelings, and actions go unseen. Those things that are seen are evaluated through an imperfect idea of what is good, what is evil, and by how much. If all things were known, many seemingly low-value people would gain value in the eyes of others. How many hidden virtues and quiet heroes would be revealed? How many seemingly normal people would be revealed as having fought and won many private battles? How many seemingly arrogant people would be revealed as gifted and patient? How many seemingly offensive people would be revealed as holy?

So much of our lives remain hidden from one another. We tend to advertise or exaggerate our best aspects, disappointing those who get to know us better. Live with such virtue in what you do and why you do it that the more someone gets to know you, the better they find you to be.

As much as it horrifies most people to contemplate, there will be a time when much more about yourself will become known to you and others. In the resurrection, you will see as you are seen and know as you are known. The additional information thrust upon you will include onerous details proving the insufficiency of your poor choices and inadequacy of your poor character qualities, even if they were hidden to you in life through ignorance or dishonesty. Everyone will see much more about each other than they presently do. Everyone will know much more about what you did in life, what you didn’t do, and why. But what about during this life?

You can come to see much more of yourself during this life, and though they are rare, there are others who already do. There are people on the earth who can see you better than you can see yourself. Whether you’re dealing with such a person or not, it’s best to be yourself and not rely on your ability to hide from others. To prepare for those who already see who you are, act as if everyone you meet can. Live each moment of each day as if all people could see what you do and—more importantly—why you do it. In every case, acting as if all things were known about you will cause you to be better than you otherwise would. Living up to the best you presently know will lead you on the shortest path to learning more about yourself than you already know. To prepare for a time when all things are revealed, act as if they already were.

Honesty requires you to accurately acknowledge your vices and your virtues. Far too many understand humility as the reduction of incorrectly overinflated self-worth. Humility actually requires the correction of any error in self-worth, whether there is too much or too little.

It is not an oxymoron to consider oneself humble. Like all virtues, humility is something we should all strive for and something we need to acknowledge in order to make the greatest use of it. Anyone who has reconciled their self-esteem to their perception of the truth, as far as they know it, can accurately call themselves humble until and unless evidence arises that suggests their self-worth is too high or too low relative to reality.

Some hold back on honestly acknowledging their positive traits for fear of becoming prideful. It is as important to live up to unacknowledged true strengths as it is to improve unacknowledged true limitations. It is vital that those who have virtue show that virtue in whatever area they have it.

The good you recognize in yourself and the good you do are coupled. It’s impossible to live up to your potential without first accurately recognizing your strengths. An artificially suppressed selfworth will cause you to be less and do less for others than you would with a more accurate self-appraisal. For example, the Lord said that the good examples we show help others see God’s goodness more clearly.

Don’t hold back your virtue. If you are good, be good. If you are smart, don’t pretend to be stupid. If you are productive, don’t slow down. If you are beautiful, don’t uglify yourself. If you are kind, do not allow the bitterness of others to dull your light. Live up to the virtues you possess.

One reason people avoid being themselves is that they fear what they would lose if they did. They rightly identify the many good situations, people, and things in their lives that cannot coexist with authenticity. What they don’t realize is that what they would lose through honesty isn’t worth having, and stands in the way of what is much better. If you were truly yourself, all of the time, you would obliterate your ability to participate in meaningless work, shallow relationships, and frivolous entertainment. Identifying and removing the fake placeholders that occupy your resources and attention clears the path for obtaining the real thing: quality relationships with others, meaningful work, and a fulfilling transcendent purpose.

Recall that all forms of dishonesty harm our ability to see all parts of reality. This reduction in awareness will decrease your ability to give and receive love in multiple ways.

Love is the measure of what you are willing to suffer for the benefit of others. In order to give or receive love, you need to accurately perceive the qualities of yourself and others, as well as know enough about reality to accurately predict what would benefit you and others.

How can you love another person without correctly seeing their attributes and the rest of reality? You cannot calculate what would be beneficial for them, or the threshold that exceeds what they deserve without first being honest.

You cannot be loved by others beyond how honest you are with yourself. How can someone love you for who you really are if they do not know who you really are? How likely are they to know who you really are without you showing yourself to them? How can you show yourself to another if you don’t yet know who you really are?

How can you recognize and receive love beyond the limits of how fully and accurately you know yourself? How will you accurately quantify the love others have for you until you accurately measure how good a person you are?

Liars overestimate their self-worth, conveniently ignoring their faults and inflating their virtues, thus chronically underestimating the love others give them. How can you recognize when someone treats you better than you deserve if you do not accurately see who you actually are? You might be immersed in love, but blind to it, mistakenly believing you are entitled to what actually far exceeds your worth. For example, it is a great act of love for someone to expose the faults in you that they have lived worthy to see, but which you refuse to see. Would you see what they share with you as love, or just hostility? Would you respond with gratitude, or would you just be offended?

To the extent that you lie, you lower your value. To the extent you lack self-respect, confidence, and improvement, you will be less likely to receive the love of others because of your lack of love for yourself. Any degree of self-hatred can increase your hatred of others, as human nature makes it difficult to see others in a better light than we see ourselves. If you don’t have ample evidence of self-improvement, you will struggle to believe that other people are capable of improvement, and this will cause you to withhold the good you might otherwise do for them. This results in a condition Jesus referred to as one’s love waxing cold, or the abandonment of concern for the benefit of others. One whose life is full of actualized improvement cannot deny what God can do to a person, because they have experienced it firsthand. A person who recognizes the benefits they have received is more likely to give great sacrifice for the potential benefit of others.

Different people will react differently to you when you live in sincerity. While it is true that many will see you as a fool, some will resent you, and others may even hate you, the few that see who you are as a good thing will make the other reactions worthwhile. Authenticity attracts those worth knowing while repelling those who aren’t worth your energy. However, it is important to recognize that in the face of the shrinking space of options, abundance is not measured in the number of options open to you, but the increased value of those options that remain.

If you are true on the outside to how you are on the inside, you will always find yourself in conflict with those who are not, but, at the same time, you will gravitate towards everyone who is authentic, no matter how different they are to you. The people who appreciate and can benefit from who you really are will self-select, and that filtering is very much a part of the purpose of this world in general and your life in particular.

Relationships that require deceit are not worth having. When you lose the support of those who don’t want you to be yourself, you haven’t lost much. These types will only support you as long as doing so makes them feel better about themselves. Eventually, friendships that are based on you pretending you are something you aren’t will always crumble in when unavoidable eventualities reveal the charade.

The easiest way to avoid the difficulty of terminating relationships based on deceit is to never begin them in the first place. If you are always who you really are, those who don’t appreciate you will avoid you from the outset. This is a wonderful blessing because it frees up your time and resources to meet people who actually like you— something that is increasingly difficult the more time you spend with people who don’t. It’s difficult to meet new people when you are spending all your time with others, and those more likely to be interested in you may be repelled by companions who you aren’t compatible with on more than a superficial level.

Pretending to conform to the expectations of others only works when it isn’t recognize as fake. The people who matter won’t fall for this, and the people who fall for this don’t matter. Those whose opinions matter the most will think poorly of you for fakery, as it shows an immense lack of respect and suggests that the real you is much worse than you pretend to be.

The best people will only be interested in you if you are yourself. The best people seek out those who think for and stay true to themselves, even if they stand alone, not those who agree with them.

If you want to get to know deep people, you’ll first have to reveal yourself to be one. Otherwise, the deep people you invariably meet will pass you over as someone not capable of the depth they, like you, crave. All people who withhold the next increment of themselves from another until that person is worthy of that increment are too guarded, and will never enjoy the relationships with others they would have if they instead decided to dispense the next increment based on worthiness to what has already been given. These people are always lonely and unfulfilled, but remain in their self-inflicted problem by lying to themselves, claiming that they have people in their lives to whom they are open—people who also complain about how closed they are! They claim that they would somehow recognize and open up to “the right people,” without any ability to describe what these conditions would actually be.

There are times when your behavior in public should deviate from your behavior in private, but never for the purpose of deceiving others. Instead, it is about withholding the parts of yourself that they cannot presently understand or which they are not yet worthy of knowing. Perhaps the easiest example of this is in the form of boundaries you might have that distinguish the parts of yourself you expose to others: coworkers versus friends, friends versus family, family versus your spouse, and your spouse versus God. Honesty precludes presenting a false self in any of these scopes, but each scope consists of withholding some different level of intimacy.

The principle of appropriately withholding intimacy ought to be applied at the individual level: Although you should never pretend to be someone other than who you really are, it is always going to be the case that you limit the extent to which you reveal yourself. This raises the vital question: how do you determine how much of yourself to reveal?

People today mistakenly believe that it is possible to identify those who are worth opening up to before opening up to them. Under this approach, the only way you will get to know others or others will get to know you is if they open themselves to you before you open yourself to them. This only works when they are more willing to open themselves to you than you are to them.

A person can’t show their trustworthiness to you without being given trust. They can’t show you that they are worthy of what you haven’t yet revealed; they can only show you if they are worthy of what you have already revealed. In order to see what more they are worthy of, you must first lend them greater trust by revealing more of yourself than what they already deserve.

If you are honest, you will show others the next increment of who you are as soon as they prove themselves worthy of what they already know about you. You will reveal yourself to others on a different pace and to a different degree depending on the differences in their worthiness. You will reveal large chunks of yourself quickly to a person who demonstrates themselves to be benevolent and trustworthy, far less in smaller chunks to someone who is guarded, and little at all to a person who clearly intends to use whatever you give them for personal gain or malevolence.

All people should have full access to you on a path comprised of steps of the next reasonable increment. Anyone who meets you should come into contact with the essence of the depth of your heart and mind. When the degree to which a person knows you depends only on the amount of time they have spent with you, and not the amount of trust you have in them, you will know you have removed these barriers.

Revealing the minimal next increment of yourself to others protects you from many of the examples of betrayed trust, which tends to come through revealing much more of yourself to a person than they have proven themselves worthy of.

Revealing the next increment is not negotiable in the path to more honest and meaningful relationships with better people. Those who wait for others to prove themselves worthy of their trust before they lend any trust to them will never find the people they seek—not because they don’t exist, but because they will never recognize them nor be recognized by them.

The approval of others is meaningless when it is based on a lie. No one worth having the respect of will be fooled or impressed by fakery, and that includes yourself.

Your self respect is hard-won and easily lost. Every move you make to please others by pretending you are something you aren’t is a move away from respecting yourself. Don’t sell your birthright for a mess of porridge by pretending that you are someone you aren’t. If you aren’t impressed with yourself, it won’t matter what anyone else thinks about you. If you don’t like who you are, nothing anyone else thinks will make you feel better about yourself—at least, not for very long.

Live to know you are who you know you could be, and you will have the confidence and courage of a lion, even if you are the only one who believes in, admires, or respects you. If you are impressed with yourself, it won’t matter what anyone else thinks about you. If you like who you are, nothing anyone else thinks will make you feel worse about yourself—at least, not for very long.

Some fear that if they show who they really are, no one will love them. The truth is that until you start acting like you really are, no one can love you.

If you are a deep person, you realized at a young age that openly demonstrating the depth of your heart and mind to others causes confusion and resentment in them and sorrow in yourself. The sorrow comes as a mix of the negative reactions from others and the painful realization of the fact that you are surrounded by people who are not like you, who cannot see you, and who cannot fulfill your deep yearning for true interaction with another soul.

No amount of people will alleviate your loneliness until or unless you know yourself and show yourself to others. Without giving direct access to your inner self, how can you ever attain the deep meaning only possible through deep connection with other people? The barrier of distance is two-way: You can’t experience someone beyond the access you give them to yourself.

No one can ever like you if you are never yourself. A mask protects you by hiding who you really are, but it also makes it impossible for anyone to really know you. When someone likes you for who you pretend to be, they don’t like you —they like the mask you are wearing. Pretending to be someone else requires you to maintain a certain distance from others who might otherwise more easily discover your rouse. Why pantomime as another person just to please others? Is there anything more lonely than playing a role for the rest of your life because the people around you love someone who isn’t really you?

You can’t be loved by someone beyond how much they know what you think, feel, and do. You can’t love another beyond how much you know what they think, feel, and do. Love is an action—the choice to sacrifice for the benefit of another—and you can’t know what would benefit a person without knowing them. To the extent you do not disclose yourself, you will withhold from others the love you could otherwise give them and withhold from yourself the love they could give you.

You can’t experience the joy of someone enjoying you for who you really are without first being who you really are. You have to open yourself to greater sorrow from others if you want to open yourself to greater joy with others. The inner self is inherently vulnerable. Direct access to it can cause greater suffering than anything else. While it is impossible to be who you really are without exposing yourself to criticism and disappointment, it is also impossible to find emotional connection, trust, and intimacy without exposing yourself. Criticism and disappointment are the price you must pay for meaningful relationships. The good news is that invalid criticism need not affect you, valid criticism will only make you better, and every disappointment orients you more fully toward what is worthy of your expectation.

The more honest you are, the more the world will hate you. Normal people are dishonest, and the dishonest don’t take honesty kindly. They always get angry, and they frequently resort to violence. They respond this way because they have so thoroughly damaged their conscience that it is momentarily renewed when they hear truth, causing them to feel immense guilt.

Too many people hold back the gifts God has given them because they realize early on that what God values is abominable to the world and to those whose hearts are still set upon it. Honesty is just one of the Lord’s attributes, all of which will increase the ire of the world the more they are manifested within you. Honest people say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done, even if other people hurt them for doing so.

To be excellent is to be hated, but the hate is stronger and begins much earlier than you might expect. It takes almost no level of performance to begin earning the hate of others. Most people detest those who excel them in some way. By living according to who you really are, you provide living proof that they could do the same, and this makes them feel guilty for choosing otherwise. It is hard to accomplish anything of worth in life without accumulating people who hate you. The better you become, the more those around you will actively resist you and the things you attempt to accomplish. Anyone who intends to always do their best should expect a life where the ratio of those who hate them to those who love them will grow as they do.

Don’t allow the faithlessness and fear of others to restrain you. Push through it, and prove to them that they, too, could be more by providing them an example of what better looks like. Not all people will choose to adopt the example of improvement you provide. Those willing to allow you to do your best even if they choose not to will still benefit a great deal from what you are able provide to them.

Sometimes, those around you will obstruct and discourage you, and they may threaten to distance themselves from you, even if they are your family or friends. Do it anyway. You never know when those who resist you for doing your best will suddenly change their course, support you, and improve themselves.

Many are tempted to hide their flaws in order to protect themselves from harm from others, but doing so causes greater harm to yourself and those you might otherwise help than it prevents to you. It is impossible to pretend to be someone other than who you really are without causing great damage to yourself in ways that extend further and deeper than what anyone else could do to you.

The better you are, the fewer people will see you that way. The brighter God’s light within you, the fewer the people will respond well to it. However, the brighter God’s light within you, the more it will mean to those who need it.

Being the best you can be is the most direct way to find the best people. Only the most exceptional people will admire you for being better than they. Only the meekest people will celebrate your victories independent of their own.

Life will provide numerous situations where hiding who you really are may seem like the best path. Maybe you have traits that others do not like. Maybe you have a perspective or desire that you know will be unfavorable to people who you care about or who you want something from. Be yourself anyway.

It is always in the best interest of all to be who you really are. If you are true on the outside to how you are on the inside, you will always be a better person than you are when you are pretending to be someone different than who you really are.

If you are less-than-ideal in some way, don’t hide it. When you place yourself in situations that are beyond your ability to contend with, you not only guarantee eventual defeat, you also guarantee unnecessary suffering along the way. If you have faults that you aren’t willing or able to fix, don’t hide them. It’s better to show others the parts of yourself that are difficult to accept up front. It saves you and them from subsequent unpleasant experiences as they have to deal with being lied to and you have to deal with them rejecting a more clear version of who you really are.

Be yourself. If you don’t like what that gets you, change who you are. If you are antisocial, be antisocial all the time. Don’t try to be artificially outgoing when meeting new people. If you are lazy, be lazy all the time. Don’t deceitfully pretend to be diligent only when someone is watching. If you are sloppy, be sloppy all the time. Don’t clean the house extra before friends or family come over. Don’t pretend you are someone else to get gain you don’t, by definition, deserve. If you want better outcomes, the only enduring way to obtain them is to actually change who you are. If you do not like who you are, the solution is to change who you are, not to pretend you are something you aren’t. The cost of change is reduced by honestly admitting the cost of staying the same. Through consistently living your character qualities, you will accrue sufficient reason to change.

Too many people clock out of being themselves when they clock into work. Your job doesn’t give you an excuse for failing to be yourself, nor does it spare you the negative consequences of practicing this form of dishonesty.

Does your work align with your purpose in life, whether directly through what you do or indirectly through the resources it secures? Do you really make the world a better place through what you do? For example, if you are a school teacher, are children better off in your care than in that of their parents?

Does your work require you to violate your principles? For example, if you are in the military, do you renew your contract even after realizing that the reasons you joined for are not aligned with how the military is used in practice? If you are a doctor, would you dare tell a patient what they need to hear to improve their health, even if it doesn’t include pills or surgery? If you are a lawyer, are you up front with your client about their chances of success, or do you take on unlikely cases just to increase your billable time?

Do you find yourself doing things you might otherwise consider wrong in order to compete with those who do not share your principles? For example, if you are a scientist, do you apply for grant money for politically popular ideas that you know to be unfruitful or untrue?

Employees are hired in good faith under the assumption that they are capable of the job they will perform and that they will consistently apply their best reasonable effort. Do you provide value that matches your pay? Do you waste time at work? Do you shirk responsibility?

How consistently do you apply what you learn at work to the rest of your life? Remember, Jesus castigated the people of his time for exercising wisdom in their work that they did not apply to test their religious beliefs. If you are a visual artist, do you beautify in all things, or merely when you are performing? If you are a scientist, do you apply the same skepticism of conventional wisdom, employ the same degree of critical thought, and open-minded experimentation in all things, or do you just blindly follow the majority in other aspects of your life? If you study something, do you study everything? Do you think deeply about all topics, or just those you are assigned?

Most modern jobs do not respond well to employees who ask why. Seek a job where your employer understands the additional contribution made possible by employees who understand and believe in the company’s purpose, particularly in how it translates to their daily tasks. Be yourself at work by asking questions, bringing up ideas for improvement, and sharing counterarguments with what is suggested by others. Ask for reasons when requests do not make sense to you. If you disagree with what you are asked to do or why you are asked to do it, make your objection known calmly and respectfully. Before opposing anything, ensure that you have adequate reasons that are at least as strong as your feelings about the situation. Share them clearly with a honest openness to rebuttal. If you can’t come to an accord with your employer or coworker, decide whether you have sufficiently cleared your moral obligation by speaking up. If not, seek employment elsewhere.

The average person spends a great portion of their adult life working. Though so many share the experience of work, very few even scratch the surface of the potential value of what it could provide to them. So much advancement in life can come through honestly extracting and applying value from employment. Try it, and you may be surprised.

The home environment can foster several tendencies that encourage a person to act in ways that do not align with who they really are. As with work, the home is not an exclusion to the need to be yourself. If anything, it is the place where honesty is most important.

It is no surprise that a desire to please others can often be strongest in the family, as it is presumably the collection of people who you care about the most. At issue is the tension between the short-term benefit you will provide through saying and doing what pleases them now versus the long-term benefit you can only provide them through being an honest, integrated person. You can’t have both.

Unfortunate as it is, another strong motivation to withhold your true self in family settings is the desire to avoid close-quarter strife. Ironically, much of the strife seeking to be avoided in the home is from one or more members of the family with no such reservations. Some people are more apt to fight with people they do not live with, but many preferentially fight with those in their own home. Those who bend their authenticity to avoid conflict in the home are aiming for unity, but unity can only occur through addressing and resolving differences—not ignoring them.

The family unit is the best situated for the greatest growth. Families provide a wonderful opportunity to give and receive invitations to improve—invitations based on greater familiarity, greater concern, and a purer motive than any relationship outside the family. But these benefits cannot occur beyond the degree to which family members are willing to be themselves and be honest with one another. A family that grows together will continuously discover new areas of difference, each providing a new opportunity to achieve even greater levels of unity. A family that ignores differences cannot grow together, because they cannot grow at all. Growth requires change, and change can only occur as differences are actually addressed. Present your true self to your family members, and encourage them to do the same. Always ensure that what you say to and how you spend time with family members reflects your sincere beliefs. It is the only way for you to give and receive the best benefits in your family.

Marriage presents a special case of the danger of dissociating from your true self. Most deadening in marriage comes from an unwillingness to continue attempts to discover and resolve differences. Too many have watched their spouse transform from a vibrant, interesting person to a person who can only have fun during superficial experiences and conversation, and who typically has far more to say to friends and strangers than they do to you. This erosion comes over time as a spouse opts not to address additional faults revealed through marriage. Lovingly engage in the typically long and laborious process of assisting your spouse to address their faults within the limits of criticism they tolerate.

Requests for improvement become increasingly frustrating for both the repeater and the receiver when they need to be repeated. Faced with increasingly hostile responses to repeated requests for improvement, most quickly abandon future attempts, preferring the quiet misery of living with someone they don’t like to the intense unpleasantness of confronting them on their faults. Superficiality is not a solution to unresolved differences in family. Instead, continuously repeating an incrementally shrinking invitation for improvement provides the only hope for things improving. When you take the seemingly easier road of appeasement by ignoring what bothers you about a family member, you will find that those things will grow in incidence and intensity while your patience for tolerating them shrinks.

Deep and truthful communication is essential to maintaining a happy family. Be honest with your family when it comes to what you desire, what you appreciate, and what concerns you, whether you are talking about the world, yourself, or your family members.

Too many people use religion as a way to obtain a community rather than as a way to learn about and become more like God. Even worse, that community tends to be even more shallow than social relationships outside of church. Church presents potential pitfalls to the person seeking to be true to themselves at all times. Part of the draw of church is the opportunity to participate in a community of like-minded individuals. Unfortunately, relationships at church rarely grow beyond the superficiality of what is shared. To resist the pressure to remain within the shallows of superficiality, avoid the temptation to go along with jargon, rituals, or any other pattern of behavior that you do not understand, that seems odd to you, or that you do not feel is useful. To help you detect the draw of fitting in, imagine you are an outsider attending your church for the first time. What would you find odd or confusing? Could you explain these oddities to a newcomer in a way that convinces them that these differences are an improvement over what they are familiar with? If not, avoid it.

One particular example of an odd behavior that spreads due to desire to fit in is the display of seemingly deep sentiments as a shallow gesture. While there are times when the display of intense emotion or conviction is appropriate, it too often presents another opportunity for superficiality. Those inclined towards public gestures of moving emotion should temper themselves against their day-to-day example. Deep spiritual conviction is not something that only appears at church. True spiritual conviction effects all areas of life, because all areas of life are opportunities to revere and emulate God. Have you invested the requisite discipleship in normal activities to honestly profess such deep conviction at church? Are you a passionate person in real life, or do you just play one at church? Don’t be a different person on Sundays than you are the rest of the week, nor a different person in church than you are outside of church.

It is common for those who attend a given church to have at least some beliefs that differ from the doctrines of that church, but very few speak about or act in recognition of these differences. It is necessary and appropriate to respectfully voice when you dissent from the positions espoused by your church or fellow congregants. It is also necessary to abstain from religious practices that you do not believe accord with God.

It is possible that the deviations between your beliefs and those of your church are significant enough that you should find another church or not attend a church at all. Much of that decision will make itself as you are open in your communication about what you disagree with and consistent in your refusal to participate in what you do not believe in.

Too many people think of recreational activities as a break from who they really are. If you aim to be a sincere person, you should be the same person during recreation as you are at any other time.

With whom do you spend your discretionary time? Do you spend the most time with those you find most important?

How do you spend your discretionary time? Do you spend the most time on what you feel is most important? Do you allow the people with whom you spend your time to bend you into activities that you do not feel are the best use of it?

What do you converse about with friends? Do you find yourself endlessly rehashing days gone by with friends from earlier in life who have not remained reconciled to your life since then?

Do you abide by the same personal and interpersonal standards you would outside of recreation? For example, do you become a vicious, violent, trash-talking monster on the basketball court?

To be true to what you sincerely believe all the time no matter the cost will always get you into trouble with anyone who isn’t sincere, and hardly anyone is. Often times what appears to be persecution for extreme beliefs is actually a reaction to extreme honesty. Absolute and constant honesty is not, never was, and never will be normal. Very few people appreciate their misconceptions, faulty assumptions, superstitions, or lies challenged. Even the most mainstream person would encounter stiff persecution in their lives if they were deeply honest all of the time. To persuade you of how immediately total honesty will get you into trouble with the world, consider every relationship you have with other people in this world, and how few of them could endure such honesty.

The few people who refuse to lie, even when everyone else does, are anchors to society. Without these people, there would be far less of everything most people value in life, and yet, instead of supporting them, the majority persecutes them, while the few who see that they contribute something of value turns a blind eye for fear of what the mob might do if they were to support them. Those unable to see or unwilling to stand against dishonesty rely on those who are willing and able to do both. The only ones able to resist lies as necessary to slow societal decay are those who see them and understand their consequences, which necessarily makes them appear to be extreme to those who do not. These people are almost always viewed as radicals, but they are the only force resisting the sudden decay of society. Those you see as radicals today are the only thing preventing you from being seen as a radical tomorrow.

It is the selfless honesty of a few good people that sustains society, but the good that they do cannot be sustained without the support of the many who must support and defend them in order for them to continue.

Boost those who tell the truth by sharing their ideas with those who would not hear them from the source. Defend them from those who dishonestly misrepresent their character.

The more a person thinks, feels, and acts as Jesus would, the more the world will treat them as it did the Lord.

If the world doesn’t hate you enough to try to kill you, as it did Jesus, you aren’t very much like him yet. Anyone who maintains the friendship of the world has betrayed and continues to betray their honesty at least occasionally. You don’t have to do terrible things to lose your honesty, and the world won’t typically require you to do terrible things to get along with it. All it takes in either case is to betray yourself just a little bit here and there. The seriousness of such things is denoted by the language James uses in describing those who do it. He calls them adulterers, stressing that it is impossible to be a friend of the world and a friend to God.

This echoes a point stated earlier by Jesus.

The more wicked the world becomes, the harder it will be for people with greater honesty to support themselves. There are those who have lost their careers for the sake of the truth. How many more will be added to their numbers? How many jobs would be lost if everyone told the truth all of the time? Everything you are compelled to say or are not allowed to say that deviates from how you actually think, feel, or do is an example of such lies. Many jobs require you to lie to customers or coworkers on a regular basis. How often do sales people, customer service reps, or politicians lie to their customers? Even outside of careers that are primarily deceitful, there are countless moments where workers are required to lie to each other or their customers.

The more dishonest society becomes, the more those who are honest will be targeted and taken out, as aptly predicted by Isaiah.

Knowing firsthand of the challenges that come from telling the truth at all times and in all places, the Lord gave encouraging promises that he would sustain and bless those who serve him. In many cases, he gives us the opportunity to fulfill these promises, restoring good to those who have been treated badly for behaving righteously.

All Christians ought to be “...distinguished for their zeal towards God, and also towards men...” (Alma 27:27) How many Christians are distinguishable from others in how zealously they seek the benefit of those who deserve better than they have? The reluctance of Christians to support those who are treated unjustly causes God great displeasure.

Too many support those who accomplish evil. One reason for this widespread phenomenon is that, even among the religious, we have an incorrect definition of evil. Most define evil as what violates the rules of whatever church they belong to. But the meaning of evil is much broader than the edicts of a church. Rather, if good is what leads to the greatest possible benefit of all, evil is anything less. The more something blocks the progress of all people, the more evil it is.

A more correct definition of evil helps you prioritize your fight against it. Many common Christian protests fall to irrelevance. Instead of opposing a celebrity, musician, or author who probably has extremely little effect on the life of you or anyone you know, inform yourself about the clergy, teachers, county council, judges, county prosecutors, school board, and others in your locale. Evaluate the righteousness of supervisors where you work. Look at the comments of the people you are connected with on social media. All of these people affect much greater outcomes in your life, and yet hardly anyone pays attention to or does anything about them. Are they supporting what is good and those who support what is good, or do they fight against good ideas and the people who promote them?

The false idea that we need to treat all people nicely, even when they are evil, hamstrings our ability to conduct the duty we have to call out evil. If a person is close to you through family connection, friendship, work, church, or geographical co-location, you have more reason—not less—to raise your voice in opposition to the evil you see them do. Those who are offended by your stand from the truth are not your real friends, they aren’t worthy to be in your church, they aren’t your real neighbors, and they are poor excuses for family.

Too often, people remain silent because they don’t want to bear the cost of speaking up. They want to appease evil people in power at any price. They won’t report a misbehaving supervisor, confront a bullying coworker, or correct their wives because they don’t want to have to deal with the reprisals that are likely to follow. They don’t realize that their wicked cowardice is not only detestable to God, but can only earn them false rewards that are guaranteed to be repaid with interest.

Evil that is not addressed will fester and grow. If you do not call out evil when you see it, you share in the guilt for enabling it.

A priori impositions on our free speech aren’t uncommon. We face these in general in the form of societal expectations and specifically from family members, friends, and employers.

Many modern examples of compelled speech occur in the workplace and social scene. Here’s a less commonly recognized example: Have you ever had a friend preface a story by asking you not to share what they are about to say? You probably wouldn’t recognize this as a seed for dishonesty, but it is. Without first hearing the story, you can’t know whether agreeing not to share it will violate what you consider best in what you do as a result of hearing it. So why agree ahead of time on how you will react?

You should always remain free to act in the way you see fit based on the information you have. When someone imposes a condition of non-action, they are asking you to act differently than you believe is right. If anyone ever gives you constraints on what you can do with information before giving it to you, interrupt them and refuse those constraints. You can say something like, “I reserve the right to act on this information as I see fit. If you have a problem with that, it’s better that you don’t tell me.” You may be shocked to notice how many times this happens, and how much previously unnoticed emotional baggage you free yourself from when you reserve the right to act as you feel you need to.

It is dishonest to break your agreements. Often, people make promises regarding the future with implicit conditions that they don’t bother doubting because they believe them so sure. You do not know the future. If you make an agreement that is based on your expectations of the future, you should state what those conditions are. If you can’t or won’t specify those conditions, you should not make the agreement.

Chapter 8: Differentially Value the Opinion of Others

It may be tempting to prioritize what others think of you above alternative options, such as what you believe is best. Like all forms of dishonesty, the full effects of prioritizing the opinion of others are far worse than they may seem.

The desire to be treated better than you would if you presented yourself to be as you really are is just one specific kind of greed. By fostering it, you are feeding it, and soon what seems like a manageable amount of the vice will spiral into less-manageable and more harmful forms. The gradient of greed includes lying, stealing, and even murdering. While it’s obvious that pretense does not always advance past lying, know that this is the dangerous road you choose when you pretend to be more or better than you are.

Ironically, living so as to please others always leads to treating others worse than you would if you were honest about who you really are. This should not be surprising. When you pretend to be different than you are, it’s never for those you are attempting to please. Deceit is always a selfish desire where you lie to get others to treat you better than they otherwise would. If you really care about other people, invest less effort in manipulating their opinion of you, and more effort in being who you really are around them.

The best way to care less about what others think is to become a coherent person. When you align your beliefs, desires, and actions, you will enjoy the constant assurance that you are on the right path and doing the right things for the right reasons, so far as you know, no matter what the rest of the world says or does or thinks.

Deceit in self-representation runs rampant in the modern world. Self-representation seems to be a longstanding quality of human nature, but the modern inception of image filters, digital avatars, shapeshifting clothing, extreme cosmetics, and plastic surgery all combine to make it easier and more extensive than ever before.

In his own time, Paul recognized fakery towards others to be a problem. He wrote: “Let love be without dissimulation....” (Romans 12:9) Dissimulation means concealment of one’s thoughts, feelings, or character. Such pretense is everywhere today.

All too many people wear a mask, exerting extreme effort to hide who they really are. How they present themselves to others and even to themselves does not match who they know they really are. They wear different masks for different occasions, all with the intent of obtaining greater favor than they would with their true identity.

People pretend to be different than they are to enjoy benefits beyond what they deserve. Will it make you feel any better about yourself to get credit for being someone you aren’t? An unfortunate consequence of fakery is that one’s entitlement becomes based on the illusion they project, rather than their actual worth. Inflated entitlement causes you to reject options that are actually the best available to you and prevents you from enjoying gratitude in the things you actually deserve.

Too many think that they can somehow find a shortcut to what they say they desire through anything but the truth, but these benefits don’t last. Realize that whatever you have through deception is as much of an illusion as the deception that enabled you to obtain it. Whatever limited benefit comes through pretending to be better than you are will be overcome by reality sooner or later, and will always carry a greater permanent price than anything it paid in the short term. The truth always manages to be revealed. Any arrangement in your life based on anything but who you really are will only endure as long as you manage to avoid the portions of reality that would overwhelm the illusion. Benefits that come to you through fakery can only be maintained as long as the deception endures.

The benefits of a forged facade aren’t worth as much as they are thought to be, even while they endure. Whatever benefit you receive from wearing a mask will be as shallow as your pretended personality.

Dishonest people are constantly trying to hide. They hide from themselves. They hide from others. They hide from life. And yet, everything they do to hide actually makes what they are trying to hide more obvious to everyone else.

The more a person tries to hide from themselves, the more they will need to do to continue hiding from themselves. Their increasingly obvious efforts and inevitable mistakes make it that much easier for everyone to see. As you lie more and more, you further expose your deepest, darkest secrets, which you mistakenly believe are hidden only because you’ve managed to hide them from yourself. Like a silly toddler who thinks he is hiding from everyone by covering his eyes, you are only fooling those who are as dishonest—and therefore as blind—as you are.

Just as you can’t do good secretly without public consequences, you can’t do evil secretly without public consequences. These consequences will cascade until all things are known by all. The more someone lies, the more easily others can see who they really are.

Honest people hope that others see more of who they really are. They want to see everything about themselves—especially the dark parts—so they can come to God and have him teach them how to be better. Dishonest people hope others don’t see them for who they really are because they don’t want to see themselves as they really are. How differently would you act if everything you did, and every reason for which you do it, were plainly known to everyone? If you would act any differently than you do for any reason other than to account for the limits in understanding and intelligence of other people, you are a dishonest person.

Some people claim to lie in order to help another person feel better, but this is misguided. You can’t lie without harming yourself, whoever you are lying to, and everyone else. When you lie, you make the world a worse place than it would otherwise be. A lie that makes someone feel better does so only temporarily, and only by postponing or denying the truth. Postponing consequences only compounds the intensity of those consequences when they finally come. Any apparent short-term good offered by a lie will absolutely be overtaken by the long-term evil that always accompanies it. A truly empathetic person would never choose to boost a person’s present feelings at the cost of their future situation. A person truly concerned with the benefit of another person would necessarily have to calculate that benefit in the scope of the long-term. The net harm of any lie is always greater than any net benefit. False empathy, false charity, flattery, and all other forms of lies that seem to be for the benefit of another are actually just for the benefit of the person telling them.

Lies in the name of false empathy go far beyond saying false things to make others feel good in the moment. They entail any thought, feeling, or action that purports to be for the benefit of another while actually being for the benefit of self. One way to detect false empathy is to pay attention to how effectively the thought, feeling, or act actually addresses what is needed or wanted. For example, everyone knows someone who loves giving gifts, yet who can’t seem to buy anything desired by or useful to the recipient, and won’t stop even when asked to. In such a case, it is abundantly obvious to everyone except the gift-giver that their giving is actually about how it makes them feel, rather than actually serving the person receiving the gift. The selfish gift-giver is just one specific example of a more general peddler of false empathy: the love-bomber.

Love-bombers are those who go above and beyond any normal limits of praise, service, or giving, but only do so in order to indebt you to reciprocate when and how they insist. To see a love-bomber’s true character, analyze how they treat those who can’t or won’t do anything for them. This is how they will inevitably treat you when you fail to meet their unattainable requirements for on-demand reciprocation. A truly selfless person will always act with the motive of benefiting others, even when dealing with those who can’t benefit them and even with their enemies.

The scriptures consistently instruct us to treat others with equal application of consequences. The scriptural phrase for this—being “without respect of persons”—means to be impartial. Partiality is when you base your view or treatment of someone or something on anything other than its objective merit. Partiality is possible with people, but also with things and ideas. Partiality is treating anything differently than it deserves, based on dispassionately applied uniform and objective standards.

All of the following are examples of partiality.

When you treat others based on how they make you feel, rather than how they really are.
When you ignore evidence that conflicts with your preconceived feelings about someone or something.
When you resist an argument for reasons other than the pertinent facts.
When you make a choice based on its ease rather than what is most beneficial.
When you make choices based on fear instead of logical expectation of cost and benefit.

Impartiality prioritizes facts over feelings, while partiality often prefers feelings to facts. Partiality is dishonest because you are being inconsistent in your behavior between similar situations. Remember: honesty requires you to reconcile to reality, which includes acting consistently across examples of similar situations.

We should be on guard to ensure that we are treating other people and things according to their merit and without prejudice or bias. As we emulate God’s impartiality, we will incur his favor. As we deviate from God’s impartiality, we will incur his wrath.

It’s not unusual for a person to seek to be liked by all. Everyone has different expectations, and it is impossible to please everyone. To please one person tends to require offending some other person. Differing desires make mutually exclusive expectations increasingly likely across larger groups.

Some try to skirt this impossible puzzle by pretending to believe what they do not, morphing their actions and words to fit the expectations of whoever is observing them. Faking who you are to gain false approval from others carries a multitude of penalties that guarantee a long-term cost higher than any short-term benefit. Whatever penalties come for living sincerely are always worth the cost.

Faced with the reality that you can’t please everyone, you will have to choose who to please. How do you choose whose opinion you should care the most about?

Jesus had many bad things to say about those who made choices based upon public opinion rather than their conscience. For example, he said.

The Lord’s opinion matters more than any man’s. To prefer any person’s opinion over God’s is to guarantee outcomes less than what you could otherwise enjoy.

Being honest will likely require you to see and believe differently than almost everyone else. You can’t live according to how everyone else thinks of you without living insincerely. You can’t live insincerely without living in opposition to your soul, and no worldly gain is worth losing your soul.

Because most people are so different from God, you should expect that they will like you less the more like God you become. Maximizing God's opinion of you will require you to offend many, since he sees things very differently than human nature does. The more you serve God, the more different you will be than others.

You have to get to the point where you care more about what God thinks of you than what others do. You can’t care what God thinks and care what others think at the same time.

Always live up to your sincere understanding of what God would do in your place, not what others expect of you. Follow what you sincerely believe, even when it puts you at odds with other people. Sin is determined by what you believe, not what others believe. Sin is less than what you know is your best (see James 4:17), not less than what others think is best for you. Often, you will disagree with others on what is best.

Instead of trying to be liked by those who you don’t want to resemble, expect to be hated by them. While the common response is to act so as to avoid conflict with such people, you should instead use their offense as a barometer to measure your own worth. If your beliefs, feelings, and actions aren’t offensive to those whose beliefs, feelings, and actions you feel are worse than yours, you should question whether you are living authentically.

The mistake we make in our perceptions of others’ opinions about us is that we make no distinction between them. People have vastly differing amounts of wisdom and experience, and any approach that treats their opinions as equally valuable is sure to be ill-fitting to either the foolish or the wise. The approval of another person is only as valuable as the value of that person. As long as you are tethered to the approval of another, you will never grow beyond their limits. While you remain tethered to the opinion of all people, you also tether yourself to the caliber of thoughts, feelings, and actions found in the average person. Normal people are, by definition, mediocre. If you seek for the approval of those who are above-average, you will have to be better than mediocre. Being better than average is not a passive outcome.

Effort is required to exceed the average, and succeeding ensures you will endure opposition from those who choose not to do the same. How well can you carry the rejection of most people, many of whom will misunderstand your actions, question your motives, undervalue your sacrifice, and envy your success? How different are you willing to be?

You would be utterly astonished to see how often and to what extent the qualities of our character are manifested in our lives. While these manifestations are almost totally hidden from almost everyone, those with sufficient understanding can see them as plainly as you can someone’s hair color or height. Your emissions of character might be invisible to you, but they can be as significant, obvious, and constant to an observer as the background noise of a kitchen appliance is to someone paying attention to, even if it remains unnoticeable to anyone else.

Character traits are so deeply rooted that they tend to emit clues in even the smallest of actions. Little outward actions can provide strong demonstrations of large internal attributes. A wise observer can learn a great deal about someone’s core values and deep desires through the smallest or seemingly mundane actions.

It comes as a surprise to many that there are people in the world so wise that they will quickly come to know you better than you know yourself. This familiarity is not limited to the experiences you have had, but will extend into accurate projections of how you would act in situations beyond your present experience, each of which demonstrates who you are beyond what you can see without them.

Have you ever wondered how it was that, during his mortal ministry, Jesus could know such private things about a person just by meeting them? Though he obviously had supernatural vision, the Lord leaned on the outward signs of inward character.

When he called his apostles, he did not call men with whom he grew up in Nazareth, but from new acquaintances in other towns. What clues did he use? Everything! Their reactions to his actions, their independent choices (such as their vocations), and everything else they did and didn’t do or say provided evidence for their character, all of which he processed over time, including a long night in prayer before he called them. It was no coincidence that several of the apostles had chosen the vocation of fishing—that much closer to becoming eventual fishers of men—or that Levi’s profession as a tax collector was assessing the value of things, which aided him in recognizing the value of the Lord when he was unrecognized by so many. Such signs are evident in the lives of all people for those with eyes to see them.

Similarly, those who successfully identified Jesus as the Christ did so through using the same subtle clues that he used to identify and choose the most righteous men as his disciples. After the Lord’s resurrection, he walked incognito with two disciples. While they failed to recognize him as he unfolded the scriptures during the long walk, it was the subtle signs in his blessing of bread they shared at the end of their journey that opened their eyes to who he was (see Luke 24). John the Baptist recognized the sign of the dove as the promised indication of the Messiah, and in response to John’s later inquiry, Jesus cited several particular expressions of his character as the evidence he was looking for.

The better you know yourself, the less likely it is that you will come across someone who knows you better. Unfortunately, very few people know themselves very well at all. While you can learn to see how you really are incrementally through the choices you make and their repercussions, other people can sometimes provide an expedited channel.

Subtle clues were used in scripture by others who sought to measure the character of others. For example, Rachel was identified by Abraham’s servant as a woman worthy of being Isaac’s wife through her willingness to perform the considerable labor to pull water up from the well for a stranger and his many thirsty camels (see Genesis 24).

Though not all people have enough understanding to discern them fully, to one who is aligned with the spirit of God, your secret works and motives may as well be a neon sign mounted on your face.

Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right. (Proverbs 20:11)

If people understood just how much of themselves they reveal to a person of understanding with every word they utter or omit, and everything they do or don’t do, they would probably avoid such a person at any cost.

The more you engage in dishonesty, the more numb you become to the ever-increasing damage you cause in yourself and others. Just as someone else is usually the first to tip you off to the presence of a skinnumbing biting mosquito, you may need the observations of an objective third party who cares more about you than you do to point out unnoticed harm. Once you have lost the ability to feel guilt while lying, the habit can only be broken through extensive, deliberate effort, typically requiring a patient, determined, and very kind friend who is willing to help you notice when you are dishonest. These people are rare in the population, but even rarer in the friend circles of established liars, from which they are summarily extirpated as part of the liars’ attempt to avoid guilt by preserving their bubble of delusion. As a result, the jolt of truth usually comes from an outsider during a chance encounter.

An illustration of the full cycle—from neglectful lack of intention to willful lies, to continuously lying without conscious choice, to being suddenly confronted with jarring truth from a stranger—is given in the story of Korihor, whose example was discussed earlier to illustrate several other aspects of lying. Korihor gained a following by repeating ideas that were popular, but which he knew were false. After experiencing the eventual consequences of his repeated lies, Korihor admitted that he had known he was lying all along, but was seduced into believing them the more he repeated them. Korihor’s repetition of lies didn’t just reduce his ability to see the truth, they transformed him so extensively that any relief of the negative consequences he incurred would result in him immediately resuming his previous behavior.

In order to know yourself deeply, you must experience more of the breadth of human experience. It’s not uncommon for people to assume that they would act in more difficult situations as they have in easy situations. That is almost never the case. You can’t know yourself very well until you see your reaction to great sorrow and great joy, great poverty and great wealth, great pleasure and great pain, great busyness and great leisure, and so on.

There are among us human beings whose experiences have more fully extended across the available breadth. If they have sufficient wisdom, they may be able to apply their experience to your character qualities and help you see yourself beyond the limits of your own experience.

There are vast differences among people, and you’ll need to exercise judgment in identifying the few who possess the wisdom to help you. Though much could be said on this topic, a short list of tips can be helpful.

Those who have solved the problems at least as difficult as those you face are preferable to those who have not.
Problems solved are more important than credentials earned.
Those who have achieved what you seek to achieve are preferable to those who have not.
Those who can give you solutions are better than those who can merely give you a place to talk about your problem.
Those who are willing to help you for free tend to be more sincere than those who want something in return.
Of those who charge money, those whose earnings come from your success are more likely to provide greater value than those who bill by the hour they spend with you.
Those who give more than they receive are preferable to those who take more than they give.

All potential has a path to being fulfilled. Sometimes the path is known and the person is already capable of taking the next step on it. Often, however, the person lacks the strength or motivation to take the next step, and sometimes the next step is not known. Too often, potential goes unfulfilled because a person is too prideful to accept that they do not have all the answers and are not capable of solving every problem alone. Too often, potential goes unfulfilled because a person is terminally trapped at the limits of their present knowledge. In cases including these, the assistance of another can be helpful.

Reality is successive and progressive. Your knowledge of yourself, others, and the world grows line upon line. It is always the case that there is someone else out there that knows what still lies beyond your own understanding. No matter where you are on your path, there is someone, somewhere, that knows the next steps better than you, has already taken them, and who can help you by identifying options you haven’t considered, provide you with better reasons and stronger evidence for and against the options you face, and help you take the next step.

Sudden problems are hardly ever sudden at all, but the first visible symptom of a deeper, long-standing fault in yourself that would probably be much more visible to an outsider. Much like a plantar wart, if you fail to do the more painful work of digging out the root of the problem, you are just going to face even greater pain later. It is not uncommon to require the assistance of a mentor to help you see and totally address the lack of understanding that caused an unexpected consequence. Challenges beyond your ability can show you who you are and help you become better, but you’ll probably still need the help of another person to see and address them. Seek out someone who saw it coming to help you better prepare for the future. Look for those who have what you want, and openly investigate whether the new beliefs or actions that worked for them will work for you.

When you find yourself with problems you can’t solve, needs that you can’t meet, questions you can’t answer, and desires that remain unfulfilled, be open to new ideas, actions, and people that are different from what you’ve already tried.

When you care more about what others think about you than the truth, you will subconsciously block out thoughts that you know will cause others to look on you poorly. You will never even get to the point where you can rationally consider these ideas or the actions that align with them. The ideas and actions you fail to consider may well be the solutions to the problems that beset you and the answers to the questions that beguile you.

You need to realize that preferring the reactions of others over fidelity to your own beliefs and desires is one and the same as believing that those you are trying to impress have a greater effect on your outcomes than the rest of reality. Inasmuch as you sincerely and accurately model the laws of cause and effect that govern the world, you build a set of rules predicting what will happen under certain conditions. To set these aside in preference for the approval of others is to adopt the belief that the person or people in question have a greater influence on the universe as it pertains to you than anyone or anything else, which is patently absurd.

To the extent that you care about what all other people think, you will find yourself reacting poorly in the presence of those few whose opinions matter more. These people have thoughts, feelings, and actions that provide an increment of improvement over your own, but to the extent that you are concerned with pleasing everyone, what they offer will offend many of those you are trying to please.

In spite of the powerful potential of the opinions of others, don’t ever blindly follow anything that anyone says. Truth never stands alone; it always leaves abundant clues. Nothing should ever be accepted as true without evidence commensurate to the scope of the truth. Just as stranger ideas require greater evidence, ideas that purport to have greater worth also require greater evidence. How you really are is of the utmost importance, and someone’s unsubstantiated guess is worth very little weight.

The opinion of others is only as valid as the strength of their reasons for holding it. Evidence can come in many forms, from prior demonstrations of wisdom in the person sharing their opinion, to specific examples of your past behavior that align with the claims. When a person presents insufficient evidence, you should doubt what they say. If a perspective presents stronger evidence than an alternative, honesty obligates you to accept it. When you do, realize that you are not just blindly accepting another person’s opinion. If someone can persuade you to think, act, or feel as they do, then by all means do so— but you will do it because you believe it to be best, not because they expect you to.

Requiring sufficient evidence is also a key to preventing others from saying anything about you that hurts your feelings. If they fail to provide sufficient evidence of their opinion about you, the only reason you have to care about what they think is the damage they might do to those without the wisdom to discern between opinions that have sufficient evidence and those that do not.

While the perspective of wise or accomplished people can be invaluable in increasing the accuracy of your self-perception, the wise and accomplished are least likely to be identified or sought by those who most need their help. Wisdom in another is not frequently obvious to those who lack it in themselves. The best approach is to assume that a person knows of what they speak until they give you sufficient reason to doubt it. For most, this won’t take very long.

One indication that you are dealing with a wise person is that their words or presence make you feel less than you otherwise would. This offense is something most people recoil from, assuming it is due to the arrogance of the other person. However, the presence of real arrogance in another and its absence in you would make you feel better about yourself—not worse. If you find yourself feeling like less than you thought in the presence of another person, odds are that you are being temporarily relieved from an overinflated self-worth by the presence of someone better than you. Rather than make things worse by persisting in your pride, it is best to use such experiences to recalibrate your selfworth instead of persisting in your pride by assuming arrogance on their part.

The opinion of the unwise or ill-informed is inconsequential. Seek for and yield to the opinion of those wiser than you. If you have the opportunity to receive feedback from a wise person, resist the common tendency to diminish, deflect, or ignore what does not accord with your self perception. Instead, open-mindedly hear them out and try to objectively weigh the evidence they provide you with. As you weigh what they say, realize that what you wish were true about yourself is irrelevant to establishing how you really are. At the same time, do not disregard real evidence from your life that demonstrates the kind of person you are. In considering evidence of your virtues, do not disregard your knowledge of your faults. Hold fast to what you know to be true until and unless someone gives you sufficient reasons to do otherwise.

The only opinions that should matter to you come from those who have what you lack and want, including their character. What is the value of the opinion of someone who doesn’t have anything you want? Why should you care about the opinion of anyone who is less than you want to be?

You can and should seek out people you respect and ask them what they think about you rather than passively awaiting them to proactively offer their unsolicited opinion. It isn’t difficult to find a person devoid of the politeness that prevents unsolicited opinions, but this trait is much more common among fools than the wise. As a person becomes more wise, they will only be willing to share their unsolicited opinion to the extent they possess true benevolence. The possession of two rare traits is much more rare than the possession of either one alone.

Seek out those with whom you would trade lives if given the chance. Find those who have what you want, who know what you don’t, or who do what you are unable to. Ask them to give you advice, and carefully weigh what they say.

The advice of mentors will always be of varying degree of accuracy, so always remember your duty to vet all information and retain responsibility for your own reactions to whatever they say. Whether their advice is perfect or not, it will in almost every case be worth asking, as it will still provide you with options and ideas you hadn’t considered. Even bad advice has value, because the vetting process will help you enumerate reasons to have greater confidence in whatever you believe and do instead.

Some people have the unfortunate company of those who constantly discourage them from trying to improve themselves. When disparaging spouses, family members, or friends repeatedly signal that they do not believe you will ever be more than you presently are, it can be incredibly disheartening. You can find this message in surprising places, such as church, where most allegedly Christian teachers believe that you can never be more than you presently are, but if you can, it won’t be by very much. If you believe someone who tells you you’re hopelessly worthless, you will turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Significant improvement requires your whole heart and soul, and you will never pour those into anything that you believe to be impossible.

Conversely, if you believe someone who says you are capable of becoming better than you are, you will prove them right, too, for all of the opposite reasons. When you have credible reasons to believe that you are capable of more than you thought, you will try more than you would otherwise, and you will experience the benefits of doing so. This effect has been noted in many environments where a visionary, example-providing leader like Steve Jobs demanded outsized performance from others. In these situations, those involved always end up saying things like “when Steve was around, you felt like you could do anything, and you could.”

Always believe the voices that show you how you can be better, but never believe the voices that tell you that you can’t improve or don’t need to. Be the biggest optimist when it comes to potential, and an unrelenting critic when it comes to actuality.

What God thinks about you is much more important than what others think about you. If you perfectly perceived how he sees you, maximizing his pleasure would be the obviously optimal decision. Unfortunately, it is extremely unlikely that you know how God sees you, and while this book gives you powerful tools to improve your idea of how he sees you, it is possible that you are still in a position where someone else might see you more closely to how God does than you do.

What others think of you only matters to the extent they are more like God than you are. Note that this does not upgrade the value of someone’s opinion simply because they claim to be a Christian, nor does it preclude the opinion of a particular atheist being more correct than that of a particular Christian. Many who claim not to believe in God are more like him in at least some way than many who claim to believe in him. To follow the Lord is to be different and better—not just compared to those who know they hate God, but also compared to those who think they love him but don’t. To follow God requires you to turn away from most people who claim to be Christians and think, say, and do things that are far from God’s actual purpose and character.

If a person isn’t more like God than you, than their opinion should be assumed to indicate what to avoid rather than what to seek.

Seek out those who are most like God among those you know, and value their opinion of you above that of anyone else.

Much of how a person acts is based on their expectation of how others will view them. The desire to please others can lead us to improvement, but only up to the limit of what they see, the limit of what they are willing to say, and the limit of what they have already become. When you act to please God, not man, you gain strength to improve yourself fully—freed from the limits of others, and subject only to the limits of the good you are presently capable of seeing in him.

As you stretch to measure up to God’s idea of your potential, you will graduate beyond caring what those less like Jesus than you think about you.

Chapter 9: Address Your Differences with Others

It is rare to find someone willing and able to righteously judge others. Many refuse to criticize others under the erroneous idea that.

Jesus wouldn’t approve of it. The fact is that the Lord commanded us to judge as he would in our place. Others violate the Lord’s instruction by judging others while they still willingly do less than their best.

You should never criticize anyone while you are doing less than the best you know. You cannot accurately judge anyone while you are intentionally deviating from your idea of what is best.

The best thing an unrepentant person can do is to repent by forsaking all their sins. The second best thing an unrepentant person can do is to follow the lesson of the parable of the Unjust Steward, doing all possible to forgive the perceived faults of all people (see Luke 16). The worst thing an unrepentant person can do is to judge others.

Professed Christians are quite apt to overlook the faults of others, particularly those closest to them. They mistakenly believe that this is what God would do in their place and what God wants them to do.

The ministry of Christ was so full of the correction of others— especially in what would be considered impolite ways and in inappropriate circumstances—that one must conclude that those who hold this position must be reading from some other book!

People think that they are helping their loved ones by ignoring their faults. In reality, they are causing them tremendous harm. Consider that you know and care about your loved ones more than anyone else. They may successfully hide the fault you see from others, and if you don’t care about them enough to say something, who will?

The more you love someone, the more willing you should be to chasten them, even if it will cost you public shame, and even if it will cost you your relationship with that person. If you really care about someone, you will do everything you can to help them without regard to what you might lose in return.

There is nothing kind, beneficial, nor loving about refraining from pointing out potential improvement in others. The choice to remain silent in the face of disagreeable behavior has nothing to do with the benefit of others, and everything to do with your desire to avoid confrontation. It is cowardice—not charity—that motivates you to remain silent. True love doesn’t count the cost.

The Lord loved us by showing us the potential of man, fulfilled in himself, the express image of the Father. He showed his love by helping others see potential beyond what they thought they had. For example, when the rich young ruler came to him asking what more he could do, Jesus “loved” him by inviting him to specific improvements. We fulfill the Lord’s charge to love others as he loved us by helping them see, believe, and fulfill greater potential in themselves.

Love is the willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of another. Part of loving your neighbor as if he were yourself is pointing out to your neighbor what your conscience points out to you. You love your neighbor by pointing out deviations from the maximal potential that you perceive.

Some will argue that while they agree that God chastens those he loves, we should not do that, because we are not him. He is our master, and he has sent us to do what he did.

If you refuse to do or say what he would in your place, you are ashamed of God, and God is ashamed of you.

“Open rebuke is better than secret love.” (Proverbs 27:5) Pointing out the faults of others is the most loving thing you can do.

It is good to forgive those who sin, but it is better to do what you can to help them stop sinning. While these are not mutually exclusive, too many people find comfort in forgiving another person for sin while refusing to do what they can to help them stop. This disconnect reveals the motive for such behavior to be selfishness, not love. People incorrectly think that if they ignore the faults of others, God will ignore theirs. God does not and cannot forgive willful sin. While forgiving others of the willful sins for which they have repented is necessary in order for God to forgive you of the willful sins of which you have repented, God will not forgive you of willful unrepentant sin, even if you forgive the willful unrepentant sin of others.

The life of a person who is living in sin will not improve until and unless they stop sinning. Your forgiveness will not change their lives. Forgiveness is not given because of confession of sin alone; it also requires cessation of sin.

You can choose to forgive those who have not repented, but that doesn’t mean God will.

Forgiving others by ignoring their bad behavior does nothing to prevent the consequences of that behavior. Your willingness to overlook their decisions until now does nothing to help them encounter the blessings of obedience to something better. If you love a person who sins, you will do what you can to help them stop.

Many shy away from boldly speaking as the Lord would in their place because they feel guilty for not living up to what they believe is best. The guilt you feel when speaking hypocritically is not an excuse not to speak up. Rather, it is a call to become capable of speaking as the Lord would in your place without hypocrisy through first doing what he would in your place, or in other words, repenting of your sins.

If you want more courage in saying what the Lord would say, change your life to do more of what the Lord would do.

Those who act as they believe the Lord would at all times have no lack of courage in saying what he would. As you increase your heed and obedience to what you believe is best, you will find that your confidence in inviting others to be better will increase.

One of the greatest consequences of the terrible advice to be nice is the nullification of some of the most important and worthwhile intended effects of close relationships. Relationships with spouses, children, parents, and dear friends are meant to provide deep meaning and companionship. None of these intended outcomes can occur with relationships sterilized by niceness.

Intimacy is a measure of the depth of shared reality. It is a measure of shared awareness and co-existence of thoughts, feelings, and actions. The meaning that can be shared between any two people is limited by the intimacy shared between them. The limits of intimacy you experience with others in life probably indicates a similar limit in your intimacy with God, for all the same reasons.

Intimacy cannot be attained or maintained without conflict. To be a true friend, and especially a loyal spouse, requires you to do all you can to help each other be the best you can be, which certainly requires you to correct each other, especially telling each other what no one else can see, what no one else cares enough to tell them, and what they least want to hear.

Too many suffer from relationship sterilized by an unspoken quidpro-quo: you will not criticize them if they will not criticize you. To ignore differences is to lose whatever unity you had before as well as to miss out on the opportunity for greater intimacy through reconciling to more of revealed reality together. Sameness through intentional ignorance is not unity. What is the point of having a relationship with someone when it is only maintainable through a lengthy list of things you can’t talk about or do together, or parts of you that the other person doesn’t want to experience?

Intimacy is maintained and grown when two people respond by making the changes necessary to remain reconciled in light of a greater revelation of reality. Life will reveal new differences in thoughts, feelings, or actions between you and any other person. A greater revelation of reality acts as a catalyst, not just to reveal previously hidden differences, but for one or both people to improve their thoughts, feelings, or actions beyond prior hidden limits. Intimacy is increased through discovering and resolving differences, and decreased through ignoring and maintaining them. To the extent that these differences cannot co-exist, it is incumbent upon you to address them.

One reason people withhold from correcting others is that they fear what those people will do in response. We live in a society of lies. In ancient times, prophets drew great persecution by correctly pronouncing undesirable predictions upon people. In our day, such predictions are met with at least as much resistance, unbelief, and violence. In our day, it’s not just that prophets are told not to prophesy; normal people are commanded to ignore the obvious and well-known consequences of cause and effect and told not to speak what were considered indisputable statements of the obvious truth just a few years prior.

If you dare challenge what the mob has decreed, you will be treated to ridicule, false accusations, and violence. You could lose your job, your friends, and your family. The incidence and intensity of recent response has markedly increased, and it will continue to get worse. Society is marching headlong into times long foretold when people will be killed just for speaking the truth. Rather than challenge the status quo, more and more people simply submit to the threats of the mob, not realizing they are bringing upon them far worse consequences than the ire of the mob.

Correcting others is a non-negotiable requirement for retaining and growing in the breadth, depth, and accuracy of the truth that you perceive. Your ability to view potential is the same, whether you apply it to yourself or others. When you willingly ignore or otherwise fail to act on the potential you could see in others, you absolutely reduce your ability to see or act on your own.

To the extent that you do all you can to help all people and things incline towards their potential, your ability to see reality will expand in breadth, depth, and accuracy. To the extent that you withhold from doing all you can to help all people and things incline towards their potential, your ability to see reality will diminish.

To fear another’s reaction to correction is to fear man more than God, as God expects you to do all you can to help others see and fulfill their potential. Those who care more about what others think than they do what God thinks value the opinion of others more than the sanctity of their own conscience. They turn further and further away from the truth, and have stronger aspersion to truth and those who espouse it.

Earth life is designed to facilitate access to and acceptance of better ideas through interactions with people who have them. We are meant to be lights to other people, and other people are meant to be lights to us. As two people honestly share conflicting ideas, they will both draw nearer to the truth, and both draw nearer to God in doing so. This process is so critical that it serves a central role in how Zion is formed.

We can’t know a priori who has the greater light in the situations we are in. We go forth as humble servants, not knowing if we are going to teach or be taught. Those willing to do so with the assumption that they will be taught will increasingly find that that they have something of worth to share, but you can’t know which is the case if you never open your ears to hear or your mouth to tell the truth.

To take part in this process and receive the benefits from it, you have to notice and confront those whose thoughts, feelings, and actions differ from what you would do in their place.

Your awareness will grow as a function of your honesty. As you become more honest in acknowledging your own faults, you will increase in how easily you can see the faults in others. Their own ability to see their faults—like your own—is based on their honesty, and as your honesty grows relative to the average person’s, the faults you will see will increase. Increased ability to see faults comes with increased responsibility to do something about them.

God’s will is for everything to be as good as it can be. Since Eden, mankind has been charged to discover and implement the potential of all things. Sin is what is less than what is best, and we are accountable for the sin we see but do not say anything about. Your obligation as a believer in Jesus is to address all situations that deviate from your understanding of the best they could be.

Point out options, costs, and benefits of which others are unaware. Help other people see the additional options you see, giving them sufficient reasons to believe that they exist, they are possible, and they are better. Help others see consequences beyond what they see: both in terms of benefits and costs. Help them understand the consequences they don’t recognize or correctly estimate.

Many people today would consider the mention of others’ faults as being overly judgmental. However, the fact is that, in most cases, a person recognizes their own dishonesty and will give blatant indications of this before you draw attention to it. We all constantly leak out clues about our own judgment of our own thoughts, feelings, and actions—you just have to learn to recognize them. This tendency not only gives a strong tool for ensuring your judgment is just, but also highlights the moral obligation you have of calling out the faults of others. One of the reasons people continue to emit clues of their own self-judgment, even when they see themselves as doing something wrong, is that they are subconsciously seeking to soothe their conscience. If a person emits a pseudo confession to you, they are seeking pseudo forgiveness from you, which they will obtain if you allow their confession of moral crime to stand unchallenged. Do not let people do this. When someone admits to you that they have done less than their best, call attention to it, whether it is a seemingly small or large issue. Every time you leave a pseudo confession unchallenged, you contaminate yourself with the same dishonesty of the confessor, and open the door to surprisingly substantial consequences.

If you see a person doing something other than what you think is best, bring it up. When a person does less than the best they know, point it out to them. When a person does less than the best you believe they are capable of, you should say something to them to indicate that you believe they are capable of more, giving them as strong a reason as you can to prove your point.

Some people will act as badly as they can get away with. Having numbed their conscience, they no longer feel guilt and are only governed by the desire to avoid getting caught. To help them, confront them when you see them do or say something wrong. If they do so in public, confront them publicly. Help them feel the guilt they should for what they could have done better.

If you are bothered by something, say something. You can do so strategically by choosing the best time and place instead of doing so in the moment, but don’t let things slide. You may believe that withholding how you really think and feel is righteousness, but you are really only practicing deceit. Jesus engaged those around him when what they did bothered him. Jeremiah spoke of fire in his bones preventing him from remaining silent. There are many such cases throughout scripture where righteous people acted righteously in speaking out about what bothered them. If you care enough to be bothered, care enough to confront.

If you notice a difference in your perception from the person with whom you are speaking, bring it up. When a person has insufficient reasons for what they believe, point it out to them. When a person uses bad logic, point it out to them. When a person presents their conclusions, ask for their reasons. If they have none, help them understand that they have not undertaken the necessary research to have a position on this issue.

Many people will publicly proclaim falsehoods. Counter them by publicly contradicting them. This could happen on the street, in a meeting, or during a class. Sometimes falsehoods are uttered in sincerity, sometimes to test whether they will be allowed, and sometimes to compel you to say the same. Do not let error enjoy a greater dispersion than truth. Any time you are compelled to repeat what is false, boldly assume the cost, and speak the truth instead. The falsehood could be about an idea, a thing, or a person. It could be intentional or accidental. Do not ignore when someone incorrectly criticizes something or someone good. In every case, confront them them. Any time you are assaulted with an obvious lie, resist the temptation to remain silent. Speak the truth by challenging the falsehood. Show them where they are mistaken or lying.

When you think you have a better idea than someone else, share your reasons for what you believe. Realize that what you find to be sufficient reasons for your own belief might not be considered sufficient to them. Incumbent upon those who would help others improve is the duty to reformulate reasons into those that are most likely to be accepted by others. Remember that faith is a question of how willing someone is to respond to sufficiency of reason. This doesn’t mean that others will respond to the same information you did, or to the same form in which you received it. Your job is to make arguments better fitting for the other person than those you found sufficient.

Give people a chance to defend themselves before talking about them. Don’t speak about a person until you have spoken to that person. You shouldn’t say something about someone that you wouldn’t say if they knew about it. Do your best to give people the benefit of the doubt and to confront them about rumors before spreading them. In most cases, reflection on the matter will reveal that the issue is none of your business, even if true. Something should have to be very important to occupy your attention. If it doesn’t matter enough to go through the trouble of verifying, don’t bother spreading it. If it is worth verifying, ask before assuming. Don’t just suppose that you know the whole story or that their motives are what yours would need to be for you to do what they are allegedly doing. In all cases, be prepared to be told to mind your own business, which is a perfectly valid response given how often busybodies are corrected in the scriptures.

Recognize and resist the use of manipulative language. Rephrase ideas that are stated in an intentionally provocative way. Insist the other person say what is really meant instead of making insinuations, oversimplifications, or using slogans. Refuse to acknowledge language that shifts the blame for poor decisions (for example, “died by suicide” instead of “killed himself ”). Point out and refuse to use words created or redefined in the modern era.

Admit fault when persuaded of it. It is vitally important to admit your faults as you realize them, up to the degree of damage they caused. It is dishonest to refuse to say you are sorry and mean it when you have transgressed against another. It is especially dishonest to admit great fault in a minimal way. The Lord plainly taught that the greater the transgression, the greater ought to be the appreciation for forgiveness of it.

If you did something you knew was wrong, or perpetuate transgressions of the same kind repeatedly against the same person, or have deeply violated trust, or any number of other errors of great consequence or particularly nefarious motive, a simple “sorry” is dishonestly insufficient, and makes the matter worse than it was before.

When a person makes a better argument than you, change your perspective. You may not yet agree with them, but honesty compels you to at least adopt less confidence in your position than you previously had. If the event that the conclusion and reasons are stronger than yours, the only honest reaction is to adopt them as your own. This is such a rare occurrence that it is a strong indication of deep honesty in any person who does it.

Don’t respond to criticism with dishonesty. There are several dishonest reactions to criticism, including.

Blame shifting: Rerouting responsibility for the criticized fault to the one criticizing. No matter what happens prior to each choice you make, you alone are responsible for the choice.
Gaslighting: Denying the criticism without sufficient reason to disbelieve it. You can’t change reality through decree.
Triggering the accuser: Attempting to anger the one criticizing you in order for them to say or do something that you can claim is worse than whatever they are criticizing you for.
Minimization: Claiming that whatever you are accused of isn’t as bad as the accuser states it is, or that the fact they care about it makes it their fault, not yours.
Character assassination: Saying bad things about the person who criticized you to others, whether they are true or not. Do not tear down another person to try to feel better about yourself—it will only make you feel worse, as the guilt of the damage you do to them and those who might be helped by them will exceed the guilt you feel for your own prior faults.

All of these dishonest reactions to criticism are designed to soothe the conscience of the guilty without them having to improve. All of these dishonest reactions cause great harm to the one using them. If a criticism is true, the only honest reaction to it is to acknowledge the fault, thank the person for caring enough to help you see it, and make appropriate efforts to improve.

Don’t respond to dishonesty with dishonesty. Increasingly often, people feel justified in being dishonest in order to catch others in their dishonesty. There is no way to do this without harming yourself. Anyone tempted to lie in order to catch another in a lie should try to honestly consider their motives. Too frequently, those who lie in order to incriminate another are after something other than proving the other person a liar. For example, they may want to make the person look bad in order to make themselves look better in comparison, or to justify past or present poor decisions. Is it worth joining another in the penalties of lying in order to publicly expose them? The consequences of lying are upon a liar whether others presently recognize them as liars or not. The person you attempt to ensnare may respond honestly by improving, but you will remain a liar whether they do or not.

Never ghost others and always confront those who attempt to ghost you. Ghosting someone is not the same as refuting their argument. If you don’t have a reasonable counterargument, the honest response is to admit to the other person that they have a better position than yours. You could also ask for time to think or conduct more research, but don’t ignore the point made. Similarly, don’t tolerate this behavior from others. Press them into admitting that they lack a sufficient counterargument—doing so is the greatest chance they have for improvement.

Live up to what you believe at all times and in all places. The strongest reason you can give others to believe what you do is to live what you believe. Living what you believe provides a more tangible example than any vocal argument can provide. Examples speak louder than words. Showing the value of what you believe by example is more important than logically proving that it is correct. Demonstrating what is better by example requires less critical thinking skill and honesty than a superior argument does, and it’s harder to deny what is obviously better than what is rationally superior. You should never attempt to teach others something that you don’t first live yourself. Hypocrites do not have the convincing power of God through the spirit. Only a fool will believe a hypocrite, and even then only for so long as it takes to encounter the slightest inconvenience in their new belief.

Your sense of what is valuable and by how much it is valuable will differ from others. There will be many occasions where you find greater value in something than other people do. Boost what is good. By attempting to draw more attention to what has more value than commonly thought, you will either help others improve the accuracy of their appraisal of good, or be confronted with reasons that you should revise your own. Either way, you win.

God places us in precise situations in this life, and he expects us to interact with those around us, helping them see what we do, and learning from them when they see more or better than we do. You have the opportunity to provide unique value to those God has placed around you in life. Many of these people do not see, believe, or value what you do, and at least some will not have access to the information you possess unless you share it with them.

One lie that makes it harder to say what you really think and do what you really believe is the belief that people are essentially interchangeable, and therefore there is no unique benefit provided in living up to the best you know. The truth is that not all people see or value the same things, and everyone differs in how much they are willing to reconcile to and share what they see, believe, and value. Our differential capacity to understand value, see potential, and affect change makes every individual’s contribution important. Our many differences include.

The unique experiences we’ve had.
The degree of truth we perceive and the accuracy with which we perceive it.
How much opposition we tolerate in our willingness to live the truth ourselves.
How much opposition we tolerate in our willingness to tell the truth to others.

Because of the diversity of subjective experience, each person serves as an information source for everyone else. Each person sees a different degree of truth, and at a different accuracy. It is immensely important that each person tell the truth as they see it.

Even if those around you have access to others who would say the same thing in the same way you could, why would they? Just because a person in your life has access to others who see, believe, or value what you do doesn’t mean that those other people will have the courage to share.

It is very unlikely that the beliefs you come up with on your own will be as good as those you could discover through investigating the beliefs of others and comparing them against your own. After all, what is the likelihood that you have learned as much about all things as the composite of everyone you will ever meet? As we share what we perceive, what we believe about it, and why, we provide vital information that, when honestly processed, will help both parties develop more correct perspectives and stronger reasons to support them.

Many people abstain from sharing their beliefs for fear of pushback or critique from others, but this is precisely one of the greatest benefits of doing so. When you share your beliefs, you will either grow in your confidence in them, or find something better to believe in. Inherent in sincerely sharing your beliefs with others is opening yourself to their feedback. It shouldn’t be a rare case that sharing your beliefs and especially your reasons for them result in you changing one or both. You will either come away with stronger reasons for believing what you did before, weaker reasons, or coming away with new beliefs. All of these are positive outcomes, because all of them lead you to greater truth than whatever you had before.

Intervening in the decisions of others is a difficult activity in the modern world. In an environment where we are told that what others do is not our concern, we both neglect to speak up and are neglected in being spoken to.

A surprising degree of our common reticence to confront others comes from the cushioning surplus of modern life, where most mistakes can be easily absorbed into the unmerited prosperity surrounding us.

Ironically, it is precisely the historical paucity of reticence—at least on the part of the wise—that provides the prosperity that enables its abundance today. Throughout history, wise men and women have done all they could reasonably do to fight back against bad ideas. It’s easy to overlook just how much of the ministry of God’s servants was spent in directly refuting bad ideas. Even activities that seem completely different were actually surprisingly connected. For example, smashing idols, casting out devils, or conquering the Canaanites were all ways of pushing back against the spread of bad ideas created and maintained through falsehood.

Too often, what is said is chosen based on how easy it is to say, rather than how much it needs to be said. The most important things to say are those that are hardest to hear. Fighting falsehood always causes offense to those who love lies, but the fight is required for those few who will listen, and beneficial to all in either case.

The Lord has called us to care for his sheep. Your sheep include those you are directly responsible for, as well any any for whom you could render benefit without displacing something more important. You shepherd your sheep by providing what is necessary for them to develop into their full potential, subject to the limits in your understanding and resources. This requires understanding the hierarchy of what is most important. If a shepherd has to choose between saving a sheep’s life and avoiding hurting its feelings, there is no question which is more important. Shepherds do not neglect taking care of the sheep for fear of harming wolves in the process. In fact, a good shepherd proactively hunts wolves before they attack. Unfortunately, these lessons are lost on most modern Christians and parents alike, who routinely spare the wolves as if they were worth preserving, and sacrifice the sheep for fear of hurting their feelings.

Everything that everyone does matters to everyone. Every bad idea allowed to remain unchallenged affects the moral calibration of society. Immense consequences are unleashed based on whether or not truth is publicly defended. Lying is a communicable disease to which truth tellers are the only cure. Every unanswered challenge to the truth renders the conscience of all involved less willing to accept invitations of improvement and less capable of seeing the truth, paving the way for grosser violations of it in the future. Every lie told increases the likelihood of someone else lying. The more lies are told, the more that will be told, as there are many who will only tell the truth if everyone else is.

If you do nothing to challenge the differences you perceive between yourself and others, you pass on the opportunity to help those who may not have the experience, awareness, or courage that you do. You guarantee that worse ideas and their effects will flow down to those who are less willing or able to contend with them than you are. The only reason that we have to say things that shouldn’t have to be said is that those who should have said something said nothing.

There is a critical cohort of people who are aware of greater truth, are able to recognize deviations from it, have the integrity to live it themselves, and have the courage to help others to do the same. Without the opposing force of those who have uncommon honesty, courage, and understanding of reality, society will execute a downward spiral where they gradually lose more and more of the wisdom they have inherited from previous generations. Truth tellers—those who are willing to tell the truth, no matter how unpopular, are the only force stemming the otherwise inevitable chain reaction of increasing dishonesty. Become such a person, and make the enormous contribution you alone can in this world full of people not yet willing to do the same.

Chapter 10: The Importance of Alignment with God

God is the source and fulfillment of all good. Everything positive comes from and leads to God, and the concentration of its value increases the closer to him it is. Every positive experience and outcome flows from God through a conduit whose bandwidth is determined by how well aligned you are with God. God’s blessings come through righteousness, and those who seek to find greater outcomes through anything but learning more about and becoming more like him will be sorely disappointed. It is impossible to describe anything more important than opening the aperture of the flow between you and God, as everything you accomplish, the strength and endurance with which you labor towards it, the joy you have during and after, and every other significant or meaningful thing will be determined by how aligned you are with God.

The conduit from God to you has several critical components, each of which requires tuning in order to maximize the quantity, quality, and longevity of blessings from him to you.

The source.
The destination.
The bandwidth.
The distance.

As you perfect each of these components, you will maximize the blessings that you receive from God.

You begin to seek the blessings of God from where you are. Any limit you have in the accuracy and depth of how you see yourself will limit the flow of blessings from God to you.

You can’t be aligned with God more than you are aligned with yourself. It should be no surprise that while you are out of harmony with yourself, you cannot be in harmony with God. In order to maximize flow from God to you, you have to be “pure in heart,” or aware of and aligned in what you think, feel, and do. You will only have God’s goodness in your life to the extent that you align everything that comes out of you with everything inside of you.

As you learn who you really are and discover and remedy any dishonesty in how you think, feel, or act, you will remove barriers that prevent the maximal flow of good from God to you and, through you, to others. Complete honesty maximally opens the channel of God’s goodness in your life. As you live fully integrated in your mind, heart, body, and spirit, you will become an unimpeded channel for God’s light to flow into the world.

When you are in total alignment, God’s light can flow into, through, and from you without impedance.

You can’t see God beyond how accurately you see yourself. You can’t see much of how God really is beyond how much you see yourself as you really are. Any inaccuracy in your self-awareness will limit your ability to see God. To the extent that you do not see parts of yourself correctly, you will likewise see God incorrectly. Your inner and outer selves are the canvas upon which more of God’s character is painted. Until you know who you really are in your desires, thoughts, and actions versus who and how you wish you were, you will not be able to identify, make, and apply the changes necessary to align with God.

You can’t see much more of God more than you see yourself. You can’t see the breadth of God beyond how extensively you see your own breadth. To the extent that you do not see parts of yourself at all, you will not see the pertinent parts of God.

You can’t see the depth of God beyond the depth of yourself that you see. You will never know God much more deeply than you know yourself. If you don’t yet know yourself, being far less than God, how can you ever expect to know God?

The gospel is about gaining greater awareness of God, and fully aligning yourself with him in how you act and feel. You can’t do that while you are still unaware of and inconsistent in how you think, act, and feel.

God is the destination you seek. Any limit you have in the accuracy and depth of how you see God will limit the flow of blessings from him to you. Ignorance or error in how you see God will create limits in the trust you have in God, the motivation you have for making changes to become more like him, and the accuracy of the changes you make to become more like him.

The Lord promised that we will encounter additional evidence to build our trust in him as we follow his example. Part of this evidence comes from receiving what we ask from him. The scriptures contain many promises from the Lord that he will grant us what we ask, believing it is right, and believing God will give it.

If you do not receive greater evidence as a result of doing what you believe is his will, you should assume that something is significantly lacking in your understanding of God and search for those who have succeeded further than you. You will only do this to the extent you are honest. Very few people recognize or respond to these signals, but if you maintain enough humility to prefer a greater relationship with God through correction than you do the false pleasure of affirmation in your present beliefs about him, he will abundantly bless you with an increasingly improved idea of how he is.

The depth, breadth, and accuracy of your knowledge of God is far more important than getting what you want. Greater evidence of the correctness of your understanding of God’s will is essential to having greater trust in God which, in turn, is required for him to lead you to making more significant changes to become more like him to receive even greater blessings.

Only to the extent that you know God can you accurately compare and contrast yourself with him to then enumerate improvements by which you can become more like him.

As you pay attention to your idea of how God is and fully live up to it, you will receive ample feedback indicating where your understanding of him is lacking or incorrect.

It is important to understand that total alignment with God is a functional requirement: it opens the gateway to greater flow of God’s goodness into your life. The Lord taught that.

This passage is recited more often than it is understood. The Greek words translated as “eye” and “single” are significant contributors to the confusion. “Single” here means united, whole, without complication or contradiction, and clear. To have a single eye is to be fully aware of what you want, why you want it, and how to get it. It requires working fully to obtain it, without any hidden motives or dishonest perspectives. To have an eye single to God is to be an integrated, honest person whose central, transcendent purpose is to learn and accomplish the will of God.

The bandwidth of the connection with God available to us spans an enormous range. While all people are born with a baseline connection to God, it is possible to expand this connection to such an extent as to have constant and complete access to the very next increment of anything God could possibly tell you.

The bandwidth of the conduit between God and you is much like a riflescope: its usefulness depends on what you point it at and how well you align the scope to it. What you think, feel, and do are interrelated. The more they are aligned and focused on God, the faster you will grow in his knowledge, wisdom, and power. The more aligned you are with God, the more you will be able to do what others can’t. Jesus was able to do what others couldn’t because he was better aligned with the Father than anyone else. This is why Jesus was able to cast out devils that his disciples could not, and even as a child had greater wisdom than the most learned elders.

The more aligned you are with God, the more God’s goodness will flow into you independent of whatever is happening outside or around you. God’s influence will enliven, improve, and enhance everything in your life. Everything will be better. You will feel greater strength to persevere when you are down, and when you feel good, you will feel better for longer.

The more coherent you are in what you think feel, and do, the more you have aligned these with your understanding of God, and the more correct your understanding of God is, the greater your bandwidth with God will be. To the extent any of these tunings are lacking, you will see much less of God and receive much less from him.

Almost no one honestly considers the abundant evidence they have of their distance from God. In the scriptures, we regularly read of examples of people whose lives were full of the undeniable, significant, and abundant fruits of a rich relationship with God. Because God does not change, those who enjoy anything less should admit that their distance from God is much greater than that of those they read about in the scriptures.

The distance between you and God is a result of your lack of understanding of how he is, which is itself due to your unwillingness to live up to what you already know about him. Each way in which you think, feel, or act less than the best you know creates impedance between you and God. Every difference between how you are and how you believe God to be creates an obstruction in the flow of God’s goodness to and through you.

It is possible to close the distance between you and God. This is done as you learn about and make whatever changes are necessary to become more like him. In order to begin increasing the flow of God’s goodness in your life, you must first live up to the goodness he has already revealed to you. To move towards God requires you to consistently think, feel, and do what you perceive as best and to improve your understanding of what is best. To clear the obstructions between you and God and maximize the flow, you have to pierce and tear the barriers, obtaining a “broken heart and contrite spirit” through fully emulating the example of God, as far as you understand him to be.

God will reveal himself even further to those who seek out and take advantage of opportunities to learn more about him. Learning more about him includes learning more about reality and what is best. All things testify of God. To the extent that you turn away from opportunities to learn more about reality, you turn away from opportunities to learn more about God. God is the spirit of truth. To the extent that you fail to live up to any truth you know, you fail to live up to what you know about him. To the extent that you reject the truth in anything, you reject him. To the extent that you allow absurdities to be proclaimed without standing up for the truth, you fail to stand as a witness of Christ, and he will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of him.

As you exercise the faith of obeying his example as far as you see it and search to learn more about God, you will grow nearer to him.

Every aspect of the good that flows from God to you depends on your honesty with yourself, others, and God. Any lack of honesty precludes the full flow of God’s goodness into your life. You will never experience a substantial increase in the flow of God’s goodness into you and your life while you are still a dishonest person. You can’t be honest without growing towards God, and you can’t grow towards God without first being honest.

Dishonesty precludes many types of goodness from flowing into your life, including being born again. The devil is the father of lies, and you can’t be born again while you are one of his children.

God does not lie, and you can’t be very much like him while you still do.

Dishonesty doesn’t just slow down the flow of God’s goodness into you—it makes invisible the path to greater goodness. You can’t identify what is best or improve your understanding of it without being an honest person. Dishonesty will cause you to lose the ability to see the ways in which you knowingly deviate from God’s example and will in your life.

Honesty is recoverable, but requires a process more difficult than living according to the truth in the first place. You regain honesty by correcting the ways you knowingly deviate from God’s example.

A crucial step in achieving honesty is to be yourself with God. Hiding from God is silly because he already knows everything about you. Nothing you do can hide who you really are from God. He sees and knows everything about you, including and extending beyond all you know about yourself. He sees the parts of you that you can’t see, won’t look at, or won’t truthfully acknowledge.

There is no benefit in pretending you are better than you are with God. Hiding from God doesn’t change what he sees; it only reduces what he can do to help you. You won’t escape from God’s judgment by pretending to be better than you are, but you will distance yourself from God’s goodness. Hiding from God won’t reduce God’s ability to see your badness, but it will reduce your ability to see his goodness.

You perceive, receive, and appreciate God’s goodness to the extent that you fully open ourselves to him. God can only sanctify what you expose to his light. The desire to cover our faults will always distance us from God and the miracles he could work in our lives. Only through freely admitting even the worst parts of ourselves can you draw nearer to him and be healed. Like the man with the shriveled hand and the crowd of onlookers, you must decide whether to draw nearer to God by exposing yourself to him or recoiling from him; showing how you really are or pretending to be someone else.

The healed man and the stubborn onlookers responded to Jesus in opposite ways. While the man who would be healed stretched out his deformed hand toward the Lord, the observers hardened their hearts. The “hardness” of the hearts of the observers, as translated from Greek, means insensible, dulled, and covered with a callous. God already sees exactly how you really are, but you won’t view yourself the same way until and unless you cease attempting to hide from him.

Are you ashamed of what you want, what you think, what you believe, what you say, or what you do? Some laugh when discussing how Adam and Eve attempted to hide from God after their rebellion in the Garden of Eden. But how many do these same things? We all face the same tests as Adam and Eve, and very few have overcome the test of facing God in their nakedness.

His disciples said, “When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?” Jesus said, “When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the living one, and you will not be afraid!” (Gospel of Thomas 1:37)

The problem with hiding from what makes you ashamed is that it creates within you a downward spiral of decay, both in the quality of your character and your ability to discern the process of degradation. The more ashamed you are of yourself, the less you will pay attention to and address the actions or qualities that make you ashamed, which creates greater blindness, more problems, more shame, and more hiding. Guilt from these particulars will creep into your general disposition. It is best to confront who you really are and seek to correct the things about yourself that you are ashamed of.

Are you honest with God about what you want, why you want it, and what you are willing to do to get it? Do you say you want something when you actually want something else more? Do you say you want something while being unwilling to pay what it costs? Do you say you want something for one reason, but actually want it for another? All of these lies will significantly impede what blessings God can send you. How can he help you draw nearer to what you actually want if you won’t be honest about what you actually want? How can he teach you more about what you should want if you aren’t honest about what you say you want, how badly you want it, or why you say you want it?

Don’t attempt to hide yourself from God in prayer by saying anything but what you truly think and feel. Communication with God can only change your standing with God to the extent you honestly open your heart and mind in full vulnerability. Acknowledge that he already knows everything you will say to him, all you have and have not done, why you are the way you are, and how you really feel about it all. Only those who interact with God in sincerity will find him.

Those who pray insincerely are not praying as a means for God to make them better, but to feel better about how they already are. Both will receive what they seek.

Don’t attempt to hide yourself from God in how you live your life, pretending to be something you’re not. Fake good is accounted by God as evil.

It is much better to be sincere about who you really are in your interactions with God (even if you have little to offer) than it is to pretend to be better than you really are (even if you are pretending to be very good). This is why the Lord commended the widow’s small donation over the larger donations from the Pharisees.

Be honest with God. Act in acknowledgement that he knows everything about your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Rather than hide from him, go to the opposite extreme. Willingly open yourself to him.

Learning and living the Lord’s purpose is a central aim in life. In adopting God’s purpose, we accept his invitation to become one with him (see John 17).

In order to align with God, you have to adopt his purpose in place of your own.

Many people are aware enough of themselves and God to know that there are many ways in which their purpose differs from God’s. They may shy away from the task because of the magnitude of change required to align their purpose with God. No person should ever feel they are beyond his ability to lead them closer. After all, “he has all power to save every man that believeth on his name and bringeth forth fruit meet for repentance.” (Alma 12:15)

Total preference for the purpose of God above your own is not meant to be something rare or exceptional. Adoption of God’s purpose is non-negotiable for any disciple of Christ.

It is only when you are in full alignment with God that you will fully receive the goodness that he has the ability to flow into your life. Because his glory and power are completely coupled to his character attributes, the concentration of God’s goodness on those sincerely aligned with him is not arbitrary. God’s goodness is always dispensed for and in accordance with what he would do in your place. In order to have more of God’s power and glory in your life, you need to “call upon his name”—that is, seek for and submit to his character in all things.

When you work in concert with God’s purpose, you contribute to and benefit from the efforts of everyone else who does the same, astronomically boosting what you are capable of accomplishing and becoming. The more deeply you learn and adopt God’s purpose, the more deeply God’s goodness will flow into every facet of your life.

The wide-ranging effects of the spirit are referred to as quickening. The quickening of the spirit increases the level of detail you are able to perceive, the speed with which you can process information, and the correctness of your judgement of ideas, opportunities, things and people. As God quickens you, you will perceive more details about yourself, others, and the world around you. Your ability to notice and weigh strengths and weaknesses of arguments will increase. You will notice connections between ideas, objects, or effects that you did not before. You will detect motives in people that you did not previously detect. The value you appraise in different options of action will change, as will the cost and benefit of anything you do. Each change from quickening will bring your mind and heart to a state more similar to God’s.

The more God’s spirit flows into you, the more you will learn about what he thinks, feels, and does.

As you give your all for the greatest possible benefit of the world, as far as you know, God will do all he can to magnify your sacrifice into something even greater. He will salt your sacrifice.

Most people who have experienced powerful spiritual experiences do so through something external—something they do not cause to happen, but which happens to them. The spirit of God is not an arbitrary external entity. Rather, it operates within you through your own faculties of thought and feeling. These faculties form your conscience, a precious gift from God that acts as a compass capable of identifying what is best to you.

Your conscience is both a result of and a driver for your awareness of reality. It illuminates the landscape of reality like a lighthouse, shining outward into a world draped in the darkness of ignorance. The light is focused through what you choose to attend to and think about, and it elucidates what was, what is, what could be, how to make it so, and why it matters.

Your conscience is a critical lifeline that will grow more and more as you develop, consult, and honestly apply it, showing you what is best in greater accuracy and to a greater extent. Strictly speaking, your conscience includes the scriptural senses of both mind and heart, though few would see it as both, and some would not make this connection at all.

The conscience can operate on several levels, all of which are functions of the spirit of God operating upon and within you. At the least intentional level, the conscience provides feelings of guilt or confidence. These feelings come whether the individual wants them or not, and in spite of how well or poorly they understand them. Those with greater intention or awareness will experience the conscience as something which provides reasons. A conscience upgraded to explicit reasoning will grow faster and is capable of informing better decisions than one limited to raw feelings.

Your choices grow or diminish your conscience. To the extent you recognize and ideally respond to what it illuminates, your light will grow brighter. To the extent you choose what is less than best, given everything you can and have seen, it will fade.

As you do more to incorporate the influence of the spirit into your life, the less that influence will wane. Instead of experiencing surges of God’s influence from time to time, it will approach constancy and build in intensity and effect.

The more you honestly interpret and apply what God teaches you through your conscience, the more he will teach you.

Everyone who has experienced the effects of the spirit is familiar with how they come and go. But the changes from quickening need not be limited to those that suddenly arrive and suddenly depart. While the spirit is like the wind, it is also like a never-exhausting spring of flowing water. Increasing the second type occurs as you choose differently as a result of experiencing the first.

You can retain the changes that come through quickening through changing how you think, feel, and act to align with the thoughts and feelings that come through the quickening. The more you modify how you think, feel, and act to align with what you learn from spiritual experiences, the more of them you will have.

Living in alignment with God is a consummate activity. You are always either increasing towards God or decreasing away from him— always growing or always decaying. You either reconcile your beliefs, desires, and actions to what you understand is best, or you don’t. Turning away from God is both a decision and a process. The decision to turn away from the path toward God in any way at any time removes us from it. Recall that this is precisely how honesty works, because honesty is just one facet of the path to God, and each facet follows this pattern.

Failing to acknowledge and live up to your idea of what God would do in your place will always result in the diminishment of your ability to see and know what is right with the same accuracy and to the same extent that you previously could.

When you disconnect yourself from the True Vine in anything, you distance yourself from him in everything. All at once in one way and by degrees in another, you join the spiritual walking dead. Despite how normal some aspects of the lives of these people may sometimes seem, the signs of their internal misalignment from God quickly become apparent as soon as you get to know them. They are recurrently depressed and riddled with anxiety. They are stressed to the point of overwhelm by reasonable regular life events. They have no goals for the future, and if they do, they have no reasonable path of concrete steps to attain them. The only happiness they know is short-term pleasure, completely controlled by the chance circumstance in which they find themselves. Instead of providing an inexhaustible battery of confidence and meaning, their past choices cause nothing but guilt and regret. These symptoms in life predict the still worse condition that awaits them in death.

The more fully we align with the light, the more fully we can grow into the light. The more we retract from the light, the less we can grow into the light, the more we will attenuate in our vigor, and the greater the risk we place ourselves in of dying. Anything less than full alignment results in a degradation of the light in a person. This darkness increases in intensity until it is all that remains.

Chapter 11: Align With God by Living Up To How He Sees You

How would you feel if you knew what God knew about you, reality, and your choices? Whether you come to see who you really are during this life or not, there will come a time after death when you will stand before God, and you will see more of what he sees in you. In that day, you will have a complete awareness of your life: everything you did and didn’t do, freed from all the excuses and delusion you used to hide from the truth during your life. In that day, you will be stripped naked of your excuses, and you will see yourself as you are seen by God: in truth. You will lack the ability to cover your failings, fears, unbelief, and selfishness with lies.

Many rightly fear direct confrontation with God, but it is unwise to react to that fear by embracing the illusion that you can hide from him. It is in your best interest to find out how God sees you while you still have time to improve. For those who wait until after death to find out how God sees them, it will be too late to change how they are.

To prepare for that day, you ought to do all things that lie in your power to.

See yourself as he does.
Value what he values.
See your potential as he does.
Attain your potential.

These actions, diligently performed, will make it so that when you see more of what God sees, it will increase your joy instead of filling you with horrible regret.

One of the barriers to seeing yourself as God sees you is the inaccuracy of what you see as valuable. God does not value things the same way as you do.

God knows everything. Among his knowledge is the true worth of everything. What the world treasures is abominable to God, and what the world despises is a treasure to God.

What God values is what is truly valuable, but your valuation will be contrary to his until and unless you learn and subject yourself to what he values. As you increase in knowledge about and appreciation for God, you will begin to notice that what you value will change, as will how much you value it.

As you learn of and adopt God’s valuation, you will find that your idea of virtues and vices will change. Some virtues will seem more rare or valuable than before and some vices will seem more common or harmful than before. You will even come to see that some prior virtues are actually vices, and some vices are actually virtues. Accordingly, you will see some of your qualities as less impressive than you thought, and may see some of your qualities as more impressive than you thought.

Another reason your self-appraisal differs from God’s is that he sees what you do not see. You can guarantee that God sees you differently than you see yourself. God knows how you really are.

God sees qualities you have but aren’t aware of and qualities you think you have but don’t. He knows which of your qualities are more or less intense or important than you think they are.

You can’t become who you have the potential to be until and unless you allow God to help you make the changes necessary to do so, and you won't know what changes to make or have sufficient reasons to make them until you allow him to show you who you really are.

As you increase your knowledge about and familiarity with God, how you see yourself will change. As you learn how he sees you, you will be surprised at how different you are from how you think you are. The light of Christ will show you more of your similarities to God and more of your differences from him. The intent of the light of Christ is to make a way for you to improve. As you learn more about how he sees you, you may be less quick to assume positive attributes in yourself, but you will also notice, develop, and have more confidence in your strengths.

Learning more about God can result in boosting the value you appraise in yourself. There are many ways you can hold yourself in lesser esteem than God does. You might have positive qualities you didn’t know you have, or you might exercise them more fully than you think you do, or when it matters the most, or they might be worth more to God than you think they are. You might possess fewer negative qualities than you think you do, or you might possess qualities that are much better in God’s eyes than they are in yours, or you might exercise them less often than you think you do, or abstain from them when it matters most.

It is important to live up to the strengths he shows you, even if doing so means you have to act differently than those around you. The Lord described David as a man after his own heart. This is a compliment that all of us would be honored to receive, but it is easy to forget how being like God caused David to be so badly persecuted by so many people—including his own parents, at least one spouse, and some of his children. What would have happened if he acted more like those around him instead of how he believed God to be?

David was a man who was accustomed to acting in ways that were true to himself even though they diverged from what was expected from him. He was a warrior when his brothers and father thought he should be a shepherd. He was a king when assigned to be a knight. He was valiant when his king wanted him to be subordinate. He was passionate in gratitude to God when his wife expected him to be subdued.

David was able to do what David did precisely because of his unique character. Had he fit his life to the expectations of others, he would have had to forfeit everything he accomplished for all in the kingdom, including those who hated him. What would have happened if David had changed his behavior to be more like his brothers in order to please his father who strongly preferred them? What if he pretended to be as scared of Goliath as the other soldiers? What if he had killed fewer Philistines in battle to avoid the jealousy of Saul? What if he had abstained from dancing to the Lord in order to avoid upsetting his wife, Michal? In every case, his service to God and God’s people would have been reduced. Being true to yourself is necessary to bring about what is best for all—including many of those who hate you.

David found the strength to live true to himself in spite of opposition from others because he was emulating the virtues he saw in God. In order to find this same strength, you will need to correctly identify and increase the parts of your personality that are like God. The more you get to know God, and the more like him you become, the easier it will be to stand for what is right, even if you stand alone.

In order to more clearly see the greatness of God, you will first have to see less of your own. There are many ways you can hold yourself in greater esteem than God does. You might not have the positive qualities you think you do, you might not exercise them as consistently as you think you do, or when it matters the most, or they might not be worth as much to God as you think they are. You might possess more negative qualities than you think you do, you might lack qualities that you do not yet understand to be positive, you might possess qualities that are much worse in God’s eyes than they are in yours, or you might exercise them more often than you think you do, or when it matters most.

You offend God when you present yourself as better than you actually are. Jesus taught that you should assume that you have low standing with God until and unless he tells you otherwise. To the extent that you think of yourself more highly than God sees you, you will be “abased,” or be given experiences that will reveal to you that you are less than you thought.

Believe that God knows much more about being a good person than you do. As you increase in your recognition of and appreciation for the attributes of God, you will decrease in what you perceive as good in yourself. Job, who was held up by God as an exemplary righteous person, thought highly of himself until he saw God, at which point he said he abhorred himself. Daniel, another man declared righteous by God, was physically overcome as everything he found good about himself was shown to be dross compared to the glory of the mighty angel that appeared to him. As you come to see yourself as worse than you did before, you make room to see God as better than you did before.

To increase in knowledge about Jesus requires you to receive criticism from him. This criticism is not some side-effect of the love of God, but the love of God itself. Obtaining more of God’s goodness requires that you become better than you are. God knows that how you are determines the joy you experience, and that only through becoming more like him can you experience more of the joy he does. As a necessary part of this, you must come to see more of your present limitations.

It is impossible to align more closely with God without coming to see new or greater faults in yourself as a result. The differences between you and God will become more apparent as you more accurately see your faults and more accurately see his virtues. As you come to God, he will show you your weakness.

No matter how exceptional you already are, the more you learn about God, the more of the gilding he will strip away from your self image.

Greater light shows new or greater differences, creating greater contrast than previously existed. Just as the blind and the sighted are indistinguishable in a dark room, you can’t see who you are or who you could be any better than you already do until and unless you are shown greater light. When the light shines, it will cause you to see unfavorable parts of yourself in greater breadth and depth than you did previously. Jesus will find fault with you until you are living up to your full idea of how he is, and even then, he will only stop when you are ready to receive more. You should expect to continue to receive criticism from God until and unless you become exactly like him. The only time you don’t have a shadow is when you are directly under the sun. If you find yourself without criticism from God, it means that you are not ready to receive what he wishes he could tell you. Good people will push harder and harder towards him, even if doing so hurts.

Most people ignore what they lack, whether in character qualities, in wisdom or knowledge, in problems they face, in situations that overcome them, or in emotions they cannot control. All of these things are indications of a need for something better, and all of them make space for greater revelation from God. To get closer to God, you must become more humble than you are. As God points out your weaknesses, you should adopt the humility of the many people who sought Jesus out to heal them during his mortal ministry. It did no good to pretend that they weren’t sick and afflicted; the solution was to look to him to know how to be healed. Until we see just how filthy we really are, we will never come to truly see God’s goodness, nor fully receive his healing hand, nor come up to anything approaching our divine potential in the full light of God’s love. All people must see themselves as they really are, and all must come to Jesus to be healed in his light: to have their willful darkness cleansed through forgiveness, and to walk in his light by continuing without sin, slaying even the thought of or desire for sin.

When God shows you your weaknesses, realize that he is also expressing his confidence that you can overcome them. God shows you your weakness to instruct you on how to be better, and he never gives you a commandment that you lack the power to obey.

As you recognize your flaws before God, you are not reducing your worth, but rather identifying how you can be better than you are. The difference between you and God reveals exactly how you need to improve to become more like him. Any time you acknowledge a fault you have compared to God, you are also identifying how to change in order to remove it. As you acknowledge your flaws before God, you are making a way for him to bring you up to a place where you no longer have them.

God created this world as a vehicle to reveal more to us about good and evil, providing opportunities for us to choose better outcomes than we would otherwise have. Every day of our life provides countless data points to document how we are.

Plotting the points of evidence through your life until now shows a clear trend of your true self. Honestly assess what you have and haven’t accomplished so far in life given the resources you have had access to and the challenges you’ve worked against. Honestly assess your strengths and your weaknesses, and your desires and fears. How diligently do you strive? How much do you trust God? How much are you willing to suffer for what is good? How much are you willing to stand for what is right? How much do you love correction? How much do you hate sin? How reliable are you? How much do you love your neighbor? How much do you love your enemies?

You can only expect God to increase what you see about yourself once you have acknowledged everything you already have the ability to see. If you want to see how God sees you, begin by daring to look at who you really are.

It is possible to ask God to reveal to you any difference in how he sees you compared to how you see yourself.

When you ask him to show you how and why he sees you differently than you see yourself, he will. Few are ready to ask him in earnest for fear of what he might say, and even fewer are ready to hear what he has to say, whether they think they are or not. Remember, he sees you differently than you see yourself, and what he tells you is likely to strip away your fantasies and delusions, cutting you to the core.

For the many who are not yet prepared to hear God’s perspective directly, he mercifully provides many experiences and interactions here to help us receive what we are willing to hear.

The best way to prepare to receive more from God is to faithfully live up to your idea of how God is. Those who are fully faithful to God receive from him whatever they ask, including God’s opinion of how they are.

God responds to the degree of our effort to seek him. The more you ask him, the more you think about it, the more you pay attention to indications of how you really are in life, and the more you study the scriptures with this in mind, the more he will show you about how he sees you.

Many people respond to criticism by saying something like: “God knows my heart,” ostensibly referring to the fact that God takes our motives into account when judging us. The problem is that the motives of those who say this are just as bad as the outward acts they attempt to excuse by saying it. The next time someone says, “God knows my heart,” you should reply: “He does...but do you?”

It is easy to presume that your heart is good, even when your outward acts are not. It is easy to come up with explanations that are sufficient to fool yourself or others into believing that you have good motives, but God can’t be fooled. What do you desire? By how much do you desire it? Why do you desire it?

Should you be so anxious to be judged by God for the intents of your heart? Can you boldly say, as David did.

The hearts of all people desire evil by default: “...for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth....” (Genesis 8:21) It is not just possible, but common, for people to desire differently than what they believe is right. It is only through active and continual submission to improvement that man’s heart bends to desire what is right.

Too many Christians erroneously believe that God automatically forgives the faults of those who say that they like him. Forgiveness doesn’t come through liking Jesus, but through being like him. Liking Jesus is not the same as loving him. You can say you like Jesus and still not obey him, but only those who obey him can claim to love him.

Those who do not obey Jesus love whatever they do instead more than they love him. Those who actually love God desire to please him more than anything else.

If you ever wonder what God thinks about you, rephrase the question into its more measurable form: list out how he is and compare yourself to each attribute. For example.

God is aligned with reality. How aligned are you with reality as you know it?
God only walks in truth. Do you ever depart from the path of truth, even just a little, even sometimes?
God knows what he wants and why he wants it. Do you know what you want and why you want it?
God only wants what is best. Do you ever desire anything less than what is best?
God only does what effectively results in his will. Do you always act honestly so as to obtain what you most desire?

By comparing yourself to how God is, you can gain an accurate appraisal of your value in his eyes. It is by his goodness that you will know what goodness is. If you want a more accurate appraisal of how you really are, you will have to learn more about how God actually is. Only through knowing God more can you truly know yourself more.

Chapter 12: Align with God by Following His Example

God knows how good you could be. He knows how you can become that way, and he knows why becoming that way would be worthwhile, correctly understanding the benefit that your achieved potential would render to yourself and others. He also knows everything needed to persuade you to walk in that way.

You don’t know your true potential any more than a slab of stone imagines the kind of statue it could be. The sculptor alone knows the stone’s potential, which combines the raw qualities of the rock with the skill of the sculptor. Similarly, God’s assessment of your potential lies far beyond who you are now. He can hone you into what has the greatest value, which is likely to be different both than what you would consider possible, and what you would consider valuable.

God knows your potential and how to achieve it because he already has done the same himself. Because he has already acquired the perfect character, God’s appraisal of value is denominated exclusively in terms of similarity to himself. A person’s value consists of how much like him they have become.

The potential of man is to acquire God’s happiness through the acquisition of God’s character. The more you get to know God, the greater your idea of your own potential will become.

God has an ideal character, but it is not easy to discover or emulate.

God’s character qualities are those with the greatest worth. God’s character consists of all qualities that an ideal person would have. If we accept the idea that God is the happiest of all beings, and we seek greater happiness, honesty requires us to learn to think, feel, and act as he does.

Choosing to acquire the character qualities of God is a challenge because you don’t know them, and even when they are shown to you, you will find them less attractive the further you are from them.

Your present idea of God is very far from the whole truth. Because God is unique, nothing less than him can adequately and fully describe who he is. It is so difficult to convey how God is that it is not a stretch to characterize the whole purpose of creation as being for this end. The staggering scale and magnificence of the universe attests to the difficulty of the puzzle of conveying more of God’s character to mankind. The only way to learn more about God is to first live up to all you presently know. As you learn more about God’s character and live up to everything you learn, he will show you more about himself.

The character qualities of God are not found attractive to those to whom they are revealed. The natural man has an embedded preference for things that are less than what is best. When improvements are revealed to the natural man, the natural reaction is to see them as bitter, not sweet. Invitations to improve will either be seen as requiring the loss of what seems more valuable—and therefore, as something other than improvement.

Everything God is, desires, and does leads to something better. However, it will only seem that way to you to the extent that you have and exercise faith—the ability to honestly perceive, reason about, decide, and act on what is logically best. Anything you are required to set aside in your path to become more like God is either something you don’t really have, can’t presently have, can’t enduringly keep, or wouldn’t want if you knew better.

Only the character qualities of God endure eternally against every opposition. Only God’s character qualities will yield the greatest joy over the greatest extent of time. Any degree of difference from God guarantees eventual disillusionment. What lies outside of how he is cannot remain. What lies outside of how he is will eventually either succumb to the need for change or face annihilation.

The purpose of life is to have greater eternal joy by becoming more like God. God has designed this life to provide us with the means and potential to become more like he is. We accomplish the purpose of life by learning more about God and living up to everything we learn.

The gospel is a process by which we become more like him through learning more about how he is and becoming that way ourselves. The gospel provides us a model of how Jesus is and sufficient reasons to make the necessary changes to become that way ourselves. The gospel provides us with teaching and examples to inform our idea of what Jesus would think, feel, and do in our place, opportunities to follow his example, and experiences to inform improvement and motivate further growth.

Christianity is meant to provide you with the courage and vision to see yourself accurately and the tools to effectively change for the better, but it is so rarely used for this purpose. Instead, Christianity is routinely adulterated into an attempt to feel good while remaining bad. Almost all Christians believe that you can worship God while completely disregarding everything he actually says and does. Some honest people correctly identify how ridiculous this position is, and many have done so for a very long time.

The invitation to think, feel, and do as Jesus would in your place is not some religious extremity. It is precisely what is meant to take place at baptism, which is meant to be a covenant to “stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death.” (Mosiah 18:9) Many incorrectly limit the definition of witnessing of God as vocally expressing your beliefs in him. Witnessing of God is not so much about proclaiming that you like him as much as it is demonstrating what he is like.

To stand as a witness of God requires you to think, feel, and act as Jesus would do in your place. The initiatory ordinance of baptism represents your submission to God. You are immersed in the water to symbolically symbolize surrounding yourself with his will in all you do.

Most Christians believe that the mortal mission of Jesus Christ was to absolve us of responsibility for our choices, but you can’t obtain the joy he has except by becoming like he is. The mortal life of Jesus Christ demonstrated to us the epitome of what a man can be. The Lord lived “after the manner of happiness” by discovering and living up to the thoughts, feelings, and actions that produce ideal eternal outcomes. Jesus has instructed us to follow his example.

If you believe that God is perfect, then every deviation from what you believe God would think, feel, or do in your place is dishonest. If God is what is best, then deviating from him in any way would require deep dishonesty, as it would require willful harm to oneself, intentionally choosing less than what is best.

Most people don’t believe it is possible to perfectly follow the example of Christ, but God doesn’t command what isn’t possible. As with all his other commandments, he provides all that is needed for us to obey his commandment to follow his example.

Some foolishly claim that it is blasphemous to believe that we can follow the example of Christ, denying his word, his example, and his power. In reality, those who argue against our ability to follow Christ typically do so to cover the guilt they feel for choosing otherwise, not because they have a reason to believe it is impossible. While denying the possibility of following Christ might satisfy your conscience, it will never alleviate you from the anxiety and depression that will plague you as long as you fail to reach for and achieve the greatest meaning uniquely available in living up to the example of Jesus Christ in all things.

Part of the reason so many fail to follow Jesus’ example is because they focus on his works without ever thinking to change their motives. Following the example of Jesus is not limited to just copying his actions, but also learning the reasons for what he does. What someone does can’t fully describe how they are. While very few Christians seek to learn and do what God would do in their place, even fewer ask how God would feel in their place, and why he would feel and act this way. To truly follow the Lord’s example, we must also adopt his thoughts and feelings.

Asking what Jesus would think, feel, do, and why, quickly identifies the gross ignorance supposed Christians have of the Lord they claim to worship. Even those who have spent a lifetime in Christianity, as they suppose, would likely struggle to know what God would do in their place in more than a few situations, and it is difficult to imagine any of them being able to say how God would think or feel, let alone make a satisfactory case for why. How could any such person believe they have eternal life, since the Lord defined this as knowing the Father and the Son?

The Lord gifts each person with the light of life when they are born here. This internal ability to understand, choose, and learn provides all people—whether secular or religious—with the ability to improve, whether they recognize it as following God or not. Since all people have the light of Christ, all people have the opportunity to advance and bear accountability for the degree to which they use it. To the extent that we obtain more of the character of Christ in our hearts and minds and instantiate it in the world through our actions, we grow in similitude to Christ.

The steps towards becoming more like God consist of iteratively perceiving more differences between how you are and how God is and reconciling yourself to how you now perceive him to be.

As you heed God’s influence within you and fully emulate it in your thoughts, feelings, and actions, he will expand his influence within you. Those who live up to how they believe God to be will be shown more of how he is. If you want to learn more about God, live up to what you already know by taking note of and submitting to how Jesus would think, feel, and act in your place. While you do this, God will.

1. Forgive you of every difference with him you had in the past.
2. Forgive you of every difference you still don’t know about.
3. Teach you more about himself.

You can learn more about how God is through living up to your conscience, perceiving and accepting opportunities to improve, and learning and living God’s purpose. We grow proportional to the degree of heed and diligence we exercise in obtaining more information about him and living up to everything we already know.

As you submit to God in how you think, feel, and act, he will increase your capacity to do good, recognize truth, and be a better person. You will receive increased connection to God through his spirit. You will find that God will “pour out his Spirit upon [you]...because of [your] easiness and willingness to believe in his words.” (Helaman 6:36) Then, “...by every word which proceeded forth out of the mouth of God, [you will] exercise faith in Christ; and thus by faith...lay hold upon every good thing...” (Moroni 7:25)

It is easy to make some change to our lives and in so doing fool ourselves into believing we have aligned ourselves with God, when we have actually left much more important changes undone, or limited those changes to only the most superficial of depths. In Jesus’ day, he railed against the Pharisees for overemphasizing the easy, superficial parts of the law of Moses while abundantly ignoring the deeper, more difficult matters.

Submission to God cannot be feigned. He knows any limits you may have in your trust in him. God cannot be fooled. He sees all, and even the slightest rebellion from him will alienate you from him.

Alignment with God is not a shallow act. It requires that you yield yourself to God’s will, which will almost always be different than yours.

Superficial changes or changes in only some areas are insufficient to yield our hearts to God. You must crucify all things within and without that oppose Jesus Christ.

Too many try to hide limits in submission to God by overcompensating in the things they have no problem doing. Unsurprisingly, those who limit their submission to God do not enjoy communion with him. Those who walk in willing misalignment from God cannot come to know him better, because they live in open rebellion against him.

Submission to God cannot be partial. The Lord didn’t partially come down from heaven, or partially give his life for us. Animals were not partially sacrificed in typifying his sacrifice. We do not follow him by partially submitting to him. In the scriptures, total submission is called having a “broken heart and contrite spirit.” Though rarely understood and hardly ever lived, this is the plain message in the oftgiven admonition to.

You must “...come with full purpose of heart, and cleave unto God as he cleaveth unto you.” (Jacob 6:5) To “cleave unto” him requires you to remove any deviation from how he would think, feel, or act in your life.

Sanctification comes only as you obtain and retain total submission to God, first by completely aligning your life to God, and then by maintaining this alignment as he teaches you more about himself over time.

God knows all things and possesses all wisdom. It is overwhelming to consider the daunting task of coming up to his knowledge and understanding. And yet, the scriptures contain clear declarations that this can and needs to be done while providing instructions on how to do it.

God wants us to know what he thinks and how he thinks so that we can know what he would feel and do in our place without relying upon new revelation at all times and in all places. He wants us to be his children—children who have apprenticed and become like their father, not slavish and stupid animals.

He bothers to tell us so much about himself and the Father because he wants us to become more than just his passive servants. As we go about obeying his commandments and receiving revelation, we are meant to be building an incrementally more correct model of how he is. The domain of this model cannot be confined to situations we deem as spiritual, as all things are spiritual to God. His character is defined in every situation throughout all creation.

As we exercise diligence in building our model of how God is and live according to that model, God will teach us more about himself, ourselves, others, and the world. This is an incremental process governed by the spirit of God.

The Lord told his apostles that they were not ready to bear everything that he had to teach them. He said the Holy Ghost would serve to control the pace of what he would teach them.

Paul declared that it is possible to “have the mind of Christ,” (1 Corinthians 2:16), but what does this mean and how does one obtain it? Paul did not mean that those who have the mind of Christ know everything that the Father knows. John the Baptist described Jesus as having access to the spirit “without limit,” and yet there were things that the Father knew that Jesus did not know during his mortal ministry. Access to God does not bypass the successive nature of truth. The mind of Christ means having access to the next increment of information on a topic without impedance. It does not waive the need to integrate that information into your understanding and practice before receiving more.

Those who exercise greater diligence and obedience in obtaining greater understanding will obtain more understanding faster than others.

Your feelings reflect how closely you approach the ideal defined by your beliefs. In a sense, your beliefs are your instruction manual for enduringly obtaining what is most valuable. By intentionally thinking about what you believe, you generate a prioritization of possible actions to achieve what you expect to be the greatest possible meaning in life.

God holds the ideal set of beliefs that generate the ideal life and the greatest possible meaning. His commandments assist us in perceiving his example, and to the extent we emulate his example, we will come to enjoy the same meaning he does.

While God’s example is a composite of thoughts, feelings, and actions, our adherence to or rebellion from him begins and ends in our feelings. What we desire will determine the actions we take, based on the beliefs we hold.

God has defined his desire, and the greatest joy is available to those who adopt it as their own: “For behold, this is my work and my glory— to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” (Moses 1:39) A person walks in eternal life as they live up to all they know about Jesus and do all they can to learn more about him. A person who has adopted God’s purpose will do this themselves and do all they can to help others do the same.

The Lord spent his mortal life learning about and living up to the Father’s example, doing all in his power to help others do the same. The sacrifice of Christ shows the value God sees in his purpose, which is to enable us all to achieve more of our potential. Christ is the most valuable person who has or will live here. You are purchased with the greatest price possible. That price is unknowable except as far as you have paid it yourself. You will only know and value the sacrifice that the Lord made and continues to make for you to the extent that you do the same for others.

God commands us to love all people as he loves us.

Like all commandments, this—the chief commandment—is designed to maximally expand the depth, breadth, and endurance of your joy. Loving others with all your heart, might, mind and strength will maximally increase the value of what you receive from God and the value of what you give to others.

To fully understand what this entails, it is necessary to know God’s definition of love: to sacrifice for the benefit of others. To love others as Jesus loves us requires us to do all we do for the benefit of the world, as he does.

As you fully adopt God’s purpose, you will come to feel more like he feels across all circumstances as he incrementally increases your understanding of himself, you, others, and the world around you. You cannot feel as God feels much more than you know what he knows, but by freely loving all people up to the limits of your present understanding of his love for you, you will open the way for him to help you perceive even greater love.

As you love others as Christ loves you, you will participate in a chain reaction of increasing receipt, giving, and appreciation of the love of God. The more of his love you give, the more you appreciate the love he has given you; the more you appreciate the love he has given you, the more you will give to others; the more love you give to others, the more love God will give to you.

As discussed in an earlier chapter, Jesus specifically commanded us on multiple occasions to follow his example. But how do we apply his example to our own lives when we live some 2,000 years after he did, in very different circumstances?

The key to applying the example of Jesus to your own life lies in extracting principles from what he did and didn’t do. Knowing that his motive was to do the greatest good is essential. His example showed what was best under the circumstances.

To act as God acts, you must exercise and further develop your willingness and ability to discern what is best. Our natural tendency is to seek what makes us feel best right now. God’s influence leads us in determining what is best for all people over the longest time period. Each person has a beginning capability to determine what is best, and through exercising what you already have, you will grow in your accuracy in discerning what is best and your determination to do it.

All good comes from, leads to, and is fulfilled in God. God’s voice is the voice of improvement. The influence of God will always cause things to become better than they were. God shows you how to improve, why to improve, and proves that you can improve. To reveal more or better to a person is to reveal what they should do to be more like God.

In order to act as God acts, you will have to learn to recognize and give invitations to improve. Recognizing invitations to improvement will require that you actively think about how things could be better, which will cause you to notice far more opportunities to improve. Effectively managing the endless opportunities to improve yourself, others, and the world requires organization and intention. You will need to develop a means of capturing potential improvements, prioritizing which you address first, and planning effective ways to accomplish your goals.

How you react to improvement is how you feel about God. The word of God will show you what is really in your heart. If you disobey God, you do not really love him. If you obey him begrudgingly, you do not really love him. If you prefer anything else to obeying him, you do not really love him. If you fear the consequences of obeying him—if you count the cost—you do not really trust him.

How do you respond to invitations to improve? How do you respond to criticism? How do you respond to evidence that what you think is incorrect? How do you respond to evidence that there are better actions than those you are taking? How do you respond to new opportunities?

God’s voice is the voice of improvement, and as you heed and echo that voice, you and those around you will grow. As you choose to ignore or disobey that voice, you will become a worse person. The more capable you become of identifying potential improvement, and the more effectively you can accomplish the greatest improvement, the more you will learn about God, and the more quickly you will become like him.

Conclusion: Be who you are to become who you want to be

You will have to overcome dishonesty in order to achieve your potential. Dishonesty blinds you to who you are and blocks you from who you could become. You won’t know the good you are capable of or the worth it carries, stripping you of the necessary motivation to attain your potential. If you want to be the best person you can be and do the greatest good, you’ll have to be honest all the time, including being yourself in all situations.

It is highly likely that the greatest obstacle between you and everything you desire is dishonesty. To the extent you deviate from full, integral honesty, you will fail to obtain what you hope for and desire in life. Dishonesty will blind you to how things really are, consistently frustrating your ability to obtain what you desire and continually presenting you with problems in life that you can’t adequately address.

Being yourself with others will increase the meaning you give and receive in your relationships. Until you become honest, you will not be aware of the degree of harm you cause others, or harm they cause you, nor be capable of seeing just how good the good few are. As you grow in honesty, you will find your relationships with others increase in quality, even if your increased candor causes them to reduce in quantity.

As you increase the honesty you exercise within and with others, you increase the bandwidth of the relationship you can have with God. Alignment with God is the most important component and benefit of honesty, as everything of worth in and after this life comes in proportion to how well you know God and how much you have become like him. Jesus gives you the power to be who you really are and become as good as you could really be. To maximize your alignment to God, you need to know who you really are, how he sees you, and how he is. As you make every change necessary to align with God, he will reveal more to you about how you are and how you can be, creating an unending cycle of improvement in your life that increases the goodness you receive from him and that flows out from you to others, maximizing the meaning and joy you experience here and hereafter.

The more dishonest you are and the longer you are dishonest for, the greater the consequences will be and the harder it will be to return to a state of honesty. Begin being more honest today.

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