Tell the truth first

Dan Sullivan has a line I can't shake: “all progress starts by telling the truth”.

Not some of it. Not the polished version. Not the part that makes you look good in the retelling. The truth.

About the numbers. About the relationship. About the employee. About the project. About yourself.

Most of the stalls in a life or business are honesty problems. Somewhere along the way, a truth got softened, delayed, or avoided, and everything downstream of that decision got slower, heavier, and more expensive.

The margin is bad, but we don't want to talk about why. The project is behind, but nobody's willing to say how far. The employee isn't working out, but it's easier to keep hoping. The marriage is drifting, but neither of you wants to name it. The habit is killing you, but you've rebranded it as "balance."

This is how good companies plateau. This is how good marriages go cold. This is how good people wake up at fifty wondering where the time went.

Not because of one big failure. Because of a thousand small moments where the truth was available, and we chose the comfortable fiction instead.

Here's what I've noticed: the truth doesn't actually hurt as much as we think it will. What hurts is the delay. It's the weeks and months and years of carrying something we won't say out loud.

The moment you actually say it, most of the weight lifts. Not because the problem is solved, but because you finally stopped pretending it wasn't there.

Reality is a lot easier to work with than fiction. You can build on reality. You can't build on a story you've been telling yourself to feel better.

One Way To Do It

Two practices I try to run on myself:

1. Audit the gap between what you say and what you do. If you said you were going to lose 20 pounds this year and you haven't started, that's data. The story you're telling yourself about why is probably protecting you from the truth. The truth might be that you don't actually want it as much as you said you did, or that you're afraid to try and fail, or that you've been lying to yourself about your habits. Any of those is workable. The story isn't.

2. Name it before you fix it. In any hard situation, the first move is not "what do we do." The first move is "what is actually true here." You'd be amazed how often the room gets stuck trying to solve a problem nobody has honestly named yet. Get the truth on the table first. The solution usually becomes obvious once you do.

The Challenge

Pick one area of your life where you've been running on a story instead of the truth.

Your business. Your marriage. Your health. Your finances. Your relationship with your kids. Your relationship with yourself.

Say the truth out loud this week. To a spouse. To a partner. To a trusted friend. To yourself in the mirror if that's where you have to start.

You don't need a plan yet. You just need the truth.

Everything else gets built from there. (Thanks, Dan)

Don’t settle. Be relentless.

— Hunter