There is a saying that goes: “It’s better to tell the truth poorly than to lie well.”
Recent events have shed light on what this saying truly means; two highly publicized and one not so publicized events show that it does no good to lie about or embellish the truth.
In the first example, Kwame Kilpatrick, the 37-year old mayor of Detroit, has “been booked on charges of lying about steamy text messages with his former chief of staff.” He is accused of “multiple counts of perjury, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and misconduct” in a scandal that will, in all likelihood, land him behind bars and end his political career. Telling the truth may not have saved his political career, but it certainly would have saved him from being sent to the clink.
In the second example, in an effort to establish her “battle-tested” leadership, Sen. Hillary Clinton said last week during a campaign rally speech that during a visit to war-torn Bosnia in 1996, she had to land “under sniper fire”, “without a welcome ceremony” because she and her party had to run “with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” But a CBS correspondent who was with the former First Lady on that trip produced video evidence that what Senator Clinton had said was simply not true. Now, her media relations team is doing some manipulating of the facts themselves, which will probably continue for the next couple of days until the press gets tired of writing about it. But instead of boosting the “battle-tested” leadership image she is so desperately trying to portray, it shoots holes in her claim to any previous leadership experience at all. What stories are embellished, which are fabricated, and which ones are completely imaginary?
The third example comes from a recent job application we received. We had previously worked with the applicant and knew about some of the information on this person’s resume because of our working together. However, the “facts” claimed on the resume for work performed while with us did not mesh with what we knew the applicant did, nor did the facts match what was reported on a client’s Web site. The applicant knowingly embellished information on the resume, probably thinking we would not catch it, or that if we did, we may not recall the exact details. However, when the embellishment was caught, the application process ended. We probably would have progressed further with the application process, but the trust was now exhausted.
We could go on for days; there are many more examples of individuals who flat-out lie, possibly under the impression that they’ll never get caught. But eventually, the truth always comes out. Elliot Spitzer found out the hard way; so too, has Kwame Kilpatrick. The simple fact is, they didn’t have to find out the hard way. They just needed to tell the truth.
It may be hard to do in the moment, but giving the facts is much better in the long run than falsifying information.
