Can you imagine never telling another lie – not even an innocent one – for the rest of your life? How about for a whole day? Yeah, me neither, which is why Keith Frankel’s commitment to a no-lie lifestyle is so intriguing.
Up until six months ago, Keith Frankel, a product design executive at Boston education software startup Firecracker, was no different than the rest of us – he would lie on a daily basis, and he was fully aware of it. He admits he had been aware of his ability to lie both persuasively and effectively and that his skills only got better with age. “Sometimes, my career necessitated that I play my little trump card in order to succeed at ‘the game’. Other times, my personal life could be made just a bit more convenient with a little fib here or there. To no surprise, the more I lied, the better I became at lying in the future. Lying, like any other skill, only gets stronger the more you use it,” Frankel says.
He didn’t really see the harm in lying, at first, especially since his little white lies didn’t really have disastrous consequences on the lives of those around him, they were just “little deceptions, teeny, tiny misdirections.” But at one point, Keith realized that having his friends and family seeing him constantly lie to other people had planted seeds of distrust in them – they knew that he could very well lie to them if he so wished (and he admits he did). He felt these ‘tiny erosions of trust’, as he calls them, not only weakened his relationship with his loved ones, but also called into question everything he claimed to be and will eventually become. Worse still, once plated, these seeds of doubt slowly whether relationships and are almost impossible to address effectively.
