Cheating is cool

Yesterday I delivered my third speech project on a Toastmasters meeting. The general topic was “Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well”

The project codename is “Get to the point”. The speech should have the general purpose (inform, entertain, persuade, inspire) and a specific one. This time I needed to abandon notes, maintaining an eye contact and trying hard to look sincere. Length should be between 5 and 7 minutes. By the way, the speech did not necessary need to reflect my personal point of view.

I managed to deliver it in 5:40 minutes, and get a positive review. There's still need for work on gestures and voice emphasis, but I was really good!

Enjoy!

Lie to be better

Lies is an inevitable part of our lives. Children develop cheating skills very early, and good parents teach them to tell truth most of the time to better suit a people society. Cuckoo nestling artificially extend their life space in a small nest to have a better comfort and chances to survive. Some insects like butterflies and caterpillars have a fake head with eyes to distract a predator attention from life critical parts of their body, and seem bigger than they are to demotivate smaller enemies. So, lies and cheating are very important natural mechanism of protection.

When I do not want to communicate much, or I do not recognize a word in a mumbled question, it's so convenient to just say meaningless “ugu”! This way I protect myself from bore and irritation.

When I miss a deadline, or feel guilty, it's so convenient to exaggerate the influence of force majors and win some time, or cover the own ass.

To have a reputation of a brilliant and interesting speaker, you do not tell what you want, but what people want to hear from you. Some luckies really have the necessary stuff on a tip of their tongue, but most of us need to try hard pretending that they are fun and know what they say.

A key to successful lie is cheating yourself in the first place. There are different approaches to this: accurately choosing the points of view, making subtle changes to terminology interpretation, inventing a scenario – the field is endless. But whatever you choose, you must believe that the story you want to tell is true indeed.

Finding a handful of small technical secrets and discussing them with interviewer can make a good impression on a potential employer, even if you lack some surface knowledge of the discussed technology.

Unfortunately, sometimes you risk to go too far in your lies. Once you do, you need to maintain the whole legend, adding new details to the story, often imaginary ones. But if others do not want to get it the way you just presented, adding more sheets to the house of cards can crash it completely, so you need to balance and be reluctant about introducing new fake. Very risky, I must say. But sometimes all you need is just to show a remorse and promise not to do so any more. Voilla, a small lie saves you again!

I lie to win more points in a psychological game, and to seem even harder boiled than I am indeed. Many of you do. And this works!

So, lie to be better. Do not just pretend being better than you are. As long as you believe it yourself, you are really better.

And please, do not get me too serious, because I am a liar! And I can cheat you.