Friday, April 25, 2008

To lie or not, that is the question


If you've been following lots of successful gurus either in IM or other areas. They lie, period. Not big lies like saying what their products are not but lying as in "It's only available to 50 people" " Your email has been eaten by filter thus you might not be able to snatch this 100 copies only" and etc

You get the idea. On the other hand, Kenrick and even archer sloan in his superconfidence talks about being totally honest to develop will. If you lie, even small white lie your will power/ confidence will be affected.

Now this has led to a huge dillema, without "lying" it would be difficult to create any sort of sensasionalism or urgency at all! And it's also a very contradictory theory. If you need to be totally honest to develop will and confidence then how come people like john reese, Style or any gurus you know lie constantly are successful?

Does you not require will and confidence to be successful? Seth Godin in his book "All Marketers Are Liars" advocate lying as long as it benefits the customer. If he has such thinking and he's successful then lying seems to be the way to go.

And hell, being in politics requires lots of confidence and will and we see broken promises all over. What do you think?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll touch the less business side of this.
The whole concept of will, as learned from Kenrick, is pretty amazing. Per him, all you said you'd do, and did (or not) has positive/negative impact on your will. Lies having a negative impact, because your words are not (or do not become) reality.
It's amazing in a way that once you say you'll do something, you have to realize that your actions are going to influence your will. I'd rather see you getting a response of: wow, that guy's word really matter - his words become reality; as opposed to: he's a weak willed, he can't even do things he promises.
It's like a jar of pebbles, for every followthrough you get some pebbles put in, and for every lie, you get them taken out. And when you have quite some pebbles in it, it's hard to bring it down, because of all the pebbles that are in it.
Success breeds success, huh?
You might say that it's different, because it's business, but isn't your business/copy whatever - a creation of you, hence, related? Some even call it their baby - now would THAT be related?

Anonymous said...

You might be interested in techniques used for propaganda. Sometimes they lie, but most often, they don't lie, but present things at an...rather unusual way.

Anonymous said...

I dont want to speak for the business world. But i know i would NEVER EVER lie to my clients, investors or partners. If they suspected i wasnt being honest, they wouldnt do business with me. Me losing a deal or relationship for a particular deal or to sell a service is not worth the price i would pay.