Overwhelming Good

This week, I met someone for whom the expectation I had conjured up in my head didn’t meet the reality.  It got me thinking about the impressions I put forth about myself and how, more often than I’m proud of, they don’t meet the reality of who I am.  Example:  I make and share meticulous time schedules for busy days.  I build up an expectation.  And yet I am routinely late.  I don’t know whether it’s a psychological overconfidence that everything will be fine regardless of whether I am on time or not, or I’m simply bad at time estimation, but I do this over and over.

“PD, how long till you get here?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
Twenty minutes later…
“Uh… how long till you get here?”
“Just a block away now!”

I know that, although not everyone’s Achilles is in the realm of timing, I’m not the only one with this problem.  Our society seems to have a prepossession with putting the best foot forward.  Putting the best foot forward, however, implies much more than just, say, turning your “better side” towards the camera.  It’s more like waxing your leg, putting spray tan on your sock-inspired tan line, painting muscles on your calf, and coiffing one leg with all the fanciest pants, shoes, and accessories.  It’s like the pedicure after rarely washing or watching the hygiene of your feet.  It may look and smell good now, but we all know it’ll stink to high heaven in a week.  We often expend far more effort propagating lies than we would need to make improvements.  It doesn’t make logical sense.

In addition to being illogical, it’s silly, too.  Even when we haven’t yet spent the time to improve, acknowledging our flaws often takes us much farther than attempts to “idealize” a situation.  We are often able to garner more respect from people by recognizing our own mistakes than by painting our pennies gold.  Who do you trust, the angel with the broken wing or the devil trying to hide his horns under a halo?  More often than not, the truth shines through eventually; the ensuing disappointment is never worth the bounties of recognizing the weakness in the first place.  I very well could have hidden the mess in my room in various closets and nooks in my apartment prior to my mom’s arrival to impress her–instead, by telling her in advance the reality of the situation, I was able to get help cleaning, advice on organization, and inspiration to continue to clean and maintain the new and improved status quo from my endlessly loving mom.

Where does this leave us?  Obviously, the good thing to do would be to accept and acknowledge our flaws openly, so that we may better improve upon and, if necessary, work around them. Can you imagine a world where that were always the case, where the image always met the reality?  Our productivity would explode!

Of course, the image doesn’t always meet the reality, and it’s at times difficult to differentiate at first the reality from the “best leg”.  If I were to change to eliminate false expectations, how would others know I mean what I say at face value?  If others were to change, how could I check to see who is acknowledging and embracing their flaws fully and who is still propagating lies?  Imagining a world where, say, half of the politicians employed each of these strategies, I can imagine it could become tremendously difficult to evaluate which is which–the Best Leg politicians would claim minor weaknesses in order to appear genuine, and the True Image politicians would look utterly flawed.

I have faith, however, that in the vast majority of situations, the truth eventually comes out.  Those who set up engorged expectations fall flat when they try to fit it into reality, like a flamingo in a flock of pigeons.  And those with genuine public images become respected and valued for their true selves.  This doesn’t mean they have to be “brutal” in their honesty, but it does mean being open with and embracing how I really am, and letting the image meet the reality.  That’s where I want to be.  I’m going to give it a shot, and I hope you do, too.  We’ve got to let the world become itself before we can make it better.

Extra Credit:  Check out The Invention of Lying–entertaining and quite thought-provoking, then report back here on what you think.