I Lied to Myself for Five Years. Here Is How I Came Clean and Learned a Valuable Lesson.

The experience was excruciating, yet incredibly rewarding and empowering.

Our lives improve only when we take chances — and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

— Walter Anderson, German writer

Five years ago I came back from a 14-month trip around Australia and South East Asia. I went on the trip because I didn’t really know what to do with my life after high-school and I thought to rack up some money and travel to be a grand idea. It was. I couldn’t describe the time as anything other but amazeballs.

There was only one little, tiny caveat: When I came back, I still didn’t know what to do with my life.

But I had to do something, and I had to do it now. At least that is what parts of my family repeatedly told me.

So I did what seems like a reasonable decision to a twenty-year-old without a clue: I took someone else’s advice and applied to one of the highest-ranking business schools in my country. It took me a lot of time, money and effort to get into it. But I made it.

I enjoyed the student life, the parties, the people. I did enjoy studying business. The subjects were interesting, most of the professors great and my appetite for number-crunching (which I still enjoy to this date) was satisfied.

I was in the top 10% of my class. I got a scholarship. Two internships at some of the biggest, most successful and industry-dominating companies.

Yet, it didn’t feel right. Even though on the surface everything was nice and shiny and smooth sailing, it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. It wasn’t fulfilling. It wasn’t making me happy.

And deep down, I knew.

Nevertheless, I kept lying and convincing myself that studying business was something I enjoyed and that fulfilled me. I didn’t want to admit that I was mistaken, that I had chosen to do something I shouldn’t have.

So whenever someone asked me if this was what I loved to do, I enthusiastically answered yes.

I lied to other people until I believed it myself.

This vicious cycle went on until about a month ago. Then I finally grew a pair.

I sat down and asked myself the questions I should have asked five years ago. I answered them. Honestly. And I realized that I had been lying to myself for the past five years straight. I realized that this was not what I wanted to do.

We all lie to ourselves, but why?

We all lie to ourselves. Sometimes they are small lies (I totally did exercise enough today to eat a second bowl of ice-cream). Sometimes they are big ones (Of course he loves me, he just hasn’t replied because he has been busy for the past three days).

We lie to ourselves for one simple reason.

We lie to ourselves because we want to avoid pain.

Being honest with yourself often causes a lot of pain. You have to admit your mistakes, flaws and where you went wrong. In order to avoid this, we often twist reality or actively avoid information which is contrary to what we are telling ourselves.

Garbage in, garbage out

You make your decisions based on the information that is available to you (your facts) and how this information makes you feel (your emotions).

The problem is that if you lie to yourself, you twist your facts and your emotions. Neither of them is an accurate representation of what is going on anymore. They are just plain, simple lies.

So what happens if you make your decisions based on wrong information? You make the wrong decisions.

Within the business world there exists a very simple phrase for this kind of problem.

Garbage in, garbage out.

You make every decision you make

From the career you choose over the place you live in to who you marry — every decision you make, you make yourself. Even if you choose to have someone else make a decision for you, you still have made a decision.

That’s exactly what happened when I took someone else’s advice. I made the decision to let someone else decide about my future life and career. And then I lied to and convinced myself that this was the right thing to do.

Not very smart. Lesson learned.

If make your decisions based on lies (or someone else’s advice), you’ll be in trouble. Your life won’t go anything as you want it to.

You will choose a job that doesn’t suit you.

You will choose to marry someone whom ultimately you won’t be happy with.

You will spend your time doing things that don’t fulfill you.

You will try diet after diet, yet still gain pound after pound, convincing yourself that you just haven’t found the right one yet. (And of course, it’s got nothing to do with the Ben & Jerry’s you inhale during your late-night trips to the fridge.)

Lying to yourself is the compound interest of messing up your life

The worst thing yet: These decisions stack up and compound. Once we have told ourselves our sweet little lie and have bought into it, it becomes so much harder to uncover the truth.

We tell ourselves more lies in order to cover ourselves because we don’t want to admit we were wrong. And then, because these additional lies lead to more wrong decisions, we need to cover these as well.

In my case, lying to myself about my studies led to the first wrong decisions. I continued to study and moved to another city.

Then I needed to cover up these decisions. I do enjoy this, I just need to enroll in a Master’s program where I have more freedom of choice regarding my courses.

More wrong decisions followed. I went through the pain of applying and getting accepted into the Master’s program at one of the highest-ranked business universities in Europe. Again it took me a lot of time, money and effort.

This led to even more lies. Yes, this Master is so much better. I’m just over studying, all I need is a real job and then I’ll be fine.

And before I knew it, we are as deep into my web of lies as 2011 Selena Gomez into Justin Bieber.

It’s an easy process, but a tough pill to swallow

Coming clean was one of the most excruciating, yet rewarding and empowering experiences I have had to this day.

At first, I felt like a total fraud. The thought hit me like a train. I just wasted five years of my life. I felt like someone pulled the rug from underneath my feet and at the same time, one of my lungs collapsed. Breathing became difficult and my head was surrounded by a dazing fog.

But then, the liberation and empowerment came. The liberation from the permanent feeling that something was wrong, from the fear of having to do something I didn’t truly enjoy for the rest of my life. The empowerment to finally make my own, honest decisions and follow through. The opportunity to now finally do what I love doing.

The feeling of relief from having solved my life’s Gordian Knot was overwhelming. My mood lit up. During the following weeks, people even came up to me and asked me what happened because I seemed so different.

I felt a deep sense of truth and just feeling right permeating my body.

I felt like I was reborn.

We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.

— Confucius

What it takes to come clean

We humans are experts at self-deception. We shape our own realities. We perceive our lives and see ourselves through our personal filters.

Being honest with yourself is not as easy as just saying “Alright, I’ll just cut the bullshit from now on.” We need a bulletproof process.

Preparation: Being honest is a mindset

I bet that you have received tons of advice from people. They tell you what (not) to do, what to seek, what to avoid, what kind of friends to look for, which country to visit and how to make the best scrambled eggs.

The problem is that most of this advice doesn’t really impact our lives. It doesn’t influence who we are or how we behave. We listen to it, think “Oh yeah, this sounds really cool” and then we fall back into our old patterns.

This is because our views, values, identities and personalities are not shaped by rational arguments, but by what we experience.

Five minutes of personal experience will have more impact than two hours of smart advice.

That means we need to obtain the experience of being honest with ourselves. Step by step, little by little.

So set aside some time, a sheet of paper and a pen.

Start by asking yourself easy questions related to your strengths and weaknesses.

When did I last make a mistake?

When did I last achieve something?

When did I last help someone out and how did I do it?

These are good starting points.

Here is what’s going to happen: At first, you will be reluctant to admit your mistakes. You might even be reluctant to admit your achievements if you are a particularly modest or self-conscious person.

But by starting small, you realize that although admitting your mistakes or achievements is hard, it makes you feel good in the long run.

And through this experience, you will be able to shift your mindset, away from lying and towards honesty.

Drill down to the core

Studying business for five years wasn’t all wasted time. I have learned some valuable lessons. For example that the vaguer someone expresses something, the more bullshit it contains.

Why? Because beating around the bush makes lying so much easier. Ever had a shady sales guy dodge your questions and talk you past your doubts into buying something? Exactly. With enough superficial yada-yada everything sounds convincing.

This is why you have to ask yourself specific questions and find straight to the point answers.

The questions I had for myself were hard to answer, but it was totally worth it.

Which topics excite me? What are my passions? I love to talk about personal development, philosophy and the ways humans and society function. I also love cooking, eating and working out.

What is my life purpose? — I want to inspire people and help them live their best lives.

What perks do I expect from my future job and career? — The ability to work remotely, dress as I want and work on my own schedule.

How much time and effort am I willing to put in over the next few years? — Over the next few years, I am willing to take 60 hour weeks as long as what I do fulfills me. I am also willing to work on weekends and put in extra time to read and improve my skills.

With each question, I got more specific.

With each question, I dug deeper.

With each question, there was less room to wiggle and give generic answers.

So be as specific as you can.

Instead of “What do I like about my job?” ask yourself “Which opportunities for professional development and growth does my job offer?”

Instead of “Can I stick with this diet?” ask yourself “Is this meal plan compatible with the lunch options I got at my 9 to 5?”

By really drilling down to the core and being specific you force yourself to be honest.

Use pen and paper

When you write things down, it is much harder to cheat yourself. A lot of times a thought will make total sense in your head. Once you write it down though, you realize that you’ve gone absolutely bonkers.

If you have written articles yourself, you are familiar with the phenomenon. You have a perfectly plausible train of thought in your head, going from question to argument to argument to conclusion. But midway through typing it out, you look back at your thoughts and can’t help but think that someone must have slipped a massive dose of LSD into your morning coffee.

But typing out your thoughts on a computer screen isn’t enough. We are going to take it one step further and use an actual pen and paper. Oldschool, baby.

Remember that I said mindset shifts occur through experience? Well, actually using your hand to guide a pen and design your own paragraphs and writings is much more of an experience than simply hammering away at your keyboard. There is more passion (and less technological distraction) to it.

I still have the little booklet where I wrote all this down. It’s got a little golden pineapple on it and sits in a drawer right next to my desk.

Whenever I have doubts about what I am doing and what I have planned for the next years, I pull it out. I read through it. And I know, deep down, that this time I am honest with myself.

Fuck social stigmas

My girlfriend recently switched from one degree to another. She dropped what most people would consider a typical “female” degree — you know, with media, culture, design and all that stuff. She picked up a typically “male” one that involves a lot of programming, numbers and computers.

After she first did what society expected her to do, she now does what she really wants.

And boy, that’s probably the most excited and happy I have seen her in a while. Except for when I surprise her with food maybe.

The unhappiest people in this world, are those who care the most about what other people think.

— C. JoyBell C.

If you think and behave a certain way just because society wants you to, you can only lose. Even if you manage to do what society wants — you still fooled yourself. Congratulations, here’s your new TV set and daily dose of Adderall.

I’ve seen people waste their lives trying to please society. They get stuck in the same rat race and conformity for years and decades. Chasing what they neither can have nor actually want.

Society will probably wrinkle its nose at the profanity, but that’s all I have to say about social stigmas: Fuck them.

You will feel like a total fraud

Yep, no sugarcoating here. You will ask yourself “How could I be such an idiot?!” If you get to this stage, awesome! It means you are on the right track.

See, when you grow up, you build houses of cards. These houses are your identity, your beliefs, your values — they are who you are. Every time you experience something which reinforces one of these beliefs, you stack another card on top of that house.

Let’s say that as a kid, you had a really mean teacher who made you feel like a slacker even though you went all out trying to succeed. Think Severus Snape in Harry Potter. Inevitably, you will start to feel useless and unworthy. Every time you have a negative experience, another card will be stacked onto this belief. It doesn’t matter if you have a negative experience because of bad luck, external factors or if it really is your own fault. You will lie to yourself and believe it is because of your own insufficiency just to stay in line with your core belief.

When you come clean and shake up your core beliefs, you pull out cards from the very bottom. Your house of cards collapses. The belief and the lies you told yourself come crashing down. Boom.

As the cards come down, you will think of all the times in your life when your belief kept you from doing the right thing. All the times when you didn’t do something simply because you believed you weren’t capable of doing it. And that shit hurts.

Collapsing your house of cards is a devastating, yet liberating and empowering process. But there is no way around it. The pain is necessary for your growth. Pick up the cards and build anew.

Trust your gut feeling

Feelings do not always determine truth, but they can sometimes tell you what is true.

— J.R. Rim

Our gut feeling is incredibly interesting. We all have it at times. There are people who simply go by nothing else. Others ignore it completely. But I have yet to encounter someone who was never had it.

Scientists have been debating about it for ages and they probably will for some more time.

The prevailing explanation for it is summed up beautifully in this quote by Jon Westenberg.

What we call following our gut is really us being subconsciously guided by every piece of information we’ve ever consumed, shaping our instincts and ideas and forming us.

— Jon Westenberg

Our gut feeling basically is everything we are.

If I look back on my life and the major decisions I made — relationships, education, moving, friends, long-time travels — my gut feeling was almost always spot on.

So this is my personal two cents. The last thing I have to say about the whole subject.

If it feels like something is off, then it probably is.

Follow your gut.

~ Moreno