Authenticity Insurance Inc.

I assure you I didn’t mean to delay publishing my post for this week. I had trouble with my car (which I named Garbage Can II… and don’t even ask what happened to the original Garbage Can), which led to a compressed bite-size amount of time to complete a super-sized serving of duties.

Being completely honest here.

I meant to follow up on my graph-laden post on the costs of being authentic with some fresh thoughts. I even put it down on my to-do list. Oh you don’t believe me? Here’s some evidence:

Everything I’ve said above is real, which plays right into what I wanted to write about: Keeping things real.

In that other post I stated the case for your being authentic possibly being the reason for your influence to be capped. What I didn’t mention was that the risk of not being authentic is a lot higher and dreadful.

Sure, you might fool people for a while. You can fake it ’till you make it, as they say. You might even shoot straight to the top without people noticing. The problem is, it takes only one person to peek behind your dirty little mask, and you could possibly blow it forever. And fast.

Go ask Milli Vanilli. Need I say more?

But you see, it’s not in your power to fool people. You can try, but there’s no way for you to ensure success, nor to maintain the façade. The only element under your control is how authentic you are.

Think about that. If authenticity has a cost (the cost of capping the growth of your influence), and being authentic protects you from the risk of really disappointing people (at least those who value sincerity), then it could almost be compared to buying home insurance.

What I mean is, your house is better off by paying a small amount each month to keep it protected. In the same way, you’re better off growing your influence slowly but steadily (i.e, paying the cost of being authentic by not growing too quickly), consistently recurring to what is absolutely true about your deep-down persona (or your brand, or your business, etc.) as a well from which to pull out actions, thoughts and ideas.

And to be completely honest, the bit about ninjas and zombies wasn’t real, of course. But if I met either, I would meet them on high-speed riding on Garbage Can II.

Ok, blog post… CHECK!

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