Selling Yourself Short

This whole lying thing seems to have opened a can of worms. In response to gwon's comment:

"But anyway, how do people get away with it? If you are found out you lose people’s trust and it won’t get you the promotion or you may even get fired. And how can you not get found out when everyone you work with knows? Can you really get ahead by lying?"

I think this is where the skill in lying would have to come in. You would have to pick things that aren't easily verifiable to lie about, and come up with a convincing story. Plus, you would have to count on dupes like me, who care more about getting the work done, than playing the whole political game. Plus, in a fairly large organisation, like the one that I work in, you can generally count on the segregated nature of the teams. The person that I mentioned is pretty much a laughing stock in my old team. Whenever his name is mentioned, people groan and ask what stupid thing he has done now. Some people have gone so far as to block him on our internal IM system. In his new team, which rarely interacts with my old team, it sounds like he is well-loved. The thing he took credit for, was something for my old team. When he moved teams, he told them about his wonderful work, and they didn't bother to fact-check it - and why would they? People trust each other.

" If you change your personality, you will naturally learn to lie. Would you change your personality to get ahead? Are you willing to sacrifice your integrity?"

Back in vanilla WoW, discipline priests were generally rubbish compared to holy, but I was so determined to play a discipline priest, even though it wasn't the best. Raids were 40 people back then, so it really didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. I did the same thing in Cataclysm, despite how hard it was to do heroic dungeons. I was even kicked from a dungeon once, because I just couldn't sustain healing for long enough to kill the boss.

After that happened, I was too afraid to do another heroic. I queued for some of the easier ones, but avoided the one that I was kicked from and all the ones after it, like the plague. I read some forum posts on how to improve, and the general consensus was switch to holy. Even Meshu told me the same thing. But I refused. I had hit a brick wall. On one hand, I was proud of myself, for sticking to my guns and staying discipline despite how hard it was. On the other hand, I had limited myself from a majority of the end game. I couldn't bring myself to queue knowing that I'd be letting 4 other people down. But I kept thinking, this is so unfair - why can't I play the spec that I want and do things that everyone else can do?

It was actually DotA, or rather HoN which is what I was playing at the time, which made me realise that in a group, each person has a specific role. To do the best that you can do as a group, you need to fulfill the role that you agreed to play by choosing your hero. I remember when I used to get angry at the carry heroes who would yell at me to buy wards or upgrade the courier when I had no gold. I felt that if they wanted the wards, they could buy them themselves. (While I still think that if your support is doing so poorly that they can't afford wards, you should buy them, instead of getting ganked constantly and blaming the lack of vision, but that is another story.)

In short, I wasn't playing optimally. By choosing to do what I wanted, despite the huge amount of evidence showing that it wasn't the best, I was also letting 4 other people down. Sure, if I had the skill to make up for the sub-optimal spec, then it would have been fine, but I didn't, and I knew that, which is why I was so afraid to queue for the more difficult heroics. I do sometimes play silly builds in DotA, but for me, that's more of a training exercise than a conscious decision to prove a point. I wasn't gaining anything.

To answer the question, whether I would change my personality to get ahead, I honestly don't know. I do know that I'm not the person that I was last year - I go to the gym, I do yoga, I actually feel confident enough in my skills to argue with J about Java related stuff. I'm not even sure that I'm the same person I was two months ago. Personality theory is a bit undecided on whether people have a permanent personality anyway. And adaptation is always good. I know that I am dodging the question, and the fundamental question is, do I really want to go back on something that I value so highly? I don't, I really don't - which is probably why I am struggling with the whole thing. But I like to think that I am pretty rational, and it's hard to deny the evidence in support of lying to get ahead.

I seem to have picked up yet another mentor, and her advice is that I need to sell myself more. That doesn't necessarily entail lying about things in a manipulative way, but it does mean framing my achievements in a more positive light. She has worked with some very senior people, and she said that those that get ahead are those that put themselves out there. So maybe it's not about becoming a good liar, but becoming a good salesperson. I guess I will put the lying thing aside for now, and focus more on selling myself.

The Dark Path

Anyone who has known me for more than a few minutes probably knows that I have a huge stick up my ass about lying. That doesn't mean I'm some shining paragon of purity who has never lied in her life, but for the most part, I will generally avoid lying.

That being said, so many people have mentioned to me that I really need to get over myself. Lying is a natural part of life, and if I want to get anywhere, I need to learn to lie - everyone else does it, so it's really just leveling the playing field. So I said that at a friend's housewarming, I would practice, and pretend to be someone completely different to get better at lying. Seeing as most of the people there wouldn't know anything about me, it would be a good opportunity. But now that I've thought about it a bit more, it seems like a really stupid thing to do. What if I meet someone that I really like, and would like to become friends with? I'd either have to continue to be that fake person, or tell them the truth, and then their first impression of me would be that I'm a liar.

This has happened before. In first year, I joined a club and met some new people. A few of them played WoW, two were Alliance on Blackrock, and the other was Horde. The two Alliance players had never seen the Horde player in game, because this was back when there was no armory, and guilds were massive, so you could easily get away with claiming to be in a guild that you weren't. Also before realID, so they couldn't check if he was online. Anyway, so when I mentioned that I was Horde on Blackrock, the Alliance guys asked me to go and find their Horde friend. I thought nothing of it, and I agreed. So I asked to add the Horde guy to my friends list, and that's when he told me he wasn't Horde on Blackrock - he didn't even play the game! He told me not to tell the other guys, and I did it, but I always thought it was strange.

What did he gain from lying about playing a game that he didn't actually play? I guess maybe he would fit in a bit better with everyone else, but I got the impression that they already respected him a lot, so I didn't think that was the reason. Besides, he told them he was on the other faction, so it's not like they could play together. It was difficult enough hanging out with MrMan4 and we wanted to spend time together in game despite being opposite factions. Talking is limited to emotes (although I think back when 2-Alliance-1-Horde Hunt was going on, you could use /me [message] to actually talk to people, not sure if it was patched out before or after the series of events, but it was definitely in Vanilla WoW, so MrMan4 and I had no chance of talking in game).

Eventually, I asked Horde Guy why he did it, and he did it as a joke. I still find that explanation unsatisfactory, but maybe I just didn't get the punchline. It seems like a lot of effort to go through for so little gain. He'd have to research what all the fights are like, and the mechanics of his class in order to be able to hold a decent conversation about the game. How do you convince someone that your guild has cleared Molten Core if you've never even seen the place, much less participated in the fights?

Once I found out about the lie, I had a very hard time trusting him. We'd known each other for maybe a couple of weeks, and the first thing about him was this huge lie. This huge, confusing lie. We've known each other for years now, the stage where you'd expect to the trust level to be around 90%+, but I find that every now and again I have to stop myself and rethink whether he's lying to me.

When I meet new people, my default position is to trust them. Sure, if they're trying to tell me that they have a fool-proof plan to make millions, all they need is my credit card number and expiry, alarm bells will start ringing, but I think they are innocent until proven guilty. I'd like to think that people who meet me have the same expectation of me - that I'm trustworthy until proven otherwise. So I just want to repay that trust in me by not lying to people. I hate the thought that I could be someone else's Horde Guy, and that they feel like they can't always believe the things that I'm saying.

That's why I think learning to lie well is a dark path, it leads to people questioning your claims and your motives. But someone at work who I despise and think is incompetent got promoted recently. He has no problems with playing dirty. When I called him out on the fact that some of the stuff he said he did, he didn't actually do, he just shrugged it off and said that's how the game is played. During my performance review, one of the pieces of feedback someone said was, "It's was a pleasure to work with Anna... she has no hidden agenda. It is refreshing to have someone who says what they think." I actually thought it was a compliment, and I have a lot of respect for the guy who said it, but maybe he was subtly telling me to change. I mean, the fact that he finds it refreshing means that it's not the norm.

"...[he] was a brave man, honest and loyal … but quite a hopeless player.” He brought the seed to his mouth with the knife. “In King’s Landing, there are two sorts of people. The players and the pieces.”
Martin, George R. R. (2012-03-15). A Game of Thrones: The Story Continues: The complete 5 books (A Song of Ice and Fire) (Kindle Locations 44250-44252). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.