Visitor Quote Of The Week: Great Britain

Hello Friends,

Hope all is well. Today we visit Great Britain. Our quote comes from Winston Churchill "who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman, orator and strategist, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army. A prolific author, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his own historical writings."

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
Winston Churchill

I'm sure a lot of you have all played some version of the "Telephone Game" or "The Gossip Game." It is an exercise which demonstrates how quickly information can be distorted.

The exercise starts with twenty people or so who sit in a circle. One person whispers a secret into the ear of the person next to them. That person whispers the same secret to the person next to them and so on until you get the last person. The last person has to tell the group what the original secret was. I have never been in a group in which the last person got it right.

This exercise demonstrates how quickly information can be lost as it is passed from one person to the next. Spreading lies or gossiping can be very harmful.

Sometimes people tell lies to make their situation better. Say someone is up for a new job. They embellish on their resume to make themselves look better. The better they look on paper, the better their chances of landing the job.

Some people lie to protect others. Say you have a girlfriend who just got a new haircut that looks horrible. You tell her that it looks good to spare her feelings even thought you know it looks hideous.

Some people lie just to be hurtful. For some reason there are people in this world who gravitate towards dishonest things, and use lies to hurt and deceive. Individuals such as con-artists will at first, appear to be helpful, but in the end they were only helping themselves.

All three of these situations are bad. The person with the fake resume will be found out one day when he asked to do something he doesn't know how to do even though it said on his resume that he was an "expert" in this field.

The girlfriend will quickly find out that her haircut is ugly when she notices that the people around her are laughing and talking behind her back. She will become angry with the boyfriend for not being honest even though he was trying to protect her.

The con-artist will eventually get caught. They always do. It may be after making a lot of money initially, but the fall they take is usually a hard one.

Lies always lead to hurt even when you are trying to protect someone. It is always better to be truthful in all situations. The trick is to put yourself in situations where you don't have to lie. Once the lie gets rolling, it picks up momentum. Now you have to lie to cover up another lie. And so on, and so on.

So, spread love not lies. Love will always make it around the circle.

Thanks for listening.