Note to Self: Truth Wins

What does business recovery and homeowner foreclosure have to do with Will Smith?

I just watched a video clips segments of interviews with Will Smith talking about success. He’s talking about more than his career — he’s talking about the idea of success just walking around in the world as a person. “You have to be willing to die for the truth,” he said. Which he defined as knowing yourself and acting in a way that doesn’t betray that, even when it’s hard, when you look ridiculous, and when it goes counter to everything else everybody wants.

I just wrote a story about “new rules” businesses have to follow to thrive now, and the gist is that if you make what you’re about and what your customers want your constant focus, you’ll win. This is not new, of course. And as a corollary to personal truth, it’s just as consistently hard to do. With the rate of change today, it means that your business may well be constantly changing as products and services quickly become obsolete. If you make the best pizza in town, and you love doing it, and suddenly the FDA declares that combining tomato sauce and mozzarella is more deadly than huffing high fructose corn syrup, how quickly could you start making tofu salad?

What makes it really hard is that your two rules may not save you. Meanwhile, the guy down the street who wouldn’t care if he served up arsenic slaw, so long as it lines his pockets, is doing just fine. It starts to look like there’s a different way — that other things matter more. And this idea catches on and grows, until we get good and lost. But when everything finally collapses, those who managed to hold onto what mattered will go on. They still have the most important thing. Call it integrity, or reputation, or the soul, or your gut. No matter, it is truth.

In homeowner foreclosure news, a study says that the highest number of homes in foreclosure were those of well-educated, affluent overreachers, a group they called Gen X “Cash & Careers.” Ouch. Granite counter tops, in other words, were more to blame for the foreclosure crisis than predatory lending. Because they thought things were different, that they could somehow get more than they could afford, they weren’t willing to look at the truth.