TRUTH ON CREDIT

My son was telling me about a podcast he’d just listened to. The guest was telling a story where a client asked him if he could build a particular thing. He did not know how to build that thing, but he assumed that he could figure it out, so he said “Yes” to the client. He explained that he was telling the truth in advance. My son and I were laughing at this concept, but inside I was thinking, Yeah, that’s my story.

I’d come across this Truth in Advance concept in an article years before. It was being offered as a better alternative to the more popular Fake it till you Make it strategy. They both have a nice ring to them, and they both have a lot of fans.

It’s simple: You aren’t going to get anywhere unless you put yourself out there. You aren’t going to be considered for an opportunity if you simply say “No” when asked if you can do certain things. Some of these things are vague: Can you lead a team? It’s fair to answer, “I believe I can do that well”. Others are precise: Can you scuba dive? Saying yes here can kill you if it’s not true. We are talking here about the stuff somewhere in between: Can you create this video animation for our website? Failing to deliver an animation won’t kill you, but it could destroy your reputation.

IT’S TRUTH ON CREDIT

I prefer my new term Truth on Credit, which is more weighty. It’s fun to say Fake it Till you Make it, but it has no repercussions. Even Truth in Advance has no consequence. This is where Truth on Credit takes the Type A crowd to task.

I like this term because in reality it’s just like taking out a loan. If you buy a car on credit, you are absolutely required to pay that balance. Defaulting means heavy consequences. Having the car repo’d is bad enough, but your credit worthiness will take years to recover. You’ll be buying whatever you can afford with cash for a long time.

DEFAULT = COLLAPSING HOME

In 2003 we bought a two-story house with a downstairs bedroom that connected to a 3-car garage. It was the perfect space for my recording studio. I would normally have built the studio myself, but I was backed up with deadlines so I found a young carpenter on Craigslist (we can already see where this is headed) who was looking for work. I asked him if he knew how to handle a project like this. He said that he could. Was this Truth, or Truth on Credit?

Things went fine for a week or so until one of my check-ins. To make way for an air duct, he was beginning to cut an 8” notch into a 12” main header that was holding up the master bedroom above. I realized what was happening and put a stop to it. I was livid. This was Carpentry 101 if there ever was. It wasn’t a simple mistake, it was a gross lack of construction knowledge. In one instant he defaulted on the loan he had taken out when he said he could handle this project.

We decided what I owed him to date, I paid him in cash and sent him on his way. As a bonus - when he left he said, “If I decide this isn’t a fair amount, I know where you live and I have heavy friends.” I was honestly scared about that for some time. Perhaps defaulting on his loans was the least of his usual offenses. I was stuck building that studio with my own hands in spite of the projects I had on my plate.

I HAD BEEN DOING THE SAME THING (MINUS THE COLLAPSING)

But this got me thinking. I had never really considered it much, but I’d been doing the same thing my whole life. I said “yes” first, and figured out how to accomplish it later. It wasn’t a strategy that I had orchestrated, or learned at a seminar. It was simply my personality and confidence. The only difference was, I hadn’t collapsed anyone’s new home. But that isn’t to say that I have always succeeded. I wouldn’t have learned any lessons if I hadn’t also failed a few times.

I had recorded a live concert for a video release (it was early 2000s, so it was for DVD). As we prepared to mix, the client asked, “You can mix this in surround, right?” I had never mixed in surround, so naturally I said “Yes”. My console was modern and had cool looking joysticks for panning in surround so I thought, How hard can it be? Turns out it can be a lot harder than it sounds, particularly at that time. After much effort rewiring, setting up rear speakers, and splitting my subwoofer to its own surround channel I was finally able to mix. Eventually I did mix up a nice surround experience for that concert. But then came the mastering and delivery. I was simply out of my element. Where I wanted to hand them 6 channels of audio, they expected me to have it encoded in formats I’d never heard of. Google and YouTube weren’t nearly as smart as they are today at being the world’s educator of all things.

It’s possible that I got this done. It’s also possible that we threw in the towel and that DVD released in stereo. I honestly can’t remember. Either way I failed at delivering it without drama, delays, and frustration for those I was working for. So in all fairness, I’ve been guilty of defaulting on my own truth loans as well.

OVERPROMISE AND OVERDELIVER

If there is a point to this post, it is this: Type B folks have a saying—Underpromise and Overdeliver. That’s a safe motto. Nobody gets hurt, and the client happily gets more than they expected to receive. It works great much of the time. But I argue that we didn’t land on the moon or invent air fryers using that motto.

It’s easy for us Type A personalities to overpromise. But doing so only to fail is far worse than not promising at all. If I had a motto (and I don’t) it might be—Overpromise and Overdeliver. That’s what I want to get from people I hire, and that’s what I want to give to people who hire me.