Be True To Yourself

How important is it to be true to yourself?  What is the potential of not being truthful? Here’s a hint: Exponential success…

Hello, my name is been Vince Schembri and I’m the president of WOWzer Technologies. Today, I want to talk to you about something that happened at the turn of century, just after the dot com crash. The Enron corporation as they went from a high of $90 per share to zero within the span of a year and a half.

What led to that? They were the darling of wall street. They were the seventh largest corporation at the time but it was all built on deception. Deception of what they were actually doing and what were they really doing you might ask? The management had devised plans to have, what they call, “special purpose entities.” These are companies or organizations that they formed to hide all their losses so they could only report the good things.

And even how they did that was very difficult to follow. Confused yet? A lot of people were, it’s even confusing me as I’m talking about it. Why go through all this trouble to, to deceive and hide, what does it do for you?

What it does is… causes this kind of result, from 90 to zero. So, what can we learn from it? We can learn that these are the things we should not do. We should always be above board and we should always be transparent and report what that is actually happening.

I know the majority of people do that, but sometimes, you never know how these deceptive things get started. Doing the right thing for the right reason on an ongoing basis always is the most important thing that anybody can do.

I think that’s the biggest lesson that we can get from this. Because if you go back and read a little bit of the history, what you’ll find out is not only did the company go down, all the employees lost their jobs and all their pension as well. All the investors lost all their money. And Arthur Anderson, the accounting company, who was charged with doing the audit on an annual basis, no longer exists. They were one of the big five accounting firms. So that just shows you the magnitude of how things can go against you.

Anything that you do has the potential for exponential growth. So if you deceive, you can have exponential growth in deception, consequently it gets worse. But if you do the right thing and you do it over a period of time, you get exponential growth going upward and therefore you have more success. Consequently you have more opportunity to live the kind of life that you want to live.

That’s why I would encourage you to live that way. You want to be integrous in all things that you do, because you don’t know who’s watching you. Actually, everyone is watching. You just can’t see it. In today’s world with social media, it’s even more evident and around than you can possibly imagine. My encouragement is always do the right thing, no matter what happens.

In return, if we live those kinds of lives, it rubs off in our work, it rubs off in our family, it rubs off in our community, it rubs off in our world as well. You can feel good about yourself. I would wonder at times, when all of this was happening in late 1990’s and the early 2000’s, what it was like to be one of the individuals in management who were only interested in lining their pockets? Doing everything they could to help the value of the shares go up so they can line their pockets.

How do they sleep at night? I know I love to sleep peacefully. I can’t imagine what that would have been like. When I think about it, I’m thinking that it is not peaceful at all. When you do the right thing on an ongoing basis, you will have peace in your heart, in your entire system. No matter what happens, you’ll be able to sleep well at night, which is what we all want.

The other thing that it also did is put them under a lot of stress. Now you can be under a lot of stress when you’re doing the right thing but at least when you’re doing the right thing, it’s a good kind of stress. When you understand that the things you’re doing is for the benefit of others, you feel more at peace about life in your heart. Whereas, I’m sure living the other way wasn’t peaceful at all.

It led to all kinds of problems. Those individuals may have lived the good life for a period of time, but they don’t anymore. So my take on all this is, we can learn from things that don’t go well by doing the exact opposite. The lessons we can learn now is something that we can take and flourish by putting integrity into our organizations. We can put that into our families as well and the people we’re close too.

They watch us…they’re looking to see what kind of people that we are, and they will follow us, especially if we’re doing the right thing. They’ll want to emulate us. Whereas if we’re doing the wrong thing, eventually people, just leave and you’ll never see them again because they believed something about you and all of a sudden that’s no longer true.

So be true to yourself, do the right thing on an ongoing basis. And instead of having a value graph that goes downwards, you’ll have a value graph that goes upwards. I wish you nothing, but the best God bless, always do the right thing, no matter what, you will never regret it. Ciao for now.