The opposite of honesty is deception, and lying.

And many of us lie. A lot of times.

When we lie, what we are doing is creating wriggle room. Wriggle room for doing things that we aren't really all that proud of. Wriggle room for claiming to know things that we don't really know. Wriggle room to pretend to be someone that we think people we meet will be impressed to meet. Wriggle room to please others by telling them what we think they'd like to hear.

And if it isn't about ourselves, but the products we sell that we lie about, then we are creating wriggle room as well. Only here, we are creating wriggle room to substitute inferior quality than what is promised. Wriggle room for falsifying accounts. Wriggle room for corruption. Wriggle room for hiding side effects. Wriggle room for doing what's best for the business and not what's best for the customer.

And then there are those times when we lie to ourselves. About what is important to us, about why we do the things we do, about how we live our lives.

When we decide to not create this wriggle room, then we are forced to show our true hand in every situation.

This means that by making one simple decision to be honest, we are leaving ourselves with two choices - do things that we aren't afraid to tell others, or change the perception of others to accept the things we do.

By removing the wriggle room, honesty raises the bar.

You will come across a lot of life hacks and trips and tricks and routines on how to raise the bar for what you do and to get better and better.

The easiest hack is to practice honesty. This automatically raises the bar on everything you do. Because if you want to tell the world about what you do, you should now actually do it exactly as you  want to tell it, without exaggeration.