Page 123 - YOU CAN WIN - SHIV KHERA

RokZRooM Special ! You Can Win by Shiv Khera

♦ omitting facts or giving half-truths?
♦ telling the greatest lies by remaining silent?

Make yourself an honest man and then you may be sure there is one rascal less in the
world.

--Thomas Carlyle

Credibility

We all know the story of the shepherd boy who cried wolf. The boy decided to have some
fun at the expense of the villagers. He shouted, "Help, help, the wolf is here." The
villagers heard him and came to his rescue. But when they got there, they saw no wolf
and the boy laughed at them. They went away. The next day, the boy played the same
trick and the same thing happened.
Then one day, while the boy was taking care of his sheep he actually saw a wolf and
shouted for help. The people in the village heard him but this time nobody came to his
rescue. They thought it was another trick and didn't trust him anymore. He lost his sheep
to the wolf. What is the moral of the story?

The moral of the story is

♦ When people tell lies, they lose credibility.
♦ Once they have lost credibility, even when they tell the truth, no one believes them.

The Quality of a Good Character is Honesty

Truth can be misrepresented in two ways:

1. Incomplete facts or information
2. Exaggeration

BEWARE OF HALF-TRUTHS OR MISREPRESENTATION OF TRUTHS

There was a sailor who worked on the same boat for three years. One night he got drunk.
This was the first time it ever happened. The captain recorded it in the log, "The sailor
was drunk tonight." The sailor read it, and he knew this comment would affect his career,
so he went to the captain, apologized and asked the captain to add that it only happened
once in three years which was the complete truth. The captain refused and said, "What I
have written in the log is the truth."
The next day it was the sailor's turn to fill in the log. He wrote, "The captain was sober
tonight." The captain read the comment and asked the sailor to change or add to it
explaining the complete truth because this implied that the captain was drunk every other
night. The sailor told the captain that what he had written in the log was the truth.

Both statements were true but they conveyed misleading messages;

Exaggeration

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