Be an honest person

One of the most important lessons I learned in life after making a lot of mistakes and after losing a lot of people I cared about was that there's no quality a person can have better than honesty. No matter who you are, no matter where you come from and no matter what you like to do, honesty is something everyone out there respects.

I said I learned this after making a lot of mistakes because a long time ago I was one of the most dishonest people I knew. I learned how to lie really well, how to manipulate others and how to use all the information I knew about them to make them do whatever I wanted.

After losing all my friends and after all the people I cared about left me, I decided to change and stop trying to control everything. I stopped lying, I stopped manipulating and I stopped trying to convince people to do what I want.

All that made me realize two things - first, people respect an honest man above all, and second, life it's way easier when you don't lie and when you don't try to control other people. You don't have to remember all the lies you told everyone and once you stop trying to control people, you stop caring about them and you have more time to focus on yourself.

Combine all that with almost always telling the truth, accepting responsibility for your actions and always being fair to others, and you'll easily become one of those "rare" people you can only find in movies. To be honest, it's pretty easy to be one of them, and while I don't consider myself to be "special" or "rare", I am pretty sure you have the chance to become one.

I believe that one of the main reasons people lie and manipulate is that they think it's always easier to do that, and to make people do what they want, rather than tell the truth and work for what they want. However, that's wrong. Lying and manipulating will offer you a life of constant fear, trying to always know more than others and always remember what you told them in order to not let them catch you with anything.

Being honest means you don't have to remember anything and you don't have to show others how powerful you are. People will come to respect you without feeling any fear, and that kind of respect lasts, and not having to remember lies... well I can say that's just liberating.

I'm not saying you should transform right now into a saint, to never lie and to always do good around you no matter your situation. I don't do that, so I won't tell you to do it. What I'm telling you is that being honest may make your life pretty easy, and may take some things off your shoulders.

Sure, some things will get harder and you'll have to work more for what you want, especially when it comes to relationships with people, but if you learn how to do that and how to make people like you for what you are and for your behavior, it's gonna be more satisfying than to make people stay with you because they're afraid of what you may tell others about them.

I know how great it feels to have power over others, to see them trying not to upset you because you know something about them others don't, and the only thing I can say is that it's not worth. What is worth is being such a great person that other people decide to tell you things about themselves because they trust you, and they are sure you won't do anything bad with that information.

So, while we all get told to always be honest, we know we're not, at least not always. I'm not always. But one advice I can give you is that being a good person makes your life easier, and the relationships you'll have will be always good (except when you get bad people in your life, that never ends well). Try to avoid lying, try to not manipulate other people and just try to be... you. You'll see how stress easily goes away and how your relationship with people will improve.