I think that most of life’s disappointments can be traced back to someone saying one thing, meaning another, and doing precisely nothing.
Maybe a friend promises to help you move but suddenly remembers they have to reorganize their spice rack. Or, a boss praises your “innovative thinking” and then quickly files it away in the well-known, yet somehow acceptable, recycling bin of polite corporate indifference.
Even politicians, whose entire job descriptions (one would think) seem to rest on these three steps, tend to stumble somewhere between the “mean it” and the “do it.”
It sounds so simple: just say what you mean. This alone could solve half of the world’s troubles. But our culture is one that encourages a soft padding of words, where “let’s get coffee sometime” often really means “please vanish from my life forever.” We have turned speech into performance art, a freqeuntly not-so-delicate choreography of half-truths and avoidances. And then we wonder why no one trusts each other.
Then comes the second rule: mean what you say. This is harder. Meaning requires a certain amount of moral spine. It means resisting the temptation to tell someone what they want to hear, even when it would make dinner less awkward. It means understanding that your words are not disposable. They linger, sometimes longer than you’d like. To mean what you say is to tether your speech to your conscience, and that is a frighteningly unfashionable thing to do.
And finally, the graveyard of human resolve: follow through. This is where New Year’s resolutions go to die and where promises curdle into excuses. Following through requires an unglamorous combination of stamina and integrity. It is easy to intend, much harder to act. Which is precisely why the rare person who follows through stands out like a lighthouse. People notice. They remember. And in our sad little world of deflated words, reliability becomes almost a super-power.
Put the three together and you have something close to a life philosophy. Not grandiose, not complicated, but durable.
If you say what you mean, mean what you say, and follow through, people begin to trust you. Trust accumulates like interest in a savings account; slowly at first, then with compounding force. And unlike money, this is a form of wealth that does not devalue.
It might not solve every problem. But it will, at the very least, save you from being the kind of person everyone groans about when your name appears on their phone. Which, when you think about it, is already a pretty great success.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers, friends.