How can you tell if someone is lying to you?
The short answer: It’s complicated.
The longer answer: There is a list of consistent tell-tale signs you can use to decide with 95% accuracy whether the person you are dealing with can be trusted or not.
This is the list we have compiled after many thousands of encounters with men ranging from lowlife losers all the way through to high-performers.
Evaluation of Emotions
- They Are Miserable: Endlessly complaining and a pessimist about everything. Would rather sit down and bitch about minor problems than exert a small amount of effort to fix them.
- They Always Come Out On Top: Anything which is worthwhile in life has a fairly low success rate and requires many unsuccessful attempts and failures. Winners view defeat as a learning experience and sign of progress, and will not waste time bragging about their accomplishments. For most other people, this is not the case, so you should learn how to feed their egos.
- They Want To See Others Fail: There is a noticeable difference between being competitive and being negative. Competitive people do not want you to win at their expense, while negative people want you to lose even when they have no skin in the game. Negative people are very easy to spot, and in most cases they will be your friends, family members, and coworkers. They will discourage you from taking calculated risks and will give you bad advice that directly contradicts the reality you see in front of you.
Business/Work
- “People are our most important asset”: This is the number one leading lie in the corporate world. A more accurate translation would be: “People are our most troublesome and unstable asset. Our most important assets are actually our financial assets.” Whenever management delivers a speech on how valuable people are to the business, you can bet there will be an impending wave of layoffs coming up.
- “The customer always comes first”: People take care of the customer only when they stand to gain from doing so, and will ignore those customers who do not deliver any immediate value.
- “It’s not personal, it’s just business”: This is a flat-out lie. Everything is personal and most people will take grudges to their grave.
- “We judge people based on performance”: This is an extension of the previous lie. Most people who keep their jobs keep them because the decision-makers like them, and those that lose their jobs have been fired because those same decision-makers no longer like them anymore.
Self-Rationalizations/Excuses
- “I don’t have time”: This is one of the more unique lies because most people who tell it genuinely believe so, but the reality is… When people say to you that they don’t have time, it’s because they are wasting time. They can’t find the time to lift weights or build a business but always have the time to binge watch TV shows and analyze sports stats for Fantasy Football.
- “I don’t have enough money”: Effectively the same lie/excuse. They don’t have the money to improve their diet but have the money for a $15 lunch at Chipotle every day when this is considerably more expensive than a high-quality homemade juice and meal.
- “I will do this tomorrow”: Inaction breeds more inaction. Push a task back once and you will keep deferring over and over again until it can no longer be postponed.
Lifestyle
- Women: The overwhelming majority of men are awful with women, so don’t believe anything they say unless you can see their results for yourself. You’ll know which guys are good with women right away because you will see them with beautiful girls. They will also be more pleasant to be around because they won’t find the need to brag.
- Social Ties: Relationships are everything when it comes to moving ahead in business and life, and having strong relationships with those who have deep pockets or are famous can save you many years of unnecessary and tiresome toil. The same is true when it comes to having good relationships with people who are well-connected. With that said, people who frequently talk about their supposedly close friendships with famous people are usually lying. In most cases this comes in the form of extreme over-exaggeration. For example, a friend of yours who works at a golf course and sees Stephen Curry there frequently might claim to regularly play golf with the man. As with everything else, don’t believe anything unless you are presented with undeniable proof.
Finance
- Income and Savings: Unless someone shows you his monthly paycheck or bank statement, assume everything he says here is a complete lie (or at the very least a gross overestimation).
- Picking Stocks: Some guy comes up to you and boasts about how he has been making easy money by trading securities. The plot of his story will revolve around him winning again and again and again with every trade while suffering negligible or zero losses. Unless this guy can show you a paper trail spanning a period of at least three years, you can reliably assume that he is either a liar or has just been incredibly lucky across a handful of trades.
- Outfoxing Quants: With a few rare exceptions, any retail investor who claims to be faster and smarter than a quant is 100% lying.
- Liquidity: No retail investor is more liquid than a hedge fund.
- Technical Analysis: It is the case that technicals move stocks but there is no way you can outperform a set up algorithm. Given the sheer number of quants out there, you won’t be able to win the speed game by clicking buy/sell before it has already passed the XYZ moving average.
Concluding Remarks
This is a relatively short post intended to be a fast but eye-opening read. Liars and shysters are everywhere, and the last thing you want is to be wasting your time hanging around them. The above list is an effective guide for detecting their bullshit. If a person is constantly making bold commitments and setting unrealistically high expectations with zero tangible contributions and does so with a condescending tone, be certain that you are engaging with a liar. Remember, anyone who is winning at multiple levels and genuinely accomplishing much does not need to show off because people can naturally sense their success.