A few years ago I started a habit I still keep. Every so often I sit by myself, alone, and take stock — not of my business, but of me. I ask myself plainly: am I still on the right path, or have I started to drift? This world is full of distractions, and if I'm honest, it's hard for anyone to say they live free of every vice, that they never fall short. So I check. Quietly, without an audience, because that's the only place the answer is ever true.
Growing up where I did, there was an idea that sat underneath almost everything — that to be smart, to make it, you had to hide. You had to become someone in the shadows before you could become someone in the light. People wore two faces: the one they showed while they were becoming, and the one they planned to reveal once they'd arrived. Deception wasn't seen as the cost of ambition. It was treated as the method.
I never accepted that. And the more business I've done, the more I've come to believe the opposite is true. In business, we're taught to find one real problem and solve it. I've settled on mine: the problem that people cannot trust each other.
Let me tell you how that showed up for me directly. I once worked with someone who felt I didn't trust him enough. He said so, more than once, in different ways. And here's what I told him, and what I still believe: whether I trust someone is my call to make. It's my duty, not his entitlement. Trust isn't owed on request — it's read off a record. So I didn't argue with him about it. I did the same thing I do when someone doesn't yet trust me: I waited. I let time do what explanation can't. Because eventually, the person watching realizes there's nothing hidden — no second version of me that only comes out when no one's looking. And when they see that, especially where it matters most in business, money and supervision, the trust arrives on its own. I don't have to ask for it. I just have to be provable.
That experience is where the bigger realization landed for me. Honesty isn't a small, tidy virtue you practice for its own sake. It plays a big role — maybe the biggest one — in how far anyone actually gets. Honesty should not be the moral luxury you afford yourself once you're already successful. I believe it is the first form of capital you ever hold. Most people spend years chasing money, when the thing they actually need to build first is how honest they can be in this world.
Ask any employer what their real challenge is, and most won't say their people can't perform. They'll tell you they can't fully trust their people to do the job the way they'd do it themselves. That's the gap. So a good leader's job isn't only to get the team aligned on the goals and the mission. It's to take responsibility for making sure the team means what they say — not to assume it, to make sure of it.
So whether you're chasing your next goal or starting completely from nothing, here's the one thing I keep coming back to: take an honest inventory of what you actually have. Maybe it's no cash. No assets. Maybe not even a name yet. But from day one, you have one thing — your word. What you say you'll do, and whether you do it.
Every honest moment is a small deposit into an account. Being honest with someone, consistently, in small ways, builds the kind of incremental trust that makes people willing to hand you their next zero. Nobody sends you a statement for this account. There's no monthly report on your honesty. But the world is quietly keeping the balance anyway. People talk to each other, they compare notes, they form an opinion — so let your record stay clean enough that people can actually entrust you with something. None of us operates in isolation. Not in business, not at work. This matters more than most people admit.
Here's why it's hard, though. In the short term, the lie almost always looks better. The over-promise wins the contract. Pretending you know wins the room. Honesty, in the moment, usually costs you something — a deal, a bit of status, a comfortable silence you'd rather keep. So the dishonest version of you is always a little richer this week. That's the trap. You're weighing a real cost today against a benefit you can't yet see — and under pressure, most people take the money today.
I know this can sound naive. But it works from a premise of good faith: that there are people above you — owners, leaders, people with capital and experience — who are actively looking for someone they can trust. And I'm telling you from the other side of that table: that search is real, and it is almost desperate.
When you're the one running something, competence isn't the rare thing. You can find skilled people without much trouble. What you cannot easily find is a skilled person whose stewardship you don't have to watch. I know operators who will tell you, honestly, that they wish they could clone the two or three trustworthy people they have and put a copy of them in every part of the business. That's how scarce real trust is.
So watch what happens when a leader finds real competence attached to real honesty. They don't just hire that person. They bet on them. They train them. They put them in front of things bigger than their CV deserves. They lend them money, or a vehicle, or a client relationship, or their own name.
That is capital. It just didn't arrive as a cheque with a pitch deck stapled to it. It arrived because someone decided you would pay it back — in work, in loyalty, in the truth — and they were right.
So here's the question, for anyone who thinks they need capital before they can start. Instead of spending two years chasing investors who don't know you, what if you spent one year becoming genuinely, provably trustworthy in service to someone who already has what you're trying to raise? Serve a master who will help you. Where I'm from, that was never a step down. That's the apprenticeship. That's the shortcut.
Let me be honest about the caveats, though.
One — this is slower, and it asks for humility. You have to be willing to be small for a while, and to be led.
Two — it depends entirely on the master. Serve a dishonest one, and you'll learn the wrong lessons and burn your name by association. Choose that person as carefully as an investor chooses a founder.
Three, and this is the big one — the moment you're honest as a strategy, it stops working. People feel it. Performed honesty is just a slower lie. You have to actually mean it, for its own sake, and let the capital be a side effect. If you can only tell the truth when someone's watching the balance, you don't have this kind of capital. You just have good manners.
Let me end with the truth about how I actually operate. When I meet someone who is genuinely honest — someone who tells me the inconvenient thing, who says “I don’t know,” who keeps a small promise — I feel like I've met a copy of myself. And that is exactly where I put my last cards. Not on the most impressive person in the room. On the one I don't have to watch.
If honesty is the main thing you have right now, you are not behind. You are holding the one form of capital that everything else eventually gets offered to.
So this week, one practice. Say nothing but the truth — even when it's uncomfortable — to someone you'd normally handle with a soft answer. A client, a partner, a boss. Tell them the job is really ten weeks, not six. Let people know you for what you say you are. Then keep that word exactly. Watch what it does to the relationship over the next month. That's the account. Start making your deposits.
I'm Yaw. Thanks for thinking with me.