Untrue Origin Stories

The little, or not so little, lies we tell

We all have our own origin stories or versions of our history that we tell ourselves and sometimes share with others. Instead of getting dumped by a partner, we tell ourselves that it was really our decision. Forgetting about the tough conversations our managers had with us, when we tell the story it was us that decided it was time to leave. All of this is natural and fairly well studied as far back as Sigmund Freud, who proposed a set of defense mechanisms to protect one's ego. While Freud emphasized sexual or aggressive desires that affected the ego, modern researchers in personality and social psychology today would readily acknowledge that people defend their self-concepts against esteem threats. In article in the Journal of Personality, the authors state: 

Nearly all adults hold preferred views of themselves. In most cases, these are favorable views of self—indeed, somewhat more favorable than the objective facts would entirely warrant, as nearly all writers on the self have observed. A recurrent problem of human functioning, therefore, is how to sustain these favorable views of self. Patterns of self-deception can help create these inflated self-perceptions (for reviews, see Baumeister, 1998; Gilovich, 1991; Taylor, 1989). Yet a particular crisis in self perception may arise when an internal or external event occurs that clearly violates the preferred view of self. In such cases, it is necessary for the self to have some mechanism or process to defend itself against the threatening implications of this event. Such processes are commonly called defense mechanisms.

While these ego defense mechanisms are natural and mostly harmless, when people use them for personal gain and often thrust themselves into the spotlight, these stories start to get more scrutiny. We need look no further than the recent acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk to see challenges to Musk’s education and even legal status in the country. Reasonably, the more mythical or unrealistic the origin story, the more investigators and reporters are drawn to scrutinize it. Often this results in discrepancies and cautionary tales. While we would likely believe that this is a recent phenomenon, ushered in during the Trump-era of braggadocio, this has been around essentially forever. One of the bigger stories in the tech world from 2012 was Scott Thompson’s firing from Yahoo after only five months for what an ABC article framed it as, “a résumé inaccurately stating that he holds a degree in computer science.” However, this goes back much further to ancient times and is where we get the idiom “feet of clay” from. The phrase originates from the Book of Daniel in the Bible, in which Daniel dreams of a beautiful statue of King Nebuchadnezzar that has a head of gold but feet of clay. This phrase is used to describe a person or entity of prominence that may appear powerful but they don’t possess the underlying support, e.g. education, to support their position and can be easily knocked over. 

As discussed above, we typically think of misstated origin stories or revisionist history being something that people use to justify their positions and support their egos but companies and other entities do this all the time as well. As one small example, if I asked you how eBay got started, you would probably recall something about candy dispensers. However, as David Karp writes in his 2009 book EBay Hacks, “As the story goes, eBay was born of a dinner conversation between Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam, about PEZ™ dispensers. As it turns out, this, like many origin stories, is a myth (this one cooked up by eBay PR whiz Mary Lou Song)...” Why, you might ask, would eBay invent this story? Well, it was a cute story that grabbed the attention of journalists that helped spread the word about eBay…a PR stunt. While many companies take advantage of PR stunts to attract attention, it always strikes me as an indicator of their culture and approval, at least tacitly, to misrepresent facts. To me this is a big red-flag. 

Whether you are acting as an individual or a company, you owe it to yourself and your community to represent the facts and your accomplishments as accurately as possible. In all of our lives there is lots of room for interpretation. To every discussion there are always two sides. Even when we agree, we almost always take away different conclusions (this is why it’s important to document decisions in writing after meetings, but that’s a topic for another article). If we’re not honest with ourselves and the people closest to us, how can we ever expect to improve and ultimately we do not have a strong base to stand up, which will get noticed eventually.