A number of years ago, I had a client who was a leadership consultant. He asked me to read over a blog post he had written, so I could tell him what I thought. I read it, and at a key moment, he had written, “Great leaders always learn from their mistakes.”

Immediately, I knew what I was reading wasn’t real. It sounded phony. It sounded like what Tolstoy would call “head-spun," as in, it came from the mind, not from lived experience.

So I told my client, “Look, I know a lot of great leaders — of major organizations, in the military, in government, and so forth — and I can virtually guarantee you that none of them always learn from their mistakes.

“Now here’s the thing: that phrase sounds dramatic, and it sounds like it should be true. But if you write it, people trust you, and now you’re setting them up with unreal expectations. They won’t learn from a particular mistake, and they’ll blame themselves. But really, you screwed them up. They just believed your lie.”

The next day, he sent me four other posts with a message: “Mark, I wrote these before speaking with you yesterday, so I went back over them and edited out all the lies. Can you look them over and see if I missed any?”

You don’t want to lie in your writing. You want to tell the truth, at least as you understand it. This is why I love the following quote from Robert Newton Peck:

“The basis for my success is that I write about what people do. Not what they ought to do.”

More than a hundred years earlier, Henry David Thoreau wrote something similar:

“Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. ‘Tell the tailors,’ said he, ‘to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.’ His companion’s prayer is forgotten.”

Truth is preferable because it connects with reality and, therefore, with the reader. When you write what is true — based on real, lived experience — your words will land.