This morning, right before starting work on this email, I checked WhatsApp on my laptop. I saw a text from last night that a friend had sent me:
“Kuki [the friend’s cat] broke your glass after all! And was joyfully playing with the glass pieces..”
The background is that last night this friend and I met up to go for a walk. My friend was late – getting her hair done, because she’s traveling today for some business thing — so I walked up the road to meet her.
We walked for a while, and I told her about my experiences at the Sean D’Souza Seville meetup a few days ago.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” my friend said. “How about we stop by my place?” We were right next to her house, which is close to the Arc de Triomf in downtown Barcelona.
So we went to her place. Bathroom finished, we sat around in the kitchen for a moment having a glass of water.
My friend has a cat, from what I can tell a Siamese cat, which is deaf and doesn’t have good motor control and which has some other deficits, which I forget — maybe it’s that it can’t read or write.
In spite of these handicaps, the cat still maintains some usual endearing cat behaviors. For example, the little bastard kept walking around the kitchen counter, repeatedly nudging my empty water glass towards the edge. “Oh sweetheart,” I said to the cat with menace in my voice, “that’s not okay.” My friend looked at the cat lovingly.
Anyways, eventually we left the cat alone and went outside to finish our walk. Actually, we also stopped to get food.
Even though the first place we stopped at was entirely empty, they told us that without a reservation we couldn’t get a table. So we wound up at some “Argentinian” place, which really just turned out to be the standard tapas fare you get anywhere in Barcelona.
Dinner in stomach, I walked my friend back to her place, wished her a good trip, and then walked home myself. And then this morning I got that text from her about the cat breaking the glass after all. “Actually just as I entered the house,” my friend wrote, “in time for me to witness it.”
So what do you think of my story? Pretty pointless, I know, but does it at least ring true?
It should. I won’t tell you whether the story is actually true or not, but I will tell you that I worked actively to make it sound more credible.
And you can do the same.
I’m not telling you to go all psychopath, and simply study the elements of truthful stories so you can embellish lies and make them sound true.
But — if you do have a true story, and nobody cares, or nobody believes you, then massaging your true story to make it sound more credible — well, maybe there’s money or influence to be gained in that.
In any case, you can study my pointless but likely-sounding story above and try to figure out what I did to make it sound more true.
Or you can take me up on my offer, which is just to sign up to my daily email newsletter. It won’t help you figure out what I did in the story above, but maybe, tomorrow or the day after, I will write more about this topic.