Please read the following excerpt from a recent Observer article: ?I remember well how it was 10 years ago this weekend. Bloated and lacklustre, I?d stumble from home to trading floor and back again, detour the office as much as possible and try not to make any eye contact with anyone, worried they might see the deceit behind my own.

Physically drained from weeks of continual, bare-faced, lying, interrupted sleep and the overpowering stress of the situation, I would look at photographs taken just three years earlier, when I first arrived at the Singapore office of Barings Securities. Whatever had happened to that young man, freshly married, just promoted, and at the beginning of a new adventure ? eager to please, eager to succeed? He had disappeared, and had been replaced by a liar. The untruths flickered like ticker-tape, rolling over again and again behind my eyelids, too many to count, getting worse by the day as the markets moved against me. Each new day would bring only new lies.?

This excerpt was written by Nick Leeson, the man dubbed the ?world?s first rogue trader?. Nick Leeson, you?d remember, is the person who brought Baring Securities to its knees some ten years ago. As you read it, you probably dismissed it as a once-off incident that is unlikely to repeat itself ? the machinations of a dishonest person who was caught, sent to jail and is said to have since repented. ?It?s unlikely to happen to me,? you would argue. ?I don?t or very seldom tell lies.? Right? Wrong! If there?s something that we do all the time, day in, day out, 24 hours a day, it is to lie ? but to lie to ourselves.

We lie to ourselves when we speak of things we do not know ? like for example when we claim that we are all free individuals. The truth is that most of us are imprisoned individuals, tortured by a bag-full of tendencies, habits and reflexes either ingrained in our genes or learnt when we were kids. We lie to ourselves when we claim that we are aware of ourselves ? that we have conscious minds who can think, choose and decide independently. The truth is that most of us spend most of our lives asleep, in a semi-comatose state, tumbling forth from one moment to another, mechanically, until one crisis or another suddenly wakes us up ? a crisis like the death of our spouse, being fired from our jobs or even physical injury. We lie to ourselves when we claim that, psychologically, we can improve, grow, become better and progress. The truth is that there is nowhere to go, nothing to become, and that only the present moment, the here and now, is reality ? yesterday is gone for ever and tomorrow is nothing else but an illusion. We lie to ourselves when we claim that we are this or that type of individual ? a fixed, permanent entity with a personality that we shall retain for the remainder of our life. The truth is that we spend our day switching from one role to another, from parents in the morning as our kids go to school, as managers during the day, and as husbands or wives in the evening. And above all, we lie to ourselves when we claim that we know ourselves ? who we are and what we are. The truth is that most of us have only a faint glimpse of who we are, a vague idea of how others see us and how we come across ? all too often our perceptions of ourselves are coloured and biased by the ideal we wish to achieve.

If you are wringing your hands in despair after reading the above and wondering if the lies will ever stop and truth will ever emerge, the good news is that yes, they can stop. The answer lies in self-knowledge and we need to devote ourselves, our hearts, our minds, our energies in finding out who we are. Self-discovery, and its natural consequence: to become self-aware, is the only goal worth pursuing in this world ? a life-long process that we need to engage into and sustain till our very last breath.

Eric CHAROUX Feedback: [email protected]