Lie to impress someone and you’ll spend the whole friendship keeping the story straight.

A flattering lie has a long tail. It has to be remembered, protected, and matched to every later detail, and that work never ends. The cost is not just the risk of being caught. It is that you can never fully relax around the one person you wanted to be comfortable with, because part of you is always on duty.

If you have a small invented thing running, let it quietly die rather than feeding it. Correcting it once is awkward for a minute and then finished. Going forward, let people find you ordinary early, because that is the only version you can keep up.