Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou.

I finished reading this book about Elizabeth Holmes and her ill-fated start-up company, Theranos, last night, and I also watched the documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. The entire story of an entrepreneur turned liar and crook got me to thinking about lies.

We constantly tell ourselves stories. Some of these stories we repeat to other people. We don’t usually tell others the stories that put us in a bad light (confession)—even though the Bible tells us to “confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another.” Maybe that’s because we often aren’t honest with ourselves to begin with, not about the sin and failure and mess in our lives. No, we like to tell ourselves good stories.

I tell myself in regard to lies that a little exaggeration, a little rearranging of events and actions, won’t hurt anyone, and it will smooth the way, make things more understandable, less messy. After all, one can be too scrupulous. And everyone else does it, too. This is exactly what I think Elizabeth Holmes told herself at first. All of the businessmen (most of them are men) in Silicon Valley exaggerate and fudge numbers and build up their expectations of success in order to appeal to investors. Holmes told herself she was just playing the game by the same rules as everyone else.

But then, slowly over time, the little lies and exaggerations become big lies and exaggerations. And if I’m not careful, if we’re not careful, we begin to believe our own lies. Elizabeth Holmes believed that she was creating a new technology that would revolutionize health care; she told herself and then others that this technology would work, that it had to work, that if only she could get enough investment funds to gain enough time to make her ideas into reality, she could change the world. After all, isn’t that what entrepreneurs do: sell an idea that hasn’t yet come to fruition. And if she had to fudge, even lie and deceive, to keep the investors happy and keep the money rolling in, then it wasn’t really lying. It was casting a vision, creative storytelling.

Until it all came crashing down. Holmes’s technology of blood testing using just a finger prick drop of blood wasn’t near realization. It wasn’t even close to being a reality, if it could be done at all. But Elizabeth Holmes was so invested in her story that she ignored the problems and the caution lights and just kept right on forging ahead. If she had to lie and deceive some people to keep on realizing her dream, well, then, that was the price she had to pay. And how dare anyone try to stand in her way? Elizabeth Holmes was the heroine of this story!

Oh, Lord, help me to be careful about the stories I tell myself and the stories I tell to others. I am often the heroine of my own story, and I am prone to believe a lie, to become caught up in my own story, to ignore the warnings and the issues and the messes that I am busily leaving in my wake. Lord, give us eyes to see, and grace to repent, and tongues to tell the truth. Kyrie eleison.