Convenient Truths: The Stories You Tell Yourself
You are the easiest person to fool — and it costs more than you think.
Coca-Cola had the best marketers and the deepest pockets in the world when it launched New Coke, tested it on nearly 200,000 people, and walked straight into one of the century’s great business disasters. They weren’t careless. They were telling themselves a convenient truth — a comfortable story that felt exactly like the facts.
We all do it, every day. Convenient truths are the plausible, self-serving accounts we hand ourselves without noticing — the ones that keep a belief, a decision, or a flattering self-image intact. They don’t feel like errors. They feel like being right.
Convenient Truths is a field guide to fifty-two of them — the cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and rhetorical tactics that steer our decisions and our arguments. Across six parts, it ranges from confirmation bias, loss aversion, and the sunk cost fallacy to the straw man, the motte-and-bailey, and the art of the loaded question.
What sets it apart is where the examples come from. Nigel Dessau spent a career as a Chief Marketing Officer at IBM, AMD, Sun Microsystems, and beyond — which is to say, in the exact rooms where these mistakes get made with real money on the line. The stories here come from that life: boardrooms, earnings calls, launches, and acquisitions, including a fair number of his own mistakes, rather than the tidy hypotheticals that never quite convince.
Every chapter is short and stands on its own. Each names one trap, asks the single question that unlocks them all — what is being protected? — and gives you a practical way to catch it. Read it straight through, keep it as a reference, or take one chapter a week and come out the far end of a year noticing things you used to walk right past.
You won’t stop telling yourself convenient truths. Nobody does. But you can learn to hear yourself doing it — and that flicker of doubt, right when you feel most certain, is where better decisions begin.
A clear-eyed, often funny, always practical guide to thinking better — at the boardroom table and the kitchen table.