How much do you exaggerate

I always try to be humble. Forcing myself not to exaggerate my results and findings to stay to the course of honesty. Honesty brews understanding of the self and attracts people who are realists like myself. I’d like people to like me for the real me instead of my glamor persona.

I thought that everyone else is more honest than me until a day at work when my colleague decided to bloat about his stock market expertise. xxx stock went up by $11! Today.

Now my reaction is actually something I should be working on to improve. When faced with an interesting phenomena, I often ask several detailed technical questions until I unintentionally corner the person into facing his own lie. I need to stop doing that and reconsider my questions so that the person can still exit gracefully. For the moment, I can only do so by blaming my failing memory, but in the future, I’d like to be able to avoid the tension in the first place while still fulfilling my own thirst of knowledge.

So my question is, how much do we exaggerate? I got my exaggeration down to twice the actual amount when I am talking without thinking and kept it at a moderate 1.25 times when talking honestly. The person mentioned here has an 11 times exaggeration. Which resulted in this particular contemplation.