On the meaning of trust.
In the past days, I have been reflecting on the meaning of trust. What does it really mean to build trust and trust someone?
These reflections are born from my own failures and misgivings. With all the good intentions, I am only now realizing the complexity and difficulty of building trust. Let me elaborate.
When you trust someone, you actually don’t trust them completely, but you trust them for something important they represent.
For example, you can:
🙏 Trust your husband or wife as a lover and life partner, but not as the manager of your family’s funds.
🙏 Trust an entrepreneur for their integrity but not on their ability to manage and build a business.
🙏 Trust a friend for their loyalty and good intentions, but not on their ability to keep secrets.
🙏 Trust a business partner for their ability to deliver on the deal, but not on their loyalty to your company.
What I am illustrating here is that the trust we build is not a monolith, but a fragmented and layered set of beliefs about the other person.
But we as humans make mistakes all the time.
💔 We might trust our finances to a person who we trust as a “brother in faith” instead of trusting their financial judgment and end up losing our money.
💔 We might trust an investor to act in good faith based on their past financial performance and end up losing our company to a hostile takeover.
💔 We might trust our advertising platform due to good vanity metrics, only to find out later that the metrics were manufactured.
Building trust with people of all backgrounds has been one of the most important things for me in life, as it is a cornerstone of my quest to gaining wisdom.
Now I realize that it is impossible to be a perfectly trustworthy person. Why? Because it would require me to be perfect in every way, which I am not, and will never be.
When I build trust with friends by telling them my life stories, I might accidentally tell them about encounters with other people that should be held private.
Openness builds trust, but only to a point. If I keep everything to myself, I would be less trustworthy, as I will be perceived “secretive”. If I share everything, I would be less trustworthy, because I would be perceived as a “gossiper”.
When I share my investors the struggles in my startup, I am less trustworthy, because I am perceived as desperate and failing to deliver them value as an entrepreneur. If I don’t share the struggles, I am being less trustworthy because I am “hiding the facts”.
The only way to be truly trustworthy as an entrepreneur is to not fail. Because failure leads to a loss of at least one aspect of trust, which is the trust to your ability as an entrepreneur.
The only way to be truly trustworthy in any relationship is to forgive. We will make mistakes, and forgiveness is the way to rebuild the lost trust.
Being human is a never-ending struggle to do the right thing. Our failures will inevitably lead to a loss of trust. As all of us fail at least in some areas of life, we all have to deal with this loss of trust.
I am still on my quest to build trust. It is much harder than I thought.
