There are two ways to live life: either trust others or be distrustful of them. The second approach can take us down a slippery slope. All it needs is one bad experience to push us down the path of questioning other people’s intentions and suspecting their motives. We rely on the kindness of strangers for many things in our life, and if that belief breaks, it will make life hard. We will go through bad experiences when someone lets down our trust. We must deal with those situations as one-offs rather than generalising to everyone and mistrusting all others.
In my early days as an entrepreneur, I went through some experiences which made me question my trust in others. People whom I trusted let me down. As an entrepreneur recovering after multiple early failures, each of these experiences made me question my approach of trusting others implicitly. I decided that the overhead of not trusting was simply too high. I accepted what had happened and moved on. My core belief has always been that there is some good which comes out of everything, even some unpleasant and difficult situations. And as I look back, I think that belief has more than justified itself.
Trust is a two-way street. One has to give trust to get it back. In business, you have to believe that if you make an advance payment, the other party will not simply abscond with the money. In India, there is little recourse through the legal system. In general, most transactions will be fine, but there will always be a few that go wrong. A few years ago, I decided that we should do our checks on the counter-parties, but there is no way of achieving perfection. So, we simply set aside 2% of revenues as bad debts and move on. It is just the cost of doing business. The alternative is trying to negotiate very stringent contracts with the other 98% and that will simply make business undoable.
With trust also comes openness. I have always been open to sharing my ideas and even business plans. I have found that the more I am open, the greater is the reciprocal candour. My blog is written in the same spirit. I share my ideas, and do so with no expectations. I just find that being open is better than being closed, being transparent is better than being opaque. Each of us will be shaped by our experiences, and we will have bad ones where this trust and openness is violated, even by people we know well. But the alternative life – of being wary of everyone we meet – is just an impossible one.
PS: My previous post on open-sourcing ideas.
