Distrust Is Too Expensive

I dated a woman one time. She had been in some bad relationships. It was obvious that she had been in some bad relationships, because she distrusted everything I did.

Of course it didn’t help that I was always lying to her. Just kidding. She distrusted me because she had been trained to, by previous boyfriends who actually did lie to her. So, although it was her problem, it wasn’t entirely her fault.

(Although although, it wouldn’t surprise me if her boyfriends ended up cheating on her because of her own behavior. Which they shouldn’t have — they should have just left. Clearly, everyone but me is wrong.)

What ended up happening was that we spent so much time arguing over whether or not I was trustworthy (I promise, I was), whether or not she could truly relax and be happy, that we never sat down and just had a relationship. She never did become happy. She bullied herself right out of having the relationship that she claimed she wanted and needed.

I’ve been watching Ozark on Netflix. It’s a show about a cute midwestern family that works for a Mexican drug cartel. As the show goes on and the stakes get higher and higher for the Byrde family, they have more and more trouble sticking together as a team. Wendy, the mother, gets harsher and harsher in trying to control her son “for the sake of the family.”

She wants to keep everyone together, and she leans harder and harder into her parental authority to do so. Because she doesn’t trust her son’s judgment or his loyalty — even after he proves over and over that he has the family’s best interest at heart. She yells at him, belittles him, overall treats him like a child. Her attitude is, there’s no possible way you understand all of this and there’s no way you can be trusted to make decisions that affect all of us.

But every time she refuses to let her son Jonah make his own decisions, she pushes him further away and undermines what she herself is trying to do. It becomes clear over the course of the show that Jonah should not only be treated like her equal in some ways, but is often better at making business decisions than his parents are. By the end of the show, Jonah doesn’t even want to be part of the family anymore. Because he doesn’t feel valued or trusted in his own home.

There are generally two kinds of teenagers: those who lie to their parents, and those who are totally honest and just outright disobey them.

The ones who tell the truth are generally better off, even though it makes short-term family relations worse. Because the ones who are confident enough to just tell the truth are probably more confident and resourceful anyway. They are probably more capable of defending themselves, thinking on their feet, and getting themselves out of whatever danger the parents are trying to protect them from.

You can see this in relationships, business, friendships, family, and anything else in life: it costs more to distrust people than it does to just trust them. Often what you're trying to preserve ends up being destroyed because you won't back off and let it work.

Look at business. If you have to hire people to make sure your employees aren't stealing from you, you're breaking one of the cardinal rules of business: to trust.

Business, to me, is defined thus: to operate a profit-seeking enterprise that is based on trust. To deliver something people want and to trust that they want to pay you for it. In return for their money, they expect to be able to trust you to consistently deliver what they want. It's all about trust, all the way down.

Without trust, you don’t have business. You have either a scam or a delusion.

Some people are so jaded on the public that they implement absurd safeguards to make sure no one steals from them. They monitor keystrokes on employees’ computers to make sure they aren’t wasting company time. They hire 10 additional employees to do forensic accounting on employee’s travel expenses. These are the same kinds of people who say tired nothings like “no one wants to work anymore.”

Or they post disclaimers with a bunch of foolish fine print limiting refunds, because they’re so terrified of getting fleeced by grubby customers.

If you're in the kind of business where either the customer doesn't trust you or you don't trust the customer, the problem isn't that there's something wrong with the concept of business. The problem is that you're bad at it.

(There are exceptions, obviously: public hospitals have no ability to turn people away, and therefore get fleeced by bad customers and insurance companies all the time.)

And the same goes for employees: if you don't trust your own employees, the problem isn't that people don’t want to work anymore or that people's moral fabric is decaying. The problem is that you suck at making people want to work for you without stealing. If you aren't good at that, then by definition you shouldn't be in business. The same way Wendy from Ozark probably shouldn’t have been a parent. Or at least she should have taken some classes.

Conversely, here’s a good way to use trust: if you want to hire someone who’s serious about work, put out a job posting with a great salary. And then, trust that the job market will deliver you a good candidate. Will it always? Maybe not. But in most cases, it will. Markets are very efficient. Markets are very good at bringing people what they deserve.

Can people hurt and betray you in this life? Of course they can. And they will.

But the way to deal with that isn't by policing people and forcing them to cooperate with you. That's bullying. The way to deal with it is by building such a strong web of trust in your life that you're mathematically all but guaranteed to end up net ahead.

If you own a business, it can be tempting to pay 100 people $40,000 each to be a system of bureaucratic police to protect your company. But not only is that the wrong message to send to literally everyone; the math doesn’t make sense anyway. You’d be better off investing that 4 million dollars into, say, being a better company. Doing more sales or hiring better product developers. Instead of making sure you don't lose, you can try winning.

All of life works this way. The more time you spend producing good relationships and useful things that people want, the more protected you are from betrayal in all its forms. Because people are less likely to betray you, and because you have more backup plans when they do. If one person betrays you but you have nine other amazing relationships in your life, you’re probably in good shape. Because there will be people literally waiting in line to help you.

Does it hurt? Of course. Everything hurts. Life hurts. But operating with voluntary trust is the only way life makes any sense. Otherwise everything you touch is just too fragile. Otherwise you are too fragile.

And this also begs the question: but how can I find more trustworthy people in the first place?

Well, you have to spend money to make money, as it so eloquently were. You earn good employees by sacrificing for them.

Of course company culture helps. And the two biggest inputs into company culture are how well you pay and how much you trust your employees. In other words, you earn what you need by offering your half of the bargain first.

And in relationships, you have to be patient. If you keep having sex with everyone you meet but then distrusting their motives, you’re gonna have a bad time. You’re going to keep attracting people who will hurt you, because that’s what you’re asking for. If you slow down and trust that someone will stick around long enough to care, eventually you’ll attract someone who will.

Drink some water and be so optimistic that it annoys people.

JDR

“Just hold on loosely.” - 38 Special