I am Aarihant Aaryan! Welcome to the Iron sharpen Iron newsletter,
Every week I share my homework from my startup journey, learnings on human behavior, and sometimes decoding industries, business models for fun,
I can’t control my curiosity :) )
Trust is one of the topics I love talking about and sharing about for hours together.
I used to think of trust as just an emotion - Trust is much deeper than that.
Through this newsletter this week I will be sharing most of my personal notes and insights on trust - Lessss GO! It’s going to be fun 🙌💯
About Trust :
There are a million quotes on trust but fewer articles or research reports because many couldn’t understand “Trust and how it works”
Trust is a core aspect of a human being that dictates their dependability and reliability on someone or something.
People who “attract” the highest trust will become way more prosperous than anyone, True for organizations, countries, and relationships.
“The existence of mediocracy is due to the inability to crack for trust”
Facts on Trust :
All low entities that operate in a low trust, will eventually become less prosperous.
India is a low trust country, it’s because of the heavy diversity we have, it’s challenging for us to trust.
we find it very easy to trust someone who has common traits but we find it massively difficult to trust someone who doesn’t have common traits.
Before your patriotic feeling overtakes you and starts bashing me in comments let me share examples of low trust in India from our daily life :
We check our fuel tank before we handover our vehicle to the driver.
We calculate the entire bill in a restaurant before paying the bill.
Only allow the fuel guy to fill petrol in our vehicles after we see the number 0 in the fuel meter.
If something is missing, doubt our workers or maids immediately.
Counting cash after we withdraw money from the ATM.
I have been personally been to 3rd world / 2nd world and 1st world countries.
I rarely come across these behaviors in 1st and 2nd world countries.
How to get Trusted?
You might be thinking if we are living in such a low-trust society, how can you build trust and create more impact/value?
Here are a few points that might help you :
To build trust or accelerate it get trusted by people/organizations who are well reputed or trusted:
Trust is decentralized in nature, it is one of the best ways to accelerate trust, Let’s assume you were in a school and very underrated and not trusted but out of nowhere your school chairman started trusting you and declares that in school, you will be delegated every other work in school.
Senior Politicians use this method wonderfully to get their new candidates trusted, Religious institutions use this wonderfully when they want to open up their new institutions in new locations. Even banks do this to fintech - that’s why neo banks are being well adopted in India.
Don’t expect to be trusted, if you don’t trust “First” :
It is massively important for you to constantly trust first and take the risk.
If you operate out of mistrust or doubt, why would anyone trust you?
Frequent Engagement → Familiarity → Trust
This is something many suck at since they have a transactional intent, If you can build trust with this method, no matter how many mishaps happen, they will keep trusting you.
If it takes one bad incident for someone to lose trust in you, was it even trust?
In my opinion, that person or institution had more transactional feelings on you.
Trust comes from familiarity that is borne through a frequent engagement, that has emotions involved on a higher level.
I think that’s why Long-distance relationships have a lot of trust issues. There is so much difference between exchanging thoughts on call VS Spending time naturally. This is how love stories are made :)
How did fintech crack for Trust?
In the early days of fintech I observed behavior that immediately made consumers trust them - That is to send money into their accounts as testing, fundamentally we trust people who give us anything we constantly desire.
How did communities crack for Trust?
Communities bring in always a group of like-minded people and folks who share a common background, this makes people be more transparent and trust easily.
I have observed in the Indian diamond community - Gujarati community if someone needs money in their community they give it immediately for a very low interest but this same community would think twice before giving to someone outside of their community.
I someone turns out to be a defaulter of their commitments in their community, they are immediately eliminated from their community.
Surprisingly same happens in animal communities as well, If a monkey falls from a tree and if it doesn’t have a fruit or leaf in it’s hand - they are eliminated from the community because monkeys were never designed to fall.
How did creators crack for Trust?
It’s very tough for creators to crack for trust when they start off, but to accelerate this process → creators started collaborating with each other.
Let’s say Ankur Warikoo, praises my content and does a collab video with me. Most people will not be finding it difficult to trust me.
Another observation I had is most of the creators crack trust, build content that is super relatable. You are less likely to build bonds with people if they keep talking greek and latin.
If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to comment would love to learn and answer them for you 🙌
If you learned anything from this week’s newsletter - take a snapshot or mention your favorite part of the newsletter and tag me @aarihantaaryan is my ID - on IG, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
How do you think vulnerability plays an important role in the way a person develops trust? Because for someone like me who finds it extremely difficult to be vulnerable with people, I struggle with trusting people as well.