Challenging assumptions about trust

- One of the tricky things about trust is the language we often use around trust. Many things that we read and hear simply are not true. So let's blow up three assumptions or misperceptions about trust. The first is the idea that more trust should always be the goal. Think of someone in your life that broke your trust. You don't want to give them more trust. What we want to do is give our trust to trustworthy people. The second is this idea that we can build trust. It's the number one question that I'm asked. "How do I build more trust?" And it's a funny way of thinking about trust because it makes you think that you're in control, that you're going to build something and that's not the way it works. The way trust works is that you have to continuously earn trust. Trust is something that is given to you. So changing the language of building more trust to continuously earning trust is really powerful in itself. The third misperception about trust, something that we often talk about in our lives, is this idea of blanket trust. I do trust someone or I don't trust someone. Let's do a quick exercise together. I'm going to say three brands and I want you to think of the brand that you trust the most. So do you trust Uber, Facebook, or Amazon the most? I'm guessing that you are probably thinking of Amazon. Some of you may be thinking of Uber if you really love Uber. And I think very few people are thinking about Facebook. But this is actually a terrible question, this idea of who do you trust the most, who do you trust the least. What I should have said is trusting them to do what? And if I said, "Do you trust that you can find your friends "from high school on Facebook?" You would give me a very different answer to the question, "Do you trust that Facebook keeps your data safe? "Do you trust that Uber will get you from A to B, yes?" "Do you trust that they treat their drivers fairly?" Maybe not. Amazon's really interesting. I think you're thinking of Amazon because when you ask that question what people jump to is that if I order my parcels on Amazon, I trust that they'll arrive within the hour or the very next day. So the way to think of trust is to always think of trust as highly contextual and highly subjective. So when you ask the question of who can you trust? You should always think of it as trusting someone to do something.