Trust is, according to my google search, a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.
Focusing on these keywords: reliability, truth, ability and strength, it means you firmly believe that you can rely on someone.
You firmly believe that someone is truthful.
You firmly believe in the ability of someone.
You firmly believe in the strength of someone or something.
Trust is the foundation we need to build a more sustainable and functional society.
We love reaping the benefits of working with trust, we understand the importance of trust, we know how good it feels to be trusted, but somehow we refuse to nurture this trust properly as we live our lives.
We trust our shoes to not give up and rip open on our way out
We trust the driver in the next lane to stay in their lane(this doesn’t apply to drivers in Nigeria),
We trust the seams on our clothes to hold firm when we dress up - even on windy days
We trust the guys at Instagram to keep their service on 24/7, and to quickly fix any downtime that may occur
We trust our umbrellas to help us not get wet on a rainy day
We even trust the whole airline crew and their airplanes to safely take us on trips.
I could go on, but you get the idea. In the listed examples, we see that trust is what makes the respective businesses flourish.
People always buy cars, shoes, clothes, umbrellas, log into Instagram and take airplane trips, but they develop trust issues when important product details are missed, or there's a catastrophic malfunction. If you had a choice, you wouldn't fly an airline that has recorded way too many crashes than you'd like.
There’s a chain to this breaking of trust, and this chain gets longer by the day
Some people don’t care about gaining lasting trust from people outside their immediate families. They do whatever they think they should, to get the very next meal.
While this is understandable, we need to remember that life doesn’t end after that very next meal. You’ll need another next meal, and another meal, and thousands of other meals throughout your life. And you’ll need them at relatively lower costs as you age.
Some others lose the trust of their subordinates by doing whatever it takes to make themselves feel good, at the expense of the self-worth of these subordinates. With that trust gone, commitment to the job in question is also gone - it becomes a chore. The subordinates wouldn’t mind doing a half-ass job on a task that obviously needs more time and energy.
If we can’t be trust-worthy outside the comfort of our homes, it’ll be hard to properly teach our own children the art of trust. This inability to build trust among ourselves has led to a consistently growing hole in our lives. We see the effects every day, we acknowledge them, and we just go about our daily routine of continuously breaking this trust.
There’s a chain to this breaking of trust, and this chain gets longer by the day. The masses don’t trust politicians to do whatever they say they would, the politicians don’t trust themselves to do the right thing the right way.
Contracts for various projects are signed because some top government official has been guaranteed a percentage of the profit. Some of their reports notice this move, and they think up schemes to make their signatures worth something to unexpecting contractors, thereby guaranteeing some percentage for themselves. Sabotaging the trust that could be built on, in the name of trying to make money.
In Nigeria, there is a trend of community chiefs and their reports storming construction sites, stopping work and demanding money from contractors. Most times, they even go as far as vandalizing stuff to get attention.
I experienced this when I was working on a Water Treatment Plant Project, funded by one of the oil companies in Nigeria. This is a project that was to supply the community with easily accessible clean water. The chief and his thugs stormed the site demanding they be given some amount of money or work would be stopped.
The site engineer tried to talk them out of stopping work at the site, but they started vandalizing our equipment and even injured an employee. After that, some calls were made, and there was a verbal agreement on how they would be paid. We thought it was over, but they came back after a few weeks, with the same goal.
Making money is essential to living a healthy life and maintaining any business, but when it’s made at the expense of the trust of the people you serve(or serve you), you lose the chance of improving as a person or even growing your business. Some construction companies in Nigeria don’t trust the government to allocate the complete funds for some projects, so they overestimate to cover for the percentage they guaranteed the awarder of the project. Most times, the overestimation doesn’t even cover all these expenses(including community chiefs raid), so the quality of the project suffers, and so do the end-users of these projects.
Another link in this chain is in day to day businesses. Business failures could lead to loss of jobs, gross dissatisfaction of customers and lack of attention to related basic necessities in the environment, which could then lead to poor health standards.
Poor health standards, give room for a whole lot of other condemnable acts like patient negligence, overcrowded hospitals, increased burnout rate of health practitioners among others. Once again, the end-users suffer the consequence.
When there's trust, strangers would actually smile at you or give you a friendly nod on the street, and it won’t feel weird.
Now picture a society where people focus more on building trust among themselves; governments would generously allocate projects to qualified contractors. Contractors would strive to be qualified, qualification bodies would consistently update and upgrade their standards as needed, thereby being of huge interest to foreign investors.
Businesses would also thrive because everyone involved would hold their own end of deals, there’ll be optimum employer-employee relationship and customer satisfaction would be easily achieved. This would also have a positive knock-on effect on the environment because successful businesses almost always want to improve the environment they operate in.
Quality health care would also tend to increase because, due to improved environmental standards, fewer people will need to be in hospitals.
When there's trust, strangers would actually smile at you or give you a friendly nod on the street, and it won’t feel weird. Traffic situations would improve because we would have more considerate road users and more people would be inclined to running businesses round the clock, thereby leading to more people working shifts, rather than the popular 9 - 5.
The police would have an easier job because there’ll be a decline in the crime rate.
You won't need to complain about foreign countries stealing your natural resources, because you trust yourselves well enough to conduct the necessary research to come up with awesome use cases for these resources.
Having said all these, don't just learn to trust people, learn to be the reliable, truthful, strong and able person that people can firmly believe in.