The Trust Algorithm: Why Giving It Away First is Your Greatest Advantage

Or the art of no regret

"Daddy, what is trust?"

That question from my 8-year-old hit me unprepared.

The longer I thought about it, the harder it became to reply with a simple answer.

Especially since one of my primary goals as a parent is to instill a sense of primal trust in our world.

Call me naive, but I believe it is the vital building block of interaction and meaningful life.

So my answer developed into a longer discussion that actually helped me, perhaps more than my child, to think through this term and its implications.

What is trust?

Trust is defined as the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

This belief is something like a solid pole in a sea of fleeting uncertainties.

It gives you something to hold on to, something akin to control.

In short, it satisfies our fundamental need for stability in an unpredictable world.

While trust is subjective, we can create a simple conceptual model to visualize its relationship with expectations:

Let T represent Trust, A represent Actual Behaviour, and E represent Expected Behaviour. A mathematical function can be expressed as:

T = f(A, E)

Where f is a function that increases as the alignment between A and E improves. A simple representation could be:

T = k × (1 - |A - E|)

Here, k is a constant to scale the trust level, and |A - E| represents the absolute difference between actual and expected behavior. The smaller the difference, the higher the trust.

Why is trust so important?

You are on a downward slope of negativity if you have trust issues.

You are in a bad place because of learned, unchecked mistrust. A pervasive lack of trust often becomes the foundation for scarcity thinking – impacting relationships, opportunities, and overall well-being. It fosters a defensive posture that can inadvertently close doors.

We live in a chaotic and uncontrollable world. That fact alone is frightening.

It seems to be an evolutionary process of life or maybe even a definition of life itself as a control-seeking and control-establishing mechanism.

Take a single-celled organism - it is a fenced, tightly controlled area. Most of the energy is used to fuel pumps that exchange electrolytes between inside and outside, creating an energy gradient. Once you die, there is no more energy to fuel the pumps, the gradient breaks down, the fences break up, the cell dissolves into the surrounding "chaos," and life ceases.

Based on this elementary principle, we are constantly trying to fence off areas from the chaos to make them more controllable. Nations, states, cities, communities, families, beliefs, mental models, concepts, ideas. Even this article is a fenced-off area of controlled words.

In short, we crave control. We all do, we just differ in the extent. We are deep down all afraid of losing control, because this might mean death as described above.

All human power games, all career craziness are essentially attempts to increase the level of perceived control.

We all know, from harsh, painful personal experience: there is no control.

But we also love to believe that if we just do the right thing, find the right hack, perform that ancient ritual, develop that futuristic technique - then we are finally and once and for all in control.

This is a deeply engrained human delusion, a trick of the mind.

It is also the underlying process that keeps fueling our unhappiness and dissatisfaction.

By Buddhist definition, suffering is the difference between expectation and reality/actuality.

While happiness is subjective, we can create a simple conceptual model to visualize the impact of expectations:

Happiness can be mathematically represented in two ways based on the relationship between expectation (E) and actuality (A):

When Happiness is Maximized (E = A):

1. H = 1 if E = A

2. This implies that happiness (H) reaches its maximum when expectation equals actuality.

Happiness as a Function of the Difference Between E and A:

1. H = 1 / (1 + |E - A|)

2. This function shows that happiness (H) decreases as the absolute difference between expectation (E) and actuality (A) increases. The closer E is to A, the higher the happiness value.

Or in a more beautiful way:

You always get what you want, if you want what you get.

Happiness is when reality meets or exceeds what we imagine it should be. - Mo Gawdat

What does all of this have to do with trust?

Trust is the basic ingredient for human interaction. Trust is a basic ingredient for mechanical interactions, as seen in trusted networks.

Trust is the hardest currency there is.

We trust that the other party will give us the goods upon receiving payment in a financial transaction.

We trust that a slip of paper with a number on it is a valid representation of value that can be stored or traded.

We trust that people stop at the red light when we cross the street.

We need a baseline level of trust to be able to live.

We trust that we wake up the next day when we go to bed.

If we don't, we get mad; we can't function or live anymore. A number of conditions and diseases are representations of this lack of trust.

That is why trust between us, between each other is so important. It enables us to help others live and survive.

How to build trust

Any living being is trying to prevent being hurt.

Take single-celled amoebas: when exposed to chemical irritants, they actively crouch away.

Nobody wants to be hurt. Neither physically nor emotionally or psychologically.

That is why we are constantly trying to protect ourselves.

We have been equipped with this fantastic brain of ours, that also runs this giant computational future-forecast-prevent-threat-program. The problem is that our brain has a hard time differentiating between an actual and an imagined threat. Our brains, wired with a negativity bias, often latch onto experiences of broken trust, making it harder to "trust again." This cognitive hurdle is part of the challenge.

Combine that with a treasure-trove full of memories of broken trust, and it can become quite challenging to trust someone or some situation because of what if…

But as said before, no trust - hard life.

A concept that has worked very well for me and for my friends and family is the Forward-Trust Principle.

The Forward-Trust Principle states that you extend trust first, without necessarily having validated the other party's trustworthiness beforehand.

It derives from the "pants-down-first" concept that states the easiest way to get everyone else to let their pants down (figuratively and literally) is to let your own pants down first.

Nothing builds trust faster than showing yourself vulnerable. Because if you are vulnerable you are at risk of being hurt.

By showing yourself vulnerable, you signal to the other person that you don't perceive them as a threat and are willing to lower your defenses. This act of goodwill often invites a reciprocal response, creating a positive feedback loop of trust.

This opens the door for your counterpart to show themselves also vulnerable and hence deepen the trust-bond between you.

But even if they don't follow, they now know that you can be trusted.

Trust only shows through action.

By showing yourself vulnerable, by keeping your word. By stating an expectation and living up to it.

The same way I argue to live an either/and life, I also argue to live a life where you trust even though you will get hurt.

I have been naively trustful in the past, and now practice it intentionally.

I rely heavily on my gut intelligence (relying on intuition to quickly assess situations) to speed up my validation process.

Most people will pay your trust back by being trustworthy when being trusted.

Admittedly, it does work best in the physical, tangible, face-to-face real world.

My first cleaning lady got my keys 5 minutes after we met for the first time. So did all of our nannies. We decided to move countries twice entirely based on forward-trust.

In times of intense stress, for example during complex microsurgery with complications, I have found myself actively surrendering to the situation and trusting myself and the universe, which helped to resolve the situation.

I had my fair share of weird, borderline situations because of that forward-trust too: like going with a random guy I met on a train to his place at 3 a.m. to get a free samurai shirt. Or ending up alone at a frozen lake sauna in remote Sweden with another guy clearly interested in more than talking.

And obviously it also depends a lot on the environment you live in, your gender (unfortunately), the society and culture that defines where the line between stupidity, dangerous naivety and open-minded trustworthiness runs.

But from a higher perspective, more good than bad has come from living after that forward-trusting principle.

How to handle broken trust

That being said, unilateral trusting is only one part of the equation.

I too had my trust violated and broken. Sometimes maybe partially expected, often times completely unexpected.

Life is an endless cycle of trust, violated trust and disappointment.

The question is not so much whether your trust will be broken at one point.

The question is how often you can get yourself to trust again. And again. And again.

We know that we have to trust.

We know that we will get disappointed.

We have to learn to live with this bipolar state.

It is like a two-state quantum particle—a "trust particle," so to say. A perpetuating, miniature Schroedinger's cat where we never know whether the trust is still warranted or not, whether the cat is alive or dead, until life opens the box for us to find out.

Time and again.

So a major part of handling broken trust is to remind yourself that this is an integral part of life.

At the end of the day everybody is concerned about themselves and their priorities - which coincidentally can be altruistic. And we don't know what is going on in someone else's mind - it is hard enough to figure out what is going on in our own minds already.

So unless we become really good at communicating radically honestly about what is going on inside of us, there will be a difference between expectation and actuality.

That realization doesn't make disappointment less painful, but it helps in accepting it, sitting with it and letting it go - to be able to move on. And trust yet again another time.

Key steps in processing broken trust involve:

• Acknowledging the hurt without dwelling indefinitely

• Reframing the event as a part of life's unpredictability rather than a personal failing

• Choosing consciously to remain open to future trust, even if more cautiously

Universal or primal trust

When embracing a forward trusting mindset it helps to move toward a general universal or primal trust.

Universal trust can be referred to a fundamental sense of security and confidence in life, often developed during early childhood through nurturing and stable relationships with caregivers.

This concept is closely associated with psychological theories, such as Erik Erikson's stages of development, where "basic trust vs. mistrust" is the first stage of psychosocial development.

Sounds smart, but I am more interested in the implications for our day-to-day lives.

I am not the first to describe it and others have found great words for this:

You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

— Steve Jobs

Urban legend has it that Steve Jobs had everyone attending his funeral receiving a copy of Yogananda's book "Autobiography of a Yogi" - whatever you may think of that book, but it has beautiful descriptions of how the universe conspires to support you when you live a fully forward-trusting life.

The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.

— Albert Einstein

Which I translate to your very own decision whether this universe is a place to trust or not. It's not whether this is objectively true or not. But your relationship to it.

I believe life is better and fuller if you choose it to be a trustworthy place.

Dance like no one is watching; love like you've never been hurt; sing like no one is listening; live like it's heaven on earth.

You have to trust, even though you know you never can fully rely on that trust in the sense of your expectation of behavior differing from actuality.

Lately I have been thinking about trust in god/the universe being something like an electron. You know it must be there, somewhere in that area of probability, but you can't really pin down where it is. You can see it's traces in the mist chamber of your past, but you can't see it's movements in the future.

The unpredictable certainty of trusting.

To more in life

Nicco

And here is the song for this topic: