How do you know who to trust?

(Viddler Screwed Old Users by deleting all their videos, so no video here 🙁 )
 

Who to trust?

You always hear stories about people who get screwed over by their friends that they trusted. How do you prevent such from happening to you? Here are a few principles.

If someone behaves shadily to someone else, they will eventually do that to you too

The key to knowing who to trust is not how close they are to you, but what their core values are. When there are no zero-sum game going on between you, it’s easy to be friends. However, for some people, once they can get some advantage by screwing you over, that becomes an obvious choice.

If you have a friend who often talks about how he tricked someone else, even though he told you because you are buddies, you have to be careful of his later on. On the other hand, if your friend is always talking about how to help others, then even if you are not as close of a friend, you can trust them more.

This is like judging if you want to date/work with someone based on how they treat waiters and waitresses. If they treat you will, it just means they want something from you, but you can evaluate they true personality by how they treat others.

Careful of those who just talk about making money

If you are working with someone who just talks about money all the time, you should be careful. In their minds, making money is one of their high priorities in life, and even though working with them as partners might get you to gain a lot, it also means that there are chances that they will screw you over for a big enough paycheck. If a person always talks about “creating an impact” or “changing the industry” then you have a better feel of what motivates them and you can trust them a little better.

There is nothing wrong with wanting money or working with people that just want money. However, it’s a good red flag to raise before you completely get screwed over by someone who has been treating you well for three years.

Build your reputation with trust

In the same way, you want to build up your reputation with the right values too. If you are always talking about making money and showing off how you ripped off some stupid person, not only do you sound sleezier, but overdoing that will cause people to trust you less. Idealy you don’t want to ever be shady and do thing with integrity, but either way, you don’t want to promote that part of your personality to people.

Rather sound altruistic and naive than too materilistic and calculatey. A lot of people would want to work with you if they think you are easily tricked, instead of thinking that you are out there to trick people.

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7 thoughts on “How do you know who to trust?”

  1. I trust character over friendship. Your BEST friend who lies to others may still lie to you, while the guy who NEVER lies would still not lie to you.

  2. What if your best friend says one thing, but your true friend who NEVER lies says another, yet the guy says another??? who do i trust then? its like i cant trust anyone in this world.

  3. Hey Disappointed!

    How are you doing? Thanks for the comment. I think Jun has a policy about if people wants to criticize, they should at least be accountable and back up their arguments. He is very against those anonymous “trolls” in the forums that just spend all day bashing without being responsible themselves. I personally don’t mind them because they create great opportunities to explain myself in all situations.

    This video actually has nothing to do with trusting my co-founder Jun Loayza. I am not disappointed with him at all actually. This video was made when I was in a discussion with someone who kept talking about how to make money, and when I asked “wouldn’t that be pretty shady?” he said “Pfff, who cares about that. We can say anything, as long as they pay us.” And that’s when I decided to raise a red flag with this person who is still my friend. I feel like one day people like that might be betray friends for money, and that’s why I made the video.

    Thanks for being a supporter of Viralogy! Jun is still working on Viralogy and making sure everything is working out smoothly. We have been growing quite a bit in the past month because of his help, see compete data http://siteanalytics.compete.com/viralogy.com/ (keep in mind compete gives us more credit than what we have done :P)

    So yea, Jun is still good on the team. He has been working crazy hours on both sides, and he has been investing the money he made from that end into Viralogy. Life is good and all is well. Is there an email where Jun can address why he deleted the comments?

    Hope all is well and have a great weekend!

  4. I left a comment in Jun’s blog, just my honest opinion. But 5 minutes later, it got deleted. If FD is a team that cannot accept criticism. That’s nothing much left to say. After watching this video, I can understand how disappointed you are with your co-founder, and you had learn a lesson who to trust and who not to. Yu Kai, we as the user of viralogy.com is strongly on your side.

    1. Like I told you before. Leave any comment you want on my blog.

      If you’re going to criticize, then you should leave your real name and email or else your comment will be immediately deleted. Yu-kai is a very nice guy when it comes to Trolls – I’m not.

      So again, I dare you to send me an email with your real email account. My email is me[at]junloayza.com. I’d love to chat with you face to face, if you’re man enough that is.

      – Jun Loayza

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