Author: Jimmy Wales & Dan Gardner
_Jimmy Wales & Dan Gardner_
Reading time: 17 minutes
Synopsis
The Seven Rules of Trust (2025) looks at how Wikipedia became a very important and trusted source around the world. This happened during 20 years when people trusted almost all other groups and organizations much less. The book looks at seven main ideas that turned an encyclopedia anyone could change into one of the most trusted places for information on the internet.
What’s in it for me? Trust can make your business successful or cause it to fail. Learn how to create it, hold onto it, and repair it if something goes wrong.
Every business deal uses something very important that you can’t see or measure with money. But this thing decides if customers come back, if teams work as well as they can, or if your good name helps you instead of stopping you. This important thing is trust.
You may have spent years thinking about how much money you make, where your business fits in the market, and how well things run. But have you thought clearly and in a planned way about how trust is built, kept, and lost? Most businesses fail because they lose trust. Yet, most leaders act based on feelings rather than clear rules when it comes to making others believe in them.
This Blink looks at seven rules about how trust works in how people interact and in business. Some of them are not what you might expect. Others seem clear, but people don’t often do them.
Understanding these rules will not make success certain. But not using them makes failure more likely. The choice is yours.
Blink 1 – Starting from zero
Wikipedia shouldn’t really exist.
When the site started in 2001, experts said it would quickly be ruined by bad online changes and wrong information. The main idea, that unknown people could work together to create a trustworthy encyclopedia, seemed silly and impossible. Yet today, Wikipedia is one of the most trusted places for information on the internet, with many, many users every day.
The difference between failure and success was about one thing: trust. Wikipedia’s creators decided to trust people, and people showed that they trusted Wikipedia back. This same idea decides if your business will do well or fail.
To build trust, the first rule is simple but very important: you earn trust from one person to another. You can’t build trust through just company messages or smart ads. Every time you talk or deal with someone is important because each person judges you on their own and decides if you should be trusted by them.
The second rule comes easily from the first: People naturally want to trust. So, you should use that natural feeling, not fight it. People naturally want to believe in you. They are social and have a natural need to work together and help. Your job is to make situations where this natural desire can grow.
These first two rules of trust are based on an idea that guides all efforts to build trust. Think of it like a triangle with three main parts. The first main part is being real, which comes from who you are. This means always being honest and doing the right thing in everything you do. The second main part is understanding others’ feelings, which means that you truly care about people and what they need. The third main part is reason, which means you are skilled and can do what you say you will. All three parts must be there and be strong – if one is missing, the whole thing falls down, and people will not believe you anymore.
Wikipedia was built completely on these ideas. The site showed it was real by making everything clear and open, from its goal to how articles were changed. Anyone could see who wrote or changed an article, and possible problems were shown in a message at the top. The platform focused on understanding others by believing contributors had good intentions. It saw them as helpful partners instead of people who might cause damage. It showed its reason by making trusted articles that people could use.
You face a similar problem when starting a business, launching a new brand, creating a new team, or joining a group. Your name is unknown, and your possible customers may have never even heard of you.
In these early days, every meeting or talk is very important. People are judging if you are honest, whether you care about their needs, and whether you can do what you promise. Your challenge is to build all three parts always and reliably.
Blink 2 – Building teams that trust
You’ve brought together a group of skilled people, but something doesn’t feel right. Meetings are polite but careful about what they say. People keep their own areas safe instead of sharing easily. Progress is slow because everyone waits to be told what to do before they do anything. You’ve hired clever people, but they don’t work together. The missing part? Trust between everyone. To build it, you need two more main ideas.
The third rule of trust is that it needs a clear and strong reason to get people working together. People don’t come together for unclear company statements or goals that are hard to understand. They need to understand what they are making together and why it is important. This common goal becomes the main guide for choices, even when you are not there. Without it, your team breaks apart into people doing their own things.
The fourth rule is just as important: to receive trust, you must offer it first. In human relationships, things go both ways. If you keep all the power and doubt every choice your team makes, they will only do what you say and nothing else. If you offer trust freely, believing they have good plans and skills, they will act in a way that matches what you expect.
Consider how Quaker traders worked in the 1600s and 1700s. These merchants built their business deals on a new and strong base of fairness and truth. The price on something was the price everyone paid, no matter if they were rich or poor. This was very different from what was usually done then. Other traders judged each customer and set a price based on how much they thought the customer could pay. A rich buyer might pay twice as much as a poor buyer for the same items.
This way of changing prices had a clear problem. Customers learned they could never trust the price. Every deal became a discussion about the price, and every talk about price made people distrustful. Over time, traders became known for saying anything to sell something. Their quick profits caused them to lose trust in the long run.
Quaker merchants did the opposite. They gave trust first by being open and treating all buyers fairly. This created a strong effect where people gave trust back. Customers knew they could trust these merchants, so they came back many times. They also told others, and the Quakers’ name for being fair became very important. These businesses grew strong because of their good way of doing business, not in spite of it.
What your team can learn is clear. Start by explaining a goal that is truly important and that everyone can understand and help with. Then trust people first, before you ask them to trust you. Believe your team members want to work well and can offer good ideas. Then watch how they react to that belief.
Blink 3 – Trust under pressure
If your business is growing, you already know that with growth come problems. Perhaps a customer asks about your prices, or a co-worker disagrees with your plan in front of everyone. Maybe a rival company is telling lies about your newest product, or you see bad comments online. In these hard times, your first thought might be to strongly protect yourself, or ignore the other person. But how you deal with problems decides if people will still trust you or stop trusting you completely.
The fifth rule of trust reminds us of something we learned as small children: be kind. If you can’t be polite, you can’t build trust. This might sound clear or too simple, but being polite is almost gone from much of today’s business and public talks. Being polite means remembering that people are human, even when you strongly disagree with them.
The skill to be polite with others comes from respect, and if there is no respect, there is no trust. Remember that understanding others’ feelings is one of the three main parts in the trust triangle. You cannot show you care about others if you treat them badly.
Look at what’s happened to social media sites in the last 10 years. These networks started with a real hope of connecting people far apart and letting groups speak. But the way most of these sites make money valued how much people interacted most, and nothing makes people interact more than anger. Computer programs learned to spread posts that made people angry, because angry people interacted a lot.
This has had very bad results. People started to forget that real people were using those names and profile pictures. A difference of opinion about rules became an excuse to attack someone’s personality, smarts, or value as a human. Being far away behind a screen made being mean easy. Users could quickly send mean messages and then leave without seeing how it affected others. Over time, these actions also started happening in real life.
The other way needs careful effort, especially when things are very important. To be polite, you have to keep the problem separate from the person as much as possible. When you find yourself unable to keep these two things apart, the smartest thing to do is to step back for a short time. Step away from the angry discussion, calm down, and then return to the conversation later with a new way of looking at it.
This way helps you even if the other person acts badly. Staying polite protects your good name and leaves chances open for working together later. More importantly, it keeps the ‘understanding others’ part of your trust triangle strong. The moment you treat someone like they are not human, even someone who has hurt you, you damage your own ability to build trust with others who see how you deal with problems.
Blink 4 – Trust in a polarized world
You have built trust carefully over a long time, so your customers depend on you, and your team trusts your decisions. Then a company you work with gets caught in a public problem, or customers want you to openly support their chosen politician. The feeling that you have to pick a side can be too much. But being forced into problems that are not part of your main goal puts everything you built at risk.
The sixth rule of trust gives clear advice: stay focused on your main goal. Don’t pick sides in arguments that are about other people’s goals. This doesn’t mean you have no beliefs or don’t care about anything. It means understanding that when you link your good name to another’s issue or argument, if they fail, people who trust you will see it as your failure too.
The tobacco industry shows a clear warning about what happens when experts stop following this rule. In the mid-1900s, tobacco companies had more and more proof that cigarettes caused cancer and other serious health problems. Instead of dealing with these facts truthfully, the companies paid scientists to do studies that disagreed with or made people unsure about the health dangers. These scientists were skilled professionals from trusted places. Many likely believed they were doing real research following science rules.
But they were choosing a side in a fight that wasn’t about science at all – it was about saving company money over people’s health. The scientists let companies pay for, guide, and share their work, because those companies wanted a certain result. When the truth finally came out, as it usually does, the scientists had their good names ruined. Many years of good work became bad because of who they worked with, and the public learned to not trust those researchers or the groups they worked for.
Your business will face similar choices, even if they are not as big. A company you buy from asks you to openly back their side in a worker disagreement. A group in your industry wants you to push for rules that help some members but hurt others. Each request might seem fair on its own, but there’s a silent threat that saying no will hurt your relationship.
The solution is to always keep your focus on your own goal. Be open about what you believe in and what is not your business. You can keep good connections with people who have different views without supporting one side. Staying out of other people’s arguments is not being weak. It protects the trust you have built with a lot of effort.
Blink 5 – Regaining trust when it falters
You made a mistake.
Your new product has a fault. An important team member left in a hard situation. Your company did not finish on time, or had to delay a planned launch because of problems getting materials. The first reaction in these times is to make the problem seem smaller, change the subject, or say nothing until it passes. But this feeling is very wrong. Hiding problems does not make them go away. It makes small problems into big public issues that destroy trust.
That is why the seventh and last rule of trust is that being open builds trust, mainly when you want to hide something. Being honest about problems and mistakes feels risky – you worry that saying you have a weakness will make you lose customers or harm your good name. But people already feel that something is not right. Your quietness does not trick anyone. It only shows that you cannot be trusted to tell the truth when it’s most important.
Wikipedia shows this idea working every day. The site does not act like its articles are perfect. Instead, it clearly marks problems at the top of pages that need work. You might see messages that an article does not have enough sources, uses only one source, or has information that might be unfair. These warnings tell readers about any problems before they spend time reading. This extreme openness could, in theory, make people leave. After all, who wants to read an article that is known to have mistakes?
But the opposite happens. The warnings make people believe the site more because they show Wikipedia is honest about its problems. Readers learn they can trust the site to tell them when information might not be trustworthy. This honesty makes them trust articles without warnings more.
You can use this same method when your business faces problems. If a product has limits, say them clearly. If you did not finish on time, explain what went wrong and how you will change things next time. This being open does many good things. It shows you respect those who rely on you by treating them like grown-ups. It stops small problems from growing into bigger ones when people find out the truth. It also strengthens the ‘being real’ part of your trust triangle.
When trust has been damaged, being open becomes even more important. Consider doing a trust check for your company. Ask the most important people for your business: customers, employees, partners, community members. Ask them straight what they feel and why. You may find differences in how you see your business and how others feel about it. Listen without getting upset or trying to defend yourself, and try to find things you agree on, even with those who don’t like you.
The aim is not to be perfect. Trust does not mean you must never make errors. It needs you to deal with mistakes truthfully and work openly to get better. Doing this often and over time changes early trust into strong, long-term belief.
Final summary
In this Blink to The Seven Rules of Trust by Jimmy Wales and Dan Gardner, you’ve learned that building trust starts with showing you are real, understanding others, and capable in every meeting. Also, treating everyone as a person who should be treated with honesty and care. Work with how people naturally are: trust first before asking for it, create a goal that is important, and believe others have good intentions, even in hard times. Keep the trust you build by being polite when problems happen and not taking sides in arguments that are not about your main goal. Above all, be open about problems and limits, because being honest about your faults builds more trust than pretending to be perfect. These ideas need regular work, but they change how people feel about your business and decide if your good name helps you or stops you.
Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/the-seven-rules-of-trust-en