There are a few rules of thumb I find universal, applicable to many corners of life. “Trust by default” is one of them.
Why does trust matter?
It is a heuristic for freeing up mental capacity. Rather than re-litigating every assumption, trust gives you a stable basis to explore from and build upon.
And really — because there is no other way to live. Doubting everything by default will overwhelm you to a breaking point; the mind simply cannot carry that load. At the bottom of it there is a line you must draw, and you give the benefit of the doubt to the many things that fall beyond it.
What do I trust?
- Personal task management — I trust my GTD system.
- Evolving a codebase — I trust the unit test suites.
- Working in an organized team — I trust the process.
- Working with people — I trust them by default.
- Learning — I trust my SRS to retain the facts.
I also trust the yin-yang philosophy — that every rule has its exceptions (the grammar of languages is a prominent example):
- It’s okay to skip your GTD cycles sometimes, if you genuinely enjoy whatever you’re doing.
- You shouldn’t rely on unit tests as the sole safety net.
- Don’t follow a process arrogantly.
- You probably shouldn’t entrust strangers with important matters.
- You should be ready to doubt what you’ve long known.
- I don’t trust information that will eventually drive a decision — not without validating it first.
Back to square one, aren’t we?
So there is a sliver of doubt tucked into the corner of every trust. Doesn’t that make this whole piece basically pointless?
If there were a definite answer to whether to trust a thing, life would be easy. It would also be boring. Even an atom is not indivisible. There are many components inside any “thing” — many ideas in a book, many people in a team, many principles in a methodology — and trust rarely belongs to all of them at once.
We would love to hold one consistent, holistic view of everything that fits in a single word — but is a “bird” really a bird? A blindly unbending trust is, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, “the hobgoblin of little minds.” Life is fascinating precisely that way: an endless fractal to uncover, in which we can never absolutely trust that we are right. (A thread of thinking I shared with a friend’s garden of thoughts.)