Saturday, October 8, 2011

Trust & Revenge

Read some interesting articles lately. Most of them from business articles sent by my associate. The articles are mostly about the kind of attitudes human are born with that subconsciously will effect our judgement in day to day life. The stories written are what we commonly associate it with our daily life, be it in studies, work, business and yes, marriage.

We as human are born with natural tendency to trust people. Not just towards people we are familiar with, strangers as well. When the trust is violated, wether in small or big ways, we tend to take revenge in any way we can possibly think of. Just to get even.

In business, revenge is necessary. It's a mean to survive. In daily life, revenge is for our own satisfaction.

Revenge doesn't necessarily mean being done in the nasty ways. Sometimes revenge can be done in the sweetest way that caught the other party by surprise and they don't realize it until it's too late that they'd been had. That kind of revenge would leave a lasting lesson that they would remember forever.

Let's say your chicken is being stolen. You spent a month to nurture it until it is ready to give you eggs. Seldom a person would just chalk it up to loss, get another chicken or two, put on better security and nurture the chickens back to the producing state and collect the outcome. Normal human being would hunt down the thief, take back the chicken plus with goat, cow and even the thief's cat to get even. It's called human nature, to get even and more, just for own satisfaction and teach the thief a lesson of what their action would bring them - more loss.

We as human trust easily, until our trust is violated, then we take revenge.

For example, we eat in a restaurant. We automatically put our trust to the cook to give us a good meal. We trust them not to spit or put poison in our food. When something bad happen, say, the egg is rotten, and we complain to the manager. The manager has 2 choices on how to handle this :

1) Remove the rotten egg, not saying sorry and still charge for the egg.

2) Say sorry, replace the meal and not charge for the rotten egg.

For action 1, we as customer will not be satisfied by this action. It would bring to anger. It's not about the money but about the attitude. We automatically will ban the restaurant and write it in our blogs and tell everybody we know about our experience. The news will spread and ultimately the restaurant will lose it's clientele due to the manager's attitude on that one simple incident. The cost for the egg is only 50cents but the loss because of that action cost them more.

For action 2, saying sorry and admitting to mistake does not make a person weak. If the manager say sorry to the customer, the anger would be cut short. And when we pay and see the charges for the egg is removed from the bill, we would feel satisfied and justified. We would leave the restaurant happy. Again, it's not about money, it's about attitude. For the restaurant, they might lose some today, but imagine how much they can make from their reputation.


Reputation is the make and break of an organization.

In our daily life, we meet people everyday, some strangers we pass by or happen to be standing next to in concession line. Some acquaintance we hardly know, friends, relatives. We trust them not to hurt us. It's in our nature. The level of trust is depending on the level of how well we know the person.

We have 2 choices in everything we do and consequences from any actions taken. Subconsciously we take revenge whenever we feel our trust is being violated.

For someone to gain a person's trust would take years. Trust is to be earned and it's not easy for someone to trust us completely. Years and a lot of hard work. But it only takes one mistake to lose that trust and to get the trust back would take a very long time and a lot more hard work. It's not easy to earn that trust and it's not easy to trust again once that trust is violated.

When we know we're in the wrong, just put aside our ego and admit to the mistake and make amends to sincerely apologize. It's not necessarily means that we have to say sorry a thousand times. No point in saying sorry if we don't mean it and still no change in our attitude and not showing how guilty we feel for violating that trust. We can forgive for the first mistake if the person say sorry and showing remorse and guilt and take actions to rectify the matter and making things much better and not repeating it again. 

But, repeated violation of trust will simply lead to the other party to take revenge. We can't complain of another person's actions because it reflected on our behavior towards that person. Every choices and actions we make will reflect on what happens to us. We can see the outcome of our attitudes towards people or decisions we make in our daily life. 

Bad things attract bad result and good thing gets good result. It's simply the matter of mind and attitude. It's really easy to be the bad guy but bad guys usually don't end up well now don't they.

It's up to us to make the choices.

-Sal's Out-