I had an interesting conversation with another person not too long ago on how he always goes out of his way to help people in business. Until he finds out without a shadow of a doubt that he is being used by someone, till then he will be entirely trusting. Sure enough, he has been taken advantage of many times.
I personally used to be always trusting where I believed if you simply do good things for people then you will most likely receive the same back from others in a naive way. Or similarly, if they seem so nice in one way then surely they should be the same when it comes to other things. There is this one incident though that sort of completely changed my perspective to a certain degree where a person who I have known for over 20 years needed substantial help financially and sure enough I gave in.
As you may have guessed it, the first opportunity he got where he initially thought that he could do the royal screw job on me he did it. Too bad for him that he has horrible memory and so the stories he tried to come up with were contradicting and made no sense which just made him look more guilty.
What I learned from that though was how in business or even life general, trust is something that needs to be earned in every department. For example, in the past if someone was say reliable when it came to always meeting deadlines and was true to his word, then most likely if he say asked to borrow money then I would assume it would be no big deal. Nowadays, it would be if I never lent you any money before, you haven’t earned my trust to do so and therefore I will need some kind of guarantee that it will be paid back or in the meantime I will keep a valuable possession of some sort.
That doesn’t mean you should stop doing good things for people without turning everything into like a negotiation as even I will be one to say that I have met a lot of great people this way. But, making people earn that trust from you in everyway will lessen the odds that they are simply trying to get on your good side in one way in an attempt take something from you on the other side without you even seeing it.