I have a tendency to trust too many people. Whether it's friends telling me their side of a story or coworkers saying why they can't deliver something by a deadline or people on the street telling me why they need $5, I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt and take them at their word. I can be very naive in that regard. It's one of the reasons I would have never made it as a journalist: I wasn't cynical enough to do the job well.
It's a flaw I fully acknowledge will hold me back someday. There are plenty of areas in business — negotiation, people management, squeezing the best performance out of a team — where you have to be a bit cynical and not believe people when they say they're giving you everything they've got.
But I also don't know if I want to change. At the end of the day, I think I would rather get walked on by 10 people who didn't deserve to be trusted than dismiss the one person that did. Maybe that sets me up to get taken advantage of my entire life, and maybe viewing either to the extreme isn't helpful when almost everyone exists somewhere in the middle of blind cynicism and unconditional trust. But I've seen a lot more relationships or company cultures burn down because of a lack of trust than an abundance of it, so if I have to lean in any direction, I know which way I'm going.
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