Reliability (and Trust)

Update - Sep 7 2024

I spent 4 months really trying to improve my reliability. It was truly my main goal, because I realized how important it was. I’m surprised how well it went.

This is the first core personality trait that I’ve been able to flip completely upside down. I would now consider myself a reliable person. Without additional prompting, at the end of my internship, my boss said the first word that comes to mind when he thinks of me is “reliable”. My inbox is now frequently checked and responded to. My calendar is now my bible. Of course, there are still hiccups, but I am now able to classify them as mistakes instead of core problems.

In some ways, I over-indexed on being reliable. This came with its own set of learnings:

• It is suboptimal to be 100% reliable. You will find yourself being overruled by commitments with little conviction in how you are spending your time.
• In cases where you have to be unreliable, default to honest communication. Things happen, people understand. If you are a default reliable person, this won’t hurt your reputation much.
• It is more important to be reliable to yourself than to others.
• Reliability goes under-appreciated in the short-term. Don’t fret. It’s worth it.

Some Yapping - April 2024

I’ve come to realize that reliability is one of the most important traits in a person. I’ve become obsessed with it. Partly because I’ve realized how unreliable I am.

Why Reliability is important

Think of your favourite person. I’m willing to bet that they are also one of the most reliable people in your life. Think of someone that you hate working with. Chances are they are unreliable. I’ve realized that consistent reliability bestows trust, and with trust comes everything.

I want to be a person that others count on. How else can I be someone the world counts on? Individual accounts of ones character make up for their societal reputation.

The way I’ve been playing life for the past couple of years has been betting on myself as a future leader. I’ve noticed that nobody wants to be led by someone unreliable. As I’m close to graduating, I need to be able to rally my friends to work on something ambitious with me. I need to convince people to drop their 300k job offers to pursue something that will statistically fail. For this to occur, I need to be reliable.

How I’m unreliable

This one hit me like a truck. I’ve realized I’m extremely unreliable. And this isn’t me being hard on myself. My best friends tell me that I am not someone they would consider reliable. People that just meet me point out that I don’t seem reliable. I’ve been racking my brain for the root cause of this, but I think the better strategy is to write out general situations and go from there.

• My looseness with timeliness.
  • If I plan to hang out with a friend at X o’clock, I notice that I’m always late.
  • If I give someone a timeline on getting something done, I almost always go over the deadline.
  • Even as I’m writing this, I’m on the train going to a hackathon that I am 2 hours late for.
  • I reply to people so late!
• My erratic behaviour
  • My friends say I give off a “mad scientist” vibe. One that is interesting, but unpredictable. If they can’t rely on my behaviour, then that sets a bad precedent in general.
  • I change my mind on how I want to spend my time a lot. This is a consequence of a strong feedback loop for my opinion on myself.
• The way I play life
  • I would say I am pretty good at convincing people of things. I could probably justify anything to myself, and to most others. Eg:
    • It’s ok if I arrive late if we spend the same amount of time together
    • Deadline is tonight, but realistically they aren’t checking until they wake up tomorrow morning, so they will probably just take the assignment
    • I forgot to sign up, but I can probably just convince them to let me in at the door
  • This has regularly given me “pardons” to rules that others have abided by.
  • As I get older, I fear that I can not rely on “charm” anymore. To be honest, I never should have.
    • I am reminded of my 10th grade summer school teacher. I got in trouble for doing magic tricks with my desk-mates while she was teaching and was moved to the corner of the classroom in isolation. At the end of the day I went ut ep to her to apologize and see if I could sit with my friends again. Sternly, she told me, “Krish, I think you believe that you can weasel yourself out of situations that most others can’t. Maybe that is true. But there is a time when that won’t be, and then you’ll be fucked.” Ok that last part was exaggeration, but it was pretty much the same thing.
• I get excited and unexcited about things too quickly. My calendar is more fluid than set.
  • I often find myself double booking my time and only addressing it in the last minute.
• I try my best to help others when I can, but I think I’ve been putting a limitation on “when I can”.
  • My justification here was that I am working on myself so that I can help others on a greater scale when I’m older. I’d forgotten that much of the joy from life comes from helping people.
  • I think getting immediate help from someone when I ask for it is something I am so grateful for. These people are busy but selfless, and I place them on the highest of pedestals.
• I think I can do more than I can.
• I lack discipline
• I commit to things that I want to do now, but don’t want to do later

I’ve noticed this problem has plagued me my entire life. I can think back all the way to grade 8 for being unable to come through on my responsibilities the way I wish I could have.