1119: Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Shares the Seven Rules of Trust

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

How to be Awesome at Your Job

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4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jimmy Wales reveals the foundational principles around trust that helped build Wikipedia.

— YOU’LL LEARN —

1) How trust helped Jimmy achieve 52X productivity

2) The common assumptions that erode trust

3) How our systems encourage mistrust

Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep1119 for clickable versions of the links below.

— ABOUT JIMMY —

Jimmy Wales is the Cofounder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. Named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, he has been recognized by the World Economic Forum for his contributions to the global public good. He lives with his family in London.

• Book: The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last

• Website: TrustCafe.io

— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW —

• Study: “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B” by Steven Kerr

• Study: “Guarding the Firewall: How Political Journalists Distance Themselves From the Editorial Endorsement Process” by Gregory Perreault, Volha Kananovich, and Ella Hackett

• Tool: GPT-OSS

• Book: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen Covey

— THANK YOU SPONSORS! —

• Monarch.com. Get 50% off your first year on with the code AWESOME.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Assume Good Faith is a classic Wikipedia rule. If you meet somebody, whatever they're doing,
0:15.3	they're probably a decent person. And then maybe one in a thousand is somehow actually being malicious.
0:20.0	And so it's a very small number of people. And so being positive about people and designing whatever your
0:25.4	process is or your life or whatever around that premise of saying, oh, like, I'm just going
0:29.7	to assume most people are going to be good. They're going to do the right thing. That actually
0:32.7	works really, really well.
0:40.3	That's Jimmy Wales.
0:41.5	He's the co-founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation.
0:44.9	Jimmy knows a thing or two about what it takes to earn people's trust.
0:47.7	And today, he's here to share some of that wisdom from his latest book,
0:50.9	The Seven Rules of Trust, A blueprint for building things that last.
0:54.7	So you'll learn one, how trust helped Jimmy achieve 52 times his previous productivity.
1:00.4	Two, the common assumptions that erode trust.
1:02.9	And three, how our systems can encourage mistrust.
1:06.4	And if you want a quick summary write-up of these actionable takeaways,
1:09.0	I recommend you drop on by Awesome at Your Job.com and sign up for the free Gold Nugget email newsletter. And if it's your
1:15.3	first time at Awesome at Your Job, welcome. I encourage you to check out what we've got to offer
1:20.4	by looking at the very earliest episodes labeled Zero and then A, B, C, D, E, F for a taste of
1:27.3	all that we've got to offer.
1:29.2	Great to have you.
1:30.3	I'm Pia Bikaitis.
1:31.3	This is How to Be Awesome at your job.
	...

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