Why You Can't Bullshit People
Humans are extremely good at detecting bullshit in others when interacting physically. Funny enough humans are also extremely bad at bullshitting others when interacting physically. Combine these two facts and you can see why bullshitting someone in the physical world is really hard.
I’ve thought about this quite a lot lately, especially in relation to Kilometre Zero Running Club, the people we want to attract, the brand, the values we want to embody and transmit, and more generally: what makes a brand which relies on people meeting physically a success?
At Kilometre Zero Running Club we want to embody three values: humanity, beauty, and performance. This in every way you can think of. So far we think that the people who have connected with us and who have come back to run regularly, embody these values. And we are really proud and happy about that.
But, how did we get there? Let me speculate. We did not know about or define these values initially. We started by listening to ourselves, to our wants, and then looked for how to meet these wants. Wants are what defines people and their behaviours. And so, what resulted was Kilometre Zero, a genuine embodiment of who we are, meaning what we wanted —beauty, humanity, and performance. We created something we wanted first and abstracted what it is through words second.
If we hadn’t done it in that order or had tried to create something that doesn’t represent us, and had tried to “sell” it anyway as being genuinely us, it wouldn’t have worked, precisely because people would have called bullshit.
I believe the lesson is: the closer the thing you create for people is something physical that people experience fully, the more it has to be genuine and close to who you are and what you want. There doesn’t seem to be another way that gets you the same results. Even if you are really good at pretending or you are lucky to come up and get started with something that people like without it being genuine, you won’t be able to make it last. You will get exposed sooner or later and people will lose trust and not forgive you. Your creation will fall apart.
So don’t bullshit people, especially when it’s about real physical experiences. It simply won’t work.