Trust Me

A friend was certain that Italy would win.

I was not.

That should have ended the discussion.

Instead, his confidence slowly became more persuasive than my doubt. The odds were much higher than the kind I usually accepted, and for the first time I put all the money I had set aside for the bet on one team because someone else sounded sure.

Before the match, I joked that if Italy lost, I might also have to lose the friend.

It was unfair, of course. He had given advice; I had made the decision. But that distinction becomes less attractive after you have borrowed someone else’s confidence and attached your own money to it.

Sports are very good at exposing this problem because the result eventually appears on a scoreboard. Before the match, confidence can sound like knowledge. Afterward, the numbers have no interest in how convincing anyone sounded.

The amount itself is no longer important to me, and I do not need to reconstruct it. What I remember is the feeling of going farther than my own judgment would have taken me.

That is the useful part.

We borrow other people’s judgment all the time. A friend recommends a restaurant, a car, a doctor, a job, a city. Usually this is efficient. Trouble begins when trust in the person quietly turns into certainty about the prediction.

A good friend can be wrong.

A confident friend can be very wrong.

And if the loss would make you angry at the person who gave the advice, perhaps the stake was already too high.

Before the match began, however, none of this sounded important.

My friend said, “Trust me.”

Apparently, I did.