Around two days
ago, I put up a post on the criteria I used when trying to figure out if I
would like a person or not. These criteria I used are not hard and fast rules.
I’ve gotten along well enough with people who don’t fit into the my “box” (yes,
I know I often complain we try to put people into boxes), but by and large,
most of the people that I get along with and want to deal with on a personal
and professional basis tend to have at least one of the following:
Firstly, there
should be an appreciation of a contact sport and one should preferably have
played a contact sport at some stage in life. The sport can be a combat sport
like boxing, MMA or kickboxing or it can be a team sport like ruby union and
league as well as the American and Australian version of football;
Secondly, if
one comes from a country where there is compulsory military service, one should
preferably have served in a combat vocation. If one comes from a country where
there are professional standing armies, I tend give instant respect to the guys
who did a spell in the military. I think of one of my American friends who was
touted as being “Mr. Cisco” but what made a difference to me was the fact that
he once served in the US Navy.
Finally, I want
to know if a guy has spent time doing any form of menial work like waiting
tables, farm work or worked in a construction site or shipyard.
As a matter of
disclosure, I played rugby at house level during my first four years at Churcher’s
College. I also served as a 155mm Gun Howitzer Commander during national
service and as is well known, I waited tables in a Bistrot in my late thirties
and carried on even though I was working a corporate job by day until Covid put
an end to this side gig.
So, you could
say that what I’m doing is looking for people who are similar to me. I guess it
is human nature to want to be with people similar to you. While there’s
probably an element of truth in there, I’m looking to be around people of a
certain character. I will be the first to admit that I’m not always the best
judge of character. My abilities to judge people accurately have come with time.
I’ve found that while I may not necessarily have an instinctive flair for
reading people, I can figure something out about a person from their
experiences.
I, for example,
click with people who like contact sports because I know they’ve taken a few knocks
before and they’ve managed to get up and continue. I take the difference
between soccer and rugby as the example. In soccer, you’ll see the guy rolling on
the floor and screaming in pain when someone taps him. In rugby the foul
usually involves an attempt to incapacitate the guy. There’s a lot more money
in soccer than in rugby (both league and union) and so I guess its all about
trying to gain every advantage you have, even if you need to blow things up a
bit. In rugby its about getting the ball across to score that try. To make it
in a contact sport, you need to take a few knocks in life and then get up and
play again.
One of the best
explanations of how this relates to life is seen in the movie Rocky Balboa,
where the aged Rocky ticks his son off for being a complaining wimp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxgU_aepGd0
Now, this is
not to say that individuality is not important. I take myself as an example. I have
an ego and my greatest pride has always been the things I did as a one-man-operator.
I take pride in the fact that the job was done by Tang Li from Singapore with
no multi-national backing as opposed to be Tang Li part of the Webber Shandwick
team.
However, as
much as I believe in the power of individuality, I also understand that you
need to be both dependable and to depend on people to get the mission through.
Yes, I was a lone PR operator for many years but I was also working alongside
people doing design, social media marketing advertising and so on. We had to
work together to achieve the common objective. There is a reason why, nearly
two and a half decades after leaving national service, my proverbial “BFFs” are
my military buddies.
I value people
who have done manual work because it actually gives you an understanding of the
value of work. I think it was best explained by an American who had volunteered
his son for national service and found, to his horror, that the SAF hired
Bangladeshi workers to do area cleaning for recruits. He said, “If those boys
had to clean up after themselves, they would look at the Bangladeshi worker in
a different way.”
The converse of
this, is that I get turned off when people treat service staff badly or start
turning their noses at construction workers. I was brought up to treat everyone
with respect and when I see someone talking down to someone like the service
staff, maids and construction worker, that automatically triggers alarm bells
about that person. No matter how rich that person is or how powerful, only
those from the gutter “talk down” to people and that applies whether you have a
million cash in the bank.
At the end the
day, all we have is our character. Money, position and power and even good
looks fade. So, I try to surround myself with people with some shred of
character. I think of my kids first serious boyfriend. He was the manager in a
bar she worked at. Had served as an army regular for six-years in Provost unit.
Looked like he could handle himself in fight. He was the only “mummy’s boy”
worth considering human – he looked after his mother and didn’t expect her to
protect him from life’s realities. I respected that he looked like he could
handle himself in a fight and we worked together in the same restaurant, the
entire crew kept telling me how fortunate I was to have him as my “son-in-law.”
I just wish my kid knew how to treasure the guy.
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