We Met as Strangers and Parted as Friends.

 

I come from a patchwork family. My mother has been married three times and has had a kid from each husband. My dad is also on his third marriage and a kid from two of his three marriages. Thus, whilst I have three siblings, we only have one parent in common. In the ever-tricky situations on race, I am officially the only “pure breed,” since both my parents are Chinese (mum and dad’s subsequent spouses are Caucasian).

If you were to look at my family, through the eyes of “traditional” values, you could say that we were the text-book case for social welfare and mental abuse. However, as my sister once put it, “We wouldn’t have our patchwork family any other way.” Whilst the family is made up of people of different ethnicities, religions, and cultures, we are actually similar in the things that matter. We have love for each other. I’m significantly older than my siblings. Since I moved back to Singapore rather than stay in the UK or USA, my experiences are totally different from theirs. Yet, we love each other deeply and the highlight of my most recent trip to the UK was having dinner with my brother and sister from my mum’s side:

 

 With Tara, Christopher and Urte (my brother’s girlfriend) at the German Gymnasium Café in Kings Cross London.

I bring up the experiences of my own family because I believe we live in a world where people are encouraged to be scared of people who are not like them. The power of race and religion to divide humanity and go against God are at strong points. Impotent charlatans who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse are successfully rebranding themselves as “strong-studs” by attacking weak and vulnerable people who happen to be a shade darker than most.

It isn’t just about race and religion. Social class has also played a divisive part. Let’s not forget that Donald Trump successfully reminded white coal miners in Louisiana that they were being screwed by white financiers in New York.

So, you now have a situation where societies are now breaking themselves down into micro-groups based on ever possible division you could think of. People only want to huddle with people exactly like them.

Now, this is perfectly understandable if you’re a migrant in a new country where you don’t speak the language or know anyone. Human nature is such that we’ll drift to the people who are most like us to help us settle in a place. If you take me as an example, I grew up in England and in boarding school. Most of my friends were native Anglo-Saxons. However, if you ask me where I like hanging out best in the UK, the answer is going to be Chinatown in London. I am or was (the main language has moved from Cantonese to Mandarin) most familiar with the sights and sounds of the place.

However, whilst hanging out with your own kind is very natural when you are starting out, there comes a time when you need to break away from your own in order to grow. It is as simple as this – you are not going to get any form of change unless you face the need for it and the most painless form of change comes when you meet people who have different experiences from you.

Let’s look at the Singapore economy as an example. Sure, Singapore has been one of the great economic stories of the past 50-years. There’s plenty of money floating around Singapore. However, the uncomfortable fact remains this, the number of Singaporean businesses that have made great things beyond the local market and the number of Singaporeans in any given field who have achieved anything beyond the shores of Singapore can be counted on with one hand.

Lee Kuan Yew would have argued that this is because we are small. However, small is not an excuse, especially in this day and age of instant communications. The one common factor is this – our companies are increasingly run by the same people – ie people who went to the same school, junior college, army unit and university. Their career paths look ever so similar and so nothing changes. The men (they usually are) will then marry girls who are exactly like them and instead of making children the biological way, they will tailor make them to be exactly like them.

However, as European royal families discovered, the problem with inbreeding is that it eventually leads to deformities both mental and physical. The gene pool gets weaker and the species becomes prone to all sorts of nasty things.

I used to hang out with my own kind, namely PR professionals. Then, when I changed fields, I started hanging out with insolvency lawyers (which is where most of the work for liquidators comes from). Now, nothing wrong with that in that you want to know what’s going on in an industry and you do want to stay up to date with the movements in your field.

However, there’s one slight problem with that. If you only hang out with your own kind, you start getting this delusion that your own industry is the centre of the world and you fail to realise that your value is not being at the centre of the industry but how the industry benefits everyone else.

I discovered this last night when I went for a wine tasting event, that I’ve been attending for some time. I used to have a large group but that got smaller as people found other things to do. Then, last night an expected number showed up. The group was professionally diverse. I had my accountant and a professional nude model. We were joined by a businessman, a surgeon and a Bollywood Scriptwriter. We were later joined by an aspiring liquidator (a former junior colleague), a multilingual American arbitrator and an Italian data architect as well as an aspiring beauty queen and an ecommerce entrepreneur (my Chubbytiger partner).

 

 The businessman and the script writer admire the wine – Taken at Providore OUE

What made the event successful was that people had things to talk about other than their usual mundane business life. We were united by an appreciation of good wine (the surgeon recommended a great bottle) but we approached things from different angles.

This was a moment where people could help each other solidify ideas and somehow ideas could flow easily.

So, yes, by all means, we should be with our own kind. However, its important to move away from our own kind if we want to achieve any form of growth. Group think and inbreeding only make you weaker and seeking out differences and challenge are actually good for you.