One of the major problems that arise when a society is pushed towards poverty and a lack of resources like food, money, houses and jobs, is that people tend to become more aggressive in their pursuit of those basic things that everybody needs to survive. I know this very well because that’s what has happened in the last 30 to 40 years in my country, where the diminishing of opportunities and resources for people, together with many social problems, converted our society into an insane competition for those opportunities and resources. I have to point out that this not only happen in my country but in many others, wherever the society has been pushed towards poverty. In my opinion these brought two main consequences to my country, a good one and a bad one, with the problem that the bad one dominated the good one and became a sign of our way of thinking.
The good thing that happened is that most of the people there are very well trained to compete with any other person for their own resources, as most people can be called self-made people, those who learn the rules of life not in the school but in the real scenario, the street. That is, the lack of resources has changed their mentality to be very competitive in any area of their life. Also the lack of resources has been an opportunity for the growing up of many ideas and has definitely risen up the creativity of many people. A lack of resources has created an atmosphere for the development of the creativity of many people in my country, sometimes in ways that you may be surprised of the good things humans can create in those “extreme” situations, where resources are lacking and survival is needed. In fact, I consider this something very good for a country; for example, I believe that one of the things that has driven China to become an economic giant is that there is a huge spirit of competition between the Chinese people and also between China and other countries, and that great power of being competitive is driving that country to be a leader in the world.
The bad thing in my country, and many others, is that competition for the resources made people forget about the others and focused in what they needed to pursue their dreams. This brought a main way of thinking that spread all over the country; it was taught to the children by their parents, in the school, in the streets, by their friends and soon became a part of the values of people. The new generations were taught to think about themselves first and over anything else, they should secure everything they needed before anybody else did it. That is how we started to lose the team spirit and a mentality of I win/ you lose became the base of our thinking. That’s how many people in many places think. They think that every action that can take them further in their pursuit of their dreams, no matter how badly it affects other people, is needed to be successful. When everybody started to think on their own with a mentality of I win/ you lose, the society and the values that kept it together started to fall down, in a spiral which lead to many social problems.
One of the foundations of society is the cooperative spirit between it participants, but in my country this has been lost during the years and the society has started to break down leading to a place where intolerance, disrespect, envy and many other defects prevail. People forgot that a team spirit is what can drive a nation to its development. There are many examples of that in the history and nowadays like the Japanese, Germans and United States people, countries that were built or rebuilt in the bases of unity and cooperativism.
In his book, the 7 habits of highly effective people, Stephen Covey shows us six manners in which people tend to act when they pursue what they want; he called it six paradigms of human interaction:
- I win/ you win -I win/ you lose -I lose/ you win
- I lose/ you lose -I win -I win/you win or no deal
The I win/ you lose people usually are self centered people that only look for their own benefit without taking care on how their actions can affect others, the same as the I win people, who search for their benefit regardless of how that affect positive or negatively others. The more aggressive situation is when people don’t let others win if they cannot win (I lose/ you lose). Also there is the opposite people who sacrifice their dreams and what they are to let the others win (I lose/ you win). While, briefly explained, all this paradigms deal with people that is insecure and do not understand how their actions affect their environment, the paradigm of I win/ you win arise to show us that is possible, in any or at least many cases, to find solutions in the pursuit of our dreams which can not only benefit us but also the environment and the people that surround us, and through internalizing that paradigm in our heart and using it daily in our normal interactions with people we can contribute to the establishment of a new society that grows up guided by the force of the union of its individuals and not by the isolated efforts of them. The I win/ you win solutions can be the bases for the development of a country!
Is obvious that a society driven by the four paradigms in the middle, I win/ you lose -I lose/ you win - I lose/ you lose -I win, will not be able to grow up as society but instead will be destructed by the ambition of any of those who look for their personal benefit first, rather than for the benefit of society.
There is much to talk about this, but today I wanted to focused on the fact that to build the nation of our dreams or the world of our dreams, is necessary to start looking for solutions of the type I win/ you win, rather than I win/ you lose or I lose/you win, solutions that can drive our society further away, much more than if we act separately in search of our own benefit. So start to think today what you could do in your normal life to contribute to your society, your family, your friends, your neighborhood, your city, by thinking in win/win actions rather than I win/ everybody else loses. You can internalize this principle by remembering it every time you do a business or you deal with a problem in your family, just think of solutions that make the two counterparts win something!
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