“Culture eats strategy for lunch”

2020 laid bare the truth in that saying. To manage a pandemic, it is not about whether a country has the strategy, the money, or the technology to handle the virus; it is about the culture of its people.

My wife and I were in Beijing during the outbreak. The news broke out during dinner time on January 20, 2020. Within an hour or two of that news, as we left restaurant that night, some people were already wearing masks. By the second day, some 20% to 50% people we saw in Beijing and Shanghai were wearing masks. Mask wearing — it was a culture.

I am always intrigued by the question of “what are your interests?” I ask myself this question often. I also throw this question to others. One business school student answered: “my interest is to find an investment banking job.” Well, he was not really answering my question.

Many people see their short-term goals as their interests. This is a mistake and I believe this is why many high-achieving people don’t feel happy (even after they have attained their goals). By not seeking to know their own interests, people end up spending their entire life doing things they don’t like and they don’t care.

As I wrote in December 2019, “Think Scientifically” was one of my five key takeaways from 2019. Of late, it has become increasingly obvious to me that there is great value in scientific thinking — and, not doing so is unusually dangerous.

To think scientifically, I believe, is to think independently, to be grounded in facts and free of preconceived notions. Scientific thinking seeks truth, not opinions. It welcomes different ideas, new ideas. It also encompasses the willingness to acknowledge that “I can be wrong.”

In the evening of January 20, 2020, China’s respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan confirmed and announced to the public that the virus had passed from person-to-person. I was in Beijing that Monday evening.

By 9pm that day, when I looked out onto the street, many citizens already had surgical masks on. By the next day, as I was travelling through China on a high-speed train, somewhere between 20% to 50% of people I saw started wearing masks.

Within three days, on January 23, Wuhan was locked down. In the following few days, Chinese cities started requiring citizens to wear surgical masks and implementing other types of social distancing measures. For example, on January 26, 2020, Suzhou announced that all passengers using the city’s subway system must wear surgical masks.