People Are More Similar Than Different

A few years ago in Dubai, I was having coffee with a VP of Sales who had spent 25 years building commercial teams across the Gulf, Europe, and the US. He was talking about what he wanted from the next chapter of his career. Not compensation, he was clear he had enough. He wanted to build something he could point to in twenty years and say he had built it. And he wanted the people who had worked for him to have gone on to build things of their own.

Later that week I was back in Kalahandi, having dinner with a man who ran a small agricultural trading business. Different world. Different language. Different everything visible on the surface. He talked about what he was building, the business he wanted to leave to his children, the employees he was trying to help develop. The same architecture. Different context. Different words.

I have had some version of this conversation dozens of times across enough different countries and economic conditions that the pattern is too consistent to be coincidence. Strip away the credential differences, the income differences, the cultural surface, and the human foundation underneath is remarkably shared.

The differences are real and matter in practice. What they obscure is the depth of similarity underneath them. The more contexts I have moved through, different countries, different economic levels, different industries, different generations, the more struck I am by how consistent the foundations are.

What does not vary

Almost everywhere I have been, people want to be seen and respected as capable. The specific expression of this varies, the things that signal respect differ across cultures, but the underlying want is constant. Being treated as intelligent, as competent, as someone whose opinion matters: this lands the same way in almost every context.

Almost everywhere, people are trying to provide for the people they love. The definition of provision varies, what counts as enough, what counts as good, but the orientation is the same. The street vendor in Bhubaneswar and the VP at a New York firm are both trying to do right by the people who depend on them.

Almost everywhere, people tell stories about themselves that explain their circumstances as the product of choices made under genuine constraint. This is not dishonesty. It is the universal human need to have a life that makes sense as a narrative, to be a protagonist rather than a subject of forces beyond their control. The stories vary. The need for them does not.

Almost everywhere, people respond to genuine interest with genuine openness. Ask someone about the place they grew up, the work they care about, the thing they are most proud of having built, and you get a different conversation than you get when you ask about their position or credentials. Interest disarms. It is one of the most reliable social facts I know.

Ask someone about the place they grew up, the work they care about, the thing they are most proud of having built - and you get a different conversation than you get when you ask about their position or credentials. Interest disarms. It is one of the most reliable social facts I know.

Why this matters

The depth of similarity matters because it changes how you think about the problems worth solving.

If people are fundamentally different, if what they want and need is shaped primarily by culture and circumstance, then solutions have to be highly localized. What works in one context will not translate to others.

If people are fundamentally similar at the level of basic human wants, dignity, connection, the ability to provide for those they love, a sense that their effort matters, then the solutions that work are often more universal than they appear. The specific implementation varies. The underlying mechanism does not.

This is part of why I believe the opportunity gap is not a problem specific to certain countries or cultures. It is a structural feature of how human societies organize the distribution of access. The problem is not that people in underserved places want less or work less hard. The problem is that the infrastructure for converting that effort into outcomes is thinner. Fix the infrastructure and you get similar outcomes, because you are working with similar raw material.

The practical consequence

Recognizing the depth of similarity changes how you approach other people, particularly people who seem very different from you.

It reduces the cognitive distance you have to cross to build a relationship. If you start from the assumption that you are fundamentally different, every interaction requires translation. If you start from the assumption that the basic human things are shared, the translation work is lighter, the differences become a layer of interesting texture over a foundation that is already familiar.

This does not mean collapsing real differences or pretending that context does not shape people. It means holding the differences as variations on something shared, rather than as evidence of fundamental separateness.

That shift in assumption changes the quality of every conversation you have with someone you did not grow up with. It is one of the most practically useful things travel has given me.

See also: How I Think About People, Long-Term Thinking in a Short-Term World, The Evolution of My Thinking

Sources

Amartya Sen: Development as Freedom

Frans de Waal: The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion