I share five slack channels with around one hundred and fifty people across eight timezones, and that’s just for work. You’re probably experiencing something similar in your own day-to-day.

Never before have we come together from so far away to form so many teams and make so many things happen together.

It’s magic, and you know how magic is: delighting and deceiving. The idea that we’re one and the same, that we just need a common goal and differences will disappear, is a beautiful and convincing illusion but an illusion nonetheless.

We are not one and the same.

Our individual identities are obviously different, and our cultures are different too. The uncomfortable truth is twofold: some of our differences can’t be solved in the space of a conversation or even a generation, and there’s no right or wrong side of the argument, but just the inevitability of change.

Why it’s important?

As we learn to look for, value, and accept our differences, we become better at seeing things from different perspectives, which will enable us to solve bigger and bigger problems. Isn’t that the whole point of living?