The magic word is Culture

“A successful culture guarantees a great population in a great nation. Do we have a great culture? If not, can we build one” 

Who is more successful, the school-educated or the street smart? It’s a classic question with two fiercely opposing schools of thought. The “school educated” are those who went through a traditional education system: High school, college, and usually a higher degree. The “street smart” are school or college dropouts who started working at a young age. As we know “success” is an intangible word difficult to measure so instead of asking who’s more successful maybe we should ask: “Which experience is more valuable?”

The Germans are the ultimate contributors to mankind, thrusting forward in the fields of science, technology, medicine, and education to keep humans pushing the limits of progress and innovation. The Germans are incredibly efficient, meticulous, precise, hard working, creative, and genius in many ways. Just look at their automotive industry: Germany has the third highest automobile production in the world. How can one country have so many amazing brands? Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche, Opel, and they just bought Lamborghini. How are they so successful? Is it DNA? Geographic location? History? And most importantly what would THEY advocate, education or street smarts?

I think in Germany it doesn’t make a difference whether you have an education or start from the sidewalk because the root of their success is fundamentally integrated in society: In their culture. Yes, the magic word is culture.

Culture is defined as:

The distinct ways that people who live differently classify and represent their experiences, and act imaginatively or creatively.

Development or improvement of the mind by education or training.

So basically culture is what you absorb from people around you. It could be from your parents, school, work, friends, or strangers. Therefore we can assume that a successful culture breeds successful people. A successful culture generates contributors who improve life for everyone else. Culture is a train carrying our habits, traditions, and ancestral secrets in its carriages, and we are the links holding those carriages together; thus preserving our identity as a race.

“The Germans are incredibly efficient, meticulous, precise, hard working, creative, and genius in many ways.”

We have a need for culture as human beings, and carry on traditions without question. We generally don’t know why we do it; we simply recreate behaviors and feel proud as we do it. Culture is an essential component hardwired into our DNA to ensure that we emulate the actions of our ancestors. It’s a survival mechanism designed to lock and preserve achievements within a particular population. Successful cultures thrive while unfortunately, unsuccessful ones eventually perish.

So it doesn’t matter if you get your education from a university or from the street because all that counts is what you ultimately do with that information. Culture used to take a long time to spread due to geographical restrictions, language barriers, and tight social structures. Today (with globalization and the internet) as the world shrinks and borders disappear we easily affect (and are affected by) people halfway across the world with our thoughts, opinions, ideas, and philosophies. A picture is worth a thousand words and we’re seeing a thousand pictures daily.

“Culture is a train carrying our habits, traditions, and ancestral secrets in its carriages, and we are the links holding those carriages together.”

You can’t argue that our culture isn’t slowly but surely merging with a new international collective mindset. A single unified culture is being born that has no race, color, creed, or boundary. A new culture that was born in 2000 with the internet. The culture of one. One world.

For Bahrainis to thrive we must integrate positive benefits from successful races into our daily thought. More specifically, for us to progress we need our entire culture to shift towards efficiency, integrity, thoroughness, creativity, and hard work. I already notice a growing Bahraini subculture of innovators, entrepreneurs, and self-starters, and it’s not hard to see their optimism infect others and begin spreading among our population. Is that due to the new culture of “one world” I wonder..

We need to communicate more. Cultures don’t evolve overnight but one thing that’s inevitable is change. Let’s align this shifting mentality with modernity, innovation, and guts. The power of words is tremendous so lets talk about change, lets push ourselves and others to improve, and lets believe. Believe in ourselves, believe in others, and believe that good things will happen. All we can do as individuals is improve ourselves and gift our experience to others. A better us is a better culture that potentially defines a better future for all. The magic word is culture, but the magic truly lies in us: Those who carry it on.

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