How do we learn these vital social skills then?

Hello guys. I had one of those conversations with my mother again on Skype - you see, I Skype my sister regularly and sometimes, my mother will join us for a part of the conversation. So my sister asked me about work and I told her about a deal that fell apart because the client (let's call him "Len" - obviously not his real name) I was dealing with refused to listen to me - I was the broker trying to find US$50 million of investment into his business and I told him that he needed to compromise, he wasn't going to be able to dictate the terms of the investment even if I have indeed found him an American party who had taken great interest in this proposal. Everyone was going to have to negotiate, compromise a little, show a bit of goodwill in order for the deal to happen but no, Len basically ignored me and thought I was just the greedy middleman trying to ask for too much when I was doing everything I could to keep everyone happy. But given his attitude, it was never going to go anywhere and sure enough, the deal fell apart pretty dramatically and quickly after two weeks of negotiation and we mutually decided to cut our losses by pulling the plug on it. With all due respect, Len has a very successful, profitable business and I'm sure he will find another party who will be willing to invest in his company. I was trying to explain to my mother and sister that whilst Len was a highly educated man who had built up a very successful business, he clearly lacked the kind of soft skills that would have served him well in this kind of negotiation.

Do you have the skills to work well in a team?

My mother had problems processing that information and I tried to speak slowly, explain the most important parts in Hokkien rather English. I don't think it was a language barrier issue, my mother just couldn't get her head around the fact that a rich, successful, intelligent businessman could have such poor social skills and he suffered from listening comprehension failure at the best of times. I could tell from the look on her face that she was terribly confused, so she asked me, "maybe this guy Len is very inexperienced, like he doesn't know what he is doing because he is very young?" And I had to tell her no, Len is very experienced in the world of business and is at least 10 years older than me (mind you, I'm going to be 43 this year). And so she then suggested, "aah, maybe then it is because he is not very highly educated, maybe he is not the kind to have gone to university?" I then had to point out to her that I knew Len was educated in Harvard and that's one of the top universities in the world - so Len was definitely extremely intelligent but of course, you can be both intelligent and have very poor social skills at the same time. Gosh, I remember I had this classmate in VJC, let's just call him Chung. He was a humanities scholar who was super intelligent and had straight As for every single test or exam he took - yet he was a social pariah with no friends, he didn't know how to have simple basic conversations and make small talk. He had body odour, bad breath and made zero effort with his appearances - if social skills was a subject, then he would have had nothing but Fs. Of course he aced his A levels and went onto a top American university to do his degree on a full scholarship, but the last I heard of him was that he got so badly bullied in the army that he had a major mental breakdown. Poor Chung, but there are probably loads of people like him out there.

It is clear that people like my mother equate intelligence or grades to social skills but we know that is clearly not the case. Heck, when I told my mother that I am clearly autistic, she said, "that's impossible, you were a scholar, you went to a good university. You're not stupid." There are people like Chung who are super intelligent but have the charms of a dirty dustbin in a public toilet, then there are others who may not have done much with their formal education but are extremely good with people and have managed to develop excellent social skills over the years. You see, my mother would assume that the students who are have great results would go to good schools where they would mix with other 'good' kids and that processes continues throughout your education process - so if you gain yourself a place in a university like Harvard, then you would spend three years in an environment surrounded by the smartest people in the world and that somehow, that experience would enrich you and infuse you with great social skills as a result. Except of course, it is not so simple: the fact is students who go to university usually have a very packed schedule but there isn't a course called 'Social Skills 101'. Sure, the university would recognize that social skills are important but at the same time, they are not responsible for teaching you those social skills. And let's face it, if you show up at university like Chung with little or no social skills, don't expect them to deliver a miracle and make fixing your situation their number one priority. Some students may develop and improve their social skills because they happen to be in a conducive environment whilst at university, but it is usually down to the individual whether or not they develop this aspect of their skills. It is not something that would just automatically happen just because you spend three or four years doing a degree at university.

Allow me to use an analogy to make this point - some students do learn how to cook at university if they are living away from home. Eating out for every single meal is expensive and you can't live on junk food like crisps and ice cream all the time, besides cooking can be great fun and a social activity because food can bring people together. I started cooking when I was university because I missed the food from Singapore but couldn't find any decent restaurants in London or Paris that truly replicated the Asian flavours from my childhood. As a result, some students do become really quite good cooks by the time they finish their degree but not all of them do so - some actually do eat crap for the entire duration of their degree. Oh I had this friend Jerry who would buy these loaves of white bread and make ham sandwiches, like literally: it was just white bread and ham. I suppose those plain ham sandwiches would be alright for a quick breakfast but he was eating these for all three meals a day because he didn't know how to cook a proper hot meal. Sometimes he would go out for dinner and get a decent meal, but most of the time he just lived on these ham sandwiches. Now I can assure you that Jerry is an extremely intelligent man who did a degree in engineering and went on to have a very successful career in engineering. But he just never learnt how to cook - Jerry didn't care if the sandwiches were bland and not tasty; no one forced him to do so and even though he knew that he wasn't having a balanced diet living on those ham sandwiches, there simply wasn't anyone to force him to change his ways. Likewise, we all knew that something was desperately wrong with Chung but there just wasn't anyone willing to step in and do something to help Chung's situation.

Oh I have encountered a lot more people like Chung when I was at university and I did nothing to try to help them. The fact is when we see someone like Chung, most of us simply take a step back and prefer not to intervene. It is not our place to try to solve his problems or provide a solution for him - I would have thought that his parents would probably have been the people who should have done something about the situation for Chung but I suspect they are probably just as clueless as him and that's why Chung is the way he is. Besides, I was just another university student with enough problems of my own - I was not prepared to try to force my help onto someone who wasn't even asking for help. Even if I did offer my help, you know the saying: you can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink. It is quite pointless trying to help someone who doesn't even want your help (even if he may need it badly). Instead I did some charity work whilst I was a student - at least that way I knew I was helping people who were more than happy to accept my help by volunteering at a charity. So if one isn't going to automatically pick up social skills by going to university, if it simply isn't a part of our formal education, then how do we learn these vital social skills then? Who can we learn it from if there isn't anyone kind enough to have helped us learn those social skills? My mother assumed that this was something that would automatically happen at university, but I beg to differ. You don't need a degree to figure out what good social skills are.

But wait - maybe my mother is right, yes guys this is a rare moment when I admit my mother may have a valid point, so do hear me out. I am old enough to remember the introduction of the internet in the 1990s, when we got our first modems and first got online and started surfing (albeit at painfully slow dial-up speeds). At that point, many people thought, oh we need to go for courses to learn how to use this internet thing or at least perhaps buy a book to read up about it. But many smarter people didn't attend a single lesson on how to use the internet - they just spoke to their friends and more or less just figured it out for themselves. That's exactly what highly intelligent people do - when we have a problem, we would first try to solve it ourselves rather than just wait for someone else to come along and give us a solution. When we have a challenge, we grab the bull by its horns and deal with it rather than wait for someone else to come along and tell us what to do. Likewise when we got these smart phones and tablets - many people thought woah this looks complicated, how do I use it? I need a user manual or even a course. I even remember stumbling upon a book - like literally, a book in bookstore back in the day - which taught people how to use Facebook. It beggars belief that anyone would ever spend money on a book like that these days but that book did exist. But the bottom line is that naturally intelligent people are often very good at figuring out most of their own problems or at least they will know where to look for the right solutions.

On the other hand, stupid people are usually stunned into inaction by fear and a lack of confidence. Let me give you a classic example from back in the early 1990s - I was trying to get my parents to use a computer mouse and they couldn't understand the concept of a double click. So I tried everything: I demonstrated how to double click, I explained in English, Mandarin and Hokkien. I even put the mouse in their hands and guided them through the motions - but my mother kept saying, "but what if I damage the mouse thing if I don't press it properly?" She was so nervous about having to learn how to double click that she ended up saying that she wasn't feeling well and had to go lie down. Now I'm not sure if the experience had stressed her out so much that she genuinely developed a headache or if she was just making an excuse to get away from the situation but this is exactly what stupid people do when they encounter something seemingly difficult or challenging that they have to learn - well, they don't. That's why my mother still can't double click today (well, like many older people her age, she's simply computer illiterate) nor has she developed much social skills - add that to a long list of things she has failed to learn. Hence it isn't completely unreasonable for her to assume that if Len is so incredibly smart enough to make it to a great university like Harvard and become the boss of a highly successful company, then surely he must be smart enough to figure this whole area of life called 'social skills'. Are people like Len and Chung intelligent? Oh undoubtedly, they are a lot smarter than me. But why haven't they dealt with this aspect of life called 'social skills' if they are so darn intelligent then? Well, I think I may have an answer to this question.

Last year I went to a Thai restaurant with my friends and I spoke a few words of Thai with the staff there. So one of my British friends asked me if I spoke Thai - he knows I speak several languages but he just wasn't sure if Thai was one of them. I said no, I don't claim to speak Thai, no more than the basics anyway. He then asked why I didn't speak Thai, given that I am from South-East Asia: I then explained that I have no real need for Thai. Thai wasn't spoken in Singapore, I don't do business with clients in Thailand, I've only been there twice in my entire life, I have no Thai friends in London and in short, I don't see the need to learn Thai whereas there are other languages that I do need more urgently like Spanish, Italian and German which I do have a lot more use for. In principle, if I decided to learn Thai - I probably could pick up the basics and make some progress quite quickly, at least with conversational Thai. I remember learning some in 2011 when I was last in Bangkok for a business trip and really enjoyed it - unfortunately that was quite some time ago and I can't remember much of it today. So my guess is that people like Len and Chung could probably make an effort to try to sort out their social skills if they really wanted to, but just like my relationship with the Thai language, they feel that this just isn't important enough for them to spend the time, effort and money on - that this is one particular skill that they don't really need to get by in life. If there's nobody in their lives telling them, "there's a problem - you must improve your social skills urgently", then they may be oblivious to the situation and thus feel no pressure to do anything about it. It's not that they're too stupid to resolve the situation; they're just not convinced at all they need to find a solution - the same way I've not really bothered to learn Thai and have instead focused on other foreign languages. 

This does raise an interesting question - I was going to visit Thailand three years ago because an old friend had moved there and was working in a very nice resort, I was going to stay with him there whilst exploring an interesting part of Thailand I had never visited before. That trip fell through because my friend quit his job, he didn't get along with the owner of the resort and he left Thailand before I could get myself organized for that trip. Shame but such is life. I was planning quite an epic trip through that part of Thailand, starting in Bangkok and working my way south overland until I arrived at the resort - of course, that would involve me learning Thai as well since I would then have a very good reason to need to speak some Thai if I were to make that trip. Without that trip happening, I had no reason or motivation to learn Thai. So hypothetically speaking, let's give Chung the motivation he needs to improve his social skills - let's imagine if he meets a wonderful woman whom he totally falls in love with - she is smart, beautiful, witty, confident, successful and most importantly, she is also single. Chung is pretty desperate to get her attention, that's when he's smart enough to realize that she isn't going to be easily impressed with his job title or how much money he has or where he has done his degree, it is time for some good old fashioned romance if he wants to even get to talk to her. Someone like Chung is definitely smart enough to do all the research he needs without much help through the internet - oh the information has always been out there, it's just that Chung never really had the motivation to look for that information until now, that he suddenly has a need for it. That is of course, we're assuming that Chung has the balls to go woo that beautiful woman he has fallen in love with rather than just give up and say, "I'm afraid she would never like a guy like me, look at her - she is just so way out of my league." But that's another debate for another day, at least we have now given him the right motivation.

This would boil down to whether or not people like Len and Chung are punished or penalized for their poor social skills in the working world when it matters the most, or if they simply get away with it. There is no straight forward answer to that question of course as it would depend entirely on their personal circumstances as to what kind of jobs they have, what kind of role they play in their companies, what kind of special skills they bring to the table, whom they have to deal with at work and what their colleagues are like etc.  So it could be the case that they find themselves a niche where they can be totally brilliant at what they do, make a lot of money and still require minimal social skills - that's entirely plausible of course and I think that's exactly what has happened with Len. Perhaps a more conventional approach to the issue would involve a discussion about how children should learn how to interact with their peers through fun and games, how we should enroll children in team sports like basketball or football to teach them how to work as a team, but I believe that motivation is really the key. After all, we accept that times have changed - kids today are far more likely to spend hours on their smart phones using social media rather than out playing games and climbing trees in the park with their friends. So if people like Len and Chung are generally not punished or penalized for having poor social skills, if nobody is willing to discriminate against those like them - then it really stops being a problem and starts becoming the norm. Our choices in life about what skills we acquire are pretty much shaped by our surroundings - allow me to give you a simple example.

In 2015, I visited Brunei and the most interesting place to visit in the capital Bandar Seri Begawan is the Kampong Ayer ('water village') where there is a huge community of people living in houses built on stilts over the Brunei River that runs through the city. I had the chance to talk to some of the locals there who were very friendly and I noticed a bunch of kids, some as young as 4 or 5 years old playing on their own very close to the water with no supervision at all. I asked the local what if one of them fell into the water, weren't the parents worried about the dangers? He smiled and assured me that living by the water is a way of life here, so the parents make sure that the kids know how to swim from a very young age. Hence even if a child were to fall into the water, it was no big deal as the children would know how to swim. He also explained that there was no alternative, if you're surrounded by water in the village, you have to learn how to swim or move inland if you couldn't! This local man was not originally from Kampong Ayer - he was from another small village called Labi which was inland. The children in his village were not particularly good at swimming but there was no real need for them to learn; there simply wasn't the imminent danger of children drowning if they accidentally fell into the water. Thus we have seen how the people of Brunei have learnt to adapt to their surroundings - the incentive to teach your kids how to swim in the Kampong Ayer was to make sure they stay alive, that's a pretty big motivation to teach them how to swim! Remove that motivation by going to a village inland and suddenly the parents there are not that bothered.

So it was logical that the kids who lived in Kampong Ayer were very good swimmers whilst the kids who grew up in Kampong Labi were not - this had very little to do with the children's natural physical ability or talent for swimming but whether there was an imminent risk of drowning if you accidentally fell into the water. The kids in Kampong Labi weren't any worse of if they didn't know how to swim or if they were poor swimmers because they were not exposed to that danger. So you could say that if Len and Chung worked in an environment where being sociable, charming and likable are not prerequisites for success, then who are we to judge them for their lack of social skills then? I think that as human beings, we're pretty apt at identifying and prioritizing the skills we need for our survival - hence if you live by the river (or in the case of Kampong Ayer, literally above the river), then you adapt by becoming very good swimmers. If you live high up in the mountains (say in the Andes or the Himalayas) then your lungs adapt to help you breathe normally despite the fact that the air is so thin and has a lot less oxygen in it. But these adaptations go way beyond physical acts like learning to swim or changing the way we breathe and use oxygen, they equally apply to social and mental skills. There is this amazing multilingual kid in Cambodia who speaks an stunning array of foreign languages despite having little formal education (please see the video below) - his motivation is to make more money by selling more souvenirs to foreign tourists so he can help this family who are living in poverty. That child is absolutely amazing but that's what many of us are capable of when we are forced by our circumstances to adapt and learn - smart people are able to do this a lot faster!

So do people like Len and Chung deserve the benefit of the doubt, that their circumstances so far have yet to require them to develop excellent social skills? Mind you, it has been many years since I met Chung - I remember I last met him in 1996 in Singapore when I ran into him at an MRT station. That was a good 23 years ago, who knows, circumstances may have forced him to evolve and adapt since; maybe he did meet the girl of his dreams and was forced to develop excellent social skills in order to woo her. Or he may be the same socially awkward nerdy geek today. Oh frustratingly, I cannot remember his surname (or how his name is spelled) - otherwise I would love to look him up on the internet and see how he is doing today. I wonder what he would be sharing on social media. I'm sure he'll be reasonably successful of course, after all, don't forget we're dealing with an extremely intelligent man here. Some of us were lucky enough to have parents, siblings or other family friends to have nurtured us in a way to inculcate excellent social skills when we were kids, others have been compelled by their circumstances develop their social skills later on in their lives - then of course, there are those who would love to develop their social skills but don't know how to do so. I suspect these people probably need a bit of help - after all, haven't we all had a frustrating moment at our computers when we don't quite know how to solve a problem, then we call for a friend who has much better IT skills than us to teach us what to do? Sometimes we have the luxury of that kind friend who can help us out of a fix - other times, life is cruel and we simply can't get the help we need to easily solve our problems. In life, you get the hand you are dealt and thus all we can do is make the best of it.

I would like to finish by talking about this Indian guy I know through work - let's call him Arjun (not his real name, but a typical Indian name). Despite the fact that Arjun is highly intelligent, he is  probably quite autistic, lacking in any real social skills. Trust me, I'm autistic - it takes one to know one. He's a highly respected expert in his field but good grief, I remember going for lunch with him once and he talked at me throughout the meal - I was quite happily eating away as the food was great but goodness me, he was not having a conversation with me. The art of conversation was lost on him - no, he was speed talking at me, telling me all about what he thinks, what he wants in life, what he likes without once asking me, "so Alex, what about you? What do you think?" He thinks I'm his good friend but he knows so little about me (yet I know everything about him - go figure). Nonetheless, Arjun has a beautiful wife from India and two children - the fact that he is highly educated, has a good job and earns a lot of money makes him a very good catch for some of the women back in India looking to escape poverty. They wouldn't care if he is very fat and autistic, as long as he is rich. It is perfectly acceptable and common in his culture to get a traditional arranged marriage - so when he was ready, his parents merely went shopping for a bride for Arjun and look, I don't want to be disrespectful to his culture and his marriage. He seems perfectly happy with the state of his marriage and family life and who are we to judge him for having an arranged marriage like that? The fact is Arjun is doing perfectly well in life despite having rather poor social skills - he has a good job, he is earning a lot of money, he is married with children and most importantly, he does seem genuinely happy with the way things are and thus has little motivation to have to address the situation with his social skills. So if Len and Chung somehow find themselves in the same situation as Arjun, then who are we to demand that they change?

So there you go, that's it from me on this topic. What do you think? Who taught you your social skills that you find most useful in life - your parents? Your older siblings? Your classmates and friends? Or did you pretty much just figure it all out for yourself? Have you ever met people like Len, Chung or Arjun who are highly intelligent and successful but seem to have very poor social skills at the same time? What do you think about people like that? Have you ever had to work with someone like that? Do we innately develop social skills if our circumstances compels us to do so, or is this something we really need help with? Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts on the issue - many thanks for reading!