I’ve been reading through former president Barack Obama’s autobiography after a recommendation from a good friend. It has been a fascinating read and I would fully recommend it, especially for anyone in leadership. I’ve been highlighting lots of different parts that have jumped out to me.

The quote I’ve included below was from his time when he was serving locally, way before the thought of being president was even an option in his head. This is what he said about connection and changing the narrative of different groups.

“But the simple, recurring insight they (roadtrips around America with his friends) offered stayed with me. As long as the residents of my Chicago district and districts downstate remained strangers to one another, I realized, our politics would never truly change. It would always be too easy for politicians to feed the stereotypes that pitted Black against white, immigrant against native-born, rural interests against those of cities. If, on the other hand, a campaign could somehow challenge America’s reigning political assumptions about how divided we were, well then just maybe it would be possible to build a new covenant between its citizens.“

I resonate with this so much.

Most of our lives are spent with people who are like us. Most of our jobs are spent with people with a similar level of education or skill. If we do interact with people who are different than us it is on the level of us being the ‘helper’ or ‘the person in need.’ Neither of those positions see us as equals, we are either above or below. That means we don’t think that we have anything in common with the people we are interacting with which reinforces the idea that we are or should be divided.

What would it truly look like to see a glimpse of what Obama was talking about here? How incredible would it be to see a world which truly understood this? How connected would that feel? How much less isolated would people and groups become.