How a 30-minute daily walk in China changed my views on nation-building.

I never appreciated or thought about nation-building when I lived in the US for 18 years.

But a daily walk in the heart of Shanghai changed all that. I walked on an oval path surrounded by towers all similar in size — none standing out.

Living in a developed nation for a lifetime makes one miss the journey of seeing things, orgs, and institutions get built out. Seeing the growing pains of building institutions and building large infrastructure is where real learnings happen for a generation of people.

This walk gave me a glimpse of Nation Building in full swing:

In very developed nations the largest buildings are less relevant

I saw the world’s 2nd largest building — The Shanghai Tower each day.

On the first day, I was thrilled to see it. But after a while, it started to blend in with the rest of the towers which were only slightly shorter than the rest.

It lost its significance fast — Countries that are serious about nation-building will never be happy with just a great piece of infrastructure but will always be gunning to make something better as there is always more work to be done.

New buildings were built in a jiffy

Each week I saw a new building, entertainment venue, or metro station come up or go through renovation.

It didn’t look like they had massive resources or manpower doing the work. There were very few people which was surprising as the city had 25 million + folks. The projects came up fast because of tremendous project management skills, collaboration, and long-term planning.

Doing projects constantly gives a generation of people to constantly improve the means of doing the project — this can be applied to many other areas too.

Adopting tech properly can turn a construction site into a Tesla Factory

There were surveillance cameras in every corner of project sites.

These AI analytics-enabled cameras can track workflow when building something in real-time. No manual plan is needed and the sequence of steps needed updates as the camera can monitor tasks in real-time.

This method is just like how Tesla changes process’s on the fly to increase production. The opportunity to build allows better usage of technology that leads to more improvement.

My appreciation of seeing projects come up grew 10X after this experience. The real growth of individuals happens in these kinds of surroundings.

This post was created with Typeshare