Interaction plays an important part in our lives. We interact with friends, colleagues, strangers and family members. Each interaction creates good and bad feelings in us and, most importantly, each interaction has social or business impact on us.

Since it is important to interact, how can we make each interaction efficient in our social and business lives?

We human beings are strange and unique creatures and we like to interact with people that we like. We always try to find common points with the people with whom we interact. Finding a common point is a good ice breaker when you meet a stranger.

Through my life experience, I have found that I like to interact with people that I get inspired by. A person that pushes me to think differently and helps to enhance my vision always manages to gain priority in my life. Interestingly, when I look back and think, I chose my friends and my best colleagues through this inspiration channel.

How can you inspire a person?

You may use your status in the community, such as the CEO of XXX, or your financial strength, such as being one of the thousand richest in the world, but this is not really influential in the long term. Given that status in the community and financial strength can be lost in a day, they are not really a permanent inspirational asset in a human being.

Is it a coincidence that many rich people are left alone when they suddenly become poor? Or that a retired Prime Minister or a high level business executive starts living an ordinary life?

I believe that a permanently inspirational character exists when you have a vision and continual viable ideas that you can share with people. I don’t mean that you have to be a scientist or an innovator; most importantly you have to have a strong ability to make good observations of people, understand developments in economics and politics or other types of social sciences, and implement these new ideas into people’s lives while taking into consideration the history and other aspects of your counterparty.

Easily said. But once you have all these skills, you are a candidate for a good leader, a mentor and a friend for everyone. I believe that acquiring these skills requires a tremendous amount of energy and motivation and a desire to update yourself constantly. A lot of people want to achieve this, but since it is long journey, many of us turn back while we are still quite close to the start.

When you inspire people, it is much easier to build trust. You don’t really have to work on building trust, since a person inspired by you will be much open to listening more to you and will be more willing to spend time with you.

And once the trust is built, it is very easy to do business with those people.

Instead of inspiring and building trust, if you want to jump to a conclusion (in business), it is very likely that you will fail. Even if you don’t, it will not be a very long term relationship.

A good leader or mentor should be able to inspire their subordinates with their vision and way of living—otherwise that leader is just an ordinary leader, and most likely he will be left alone once he gives up his status in the community. And a good friend should be able to show you new ways of looking at things while having a good time.

A lot of people are advising that you split your social and business circles, which I strongly oppose. Conversely, combine your social and business circles!

It will definitely create more synergy, as one plus one sometimes does not equal two. In addition, doing business within your social circle is a good test to see how much your friends are inspired by you.

All the best from Singapore.

Sukru Haskan
Twitter:@sukru_haskan