Yesterday I flew back to Phnom Penh from a one day trip to Singapore. Next to me sat Abhinav, an Indian finance manager of Mondelez. Mondelez is at the moment the largest company in the confectionery industry. Kraft and Cadbury joined forces in 2012, and this giant rose up. Apparently with a lot of internal struggles if I understood it well from Abhinav.
But why did I happen to sit next to someone who gave me a lot of inside information about the biscuit and chocolate industry? The industry that I am following so closely at the moment because of the important fact that cacao is one of my two main businesses. Why didn’t I end up with someone with a far lesser impact on my thoughts, like a partying student or a soccer fan?
In the morning, I met up with Niko, an even more challenging guy – in this case with a French-Cambodian background – who found me online a few days before because the world of cacao also drives him. He works in Singapore, and he approached me exactly around the time that I had to be in this city state. We immediately decided to plan a coffee break in both our busy schedules. The coffee break became two hours because both of us couldn’t stop talking, interrupting and motivating each other. We were completely on the same wavelength. Our ideas about politics, business and humanity, were matching perfectly. We were in a harmonious flow. He wants to change Cambodia, my new home country and wants to use cacao as the tool. Do I need to say more? I love it when I have the privilege to meet people like him and Abhinav; people who are more intelligent than me; people who can see things from different angles and who are capable of constantly switching between those perspectives. But why does a person like Niko finds me, at a moment that we have one morning and one morning only to meet up physically?
I don’t believe in coincidences and Niko either. He told me how his mother -fled from the Khmer Rouge regime in the seventies- taught him not to accept life as it is. She hates the line “C’est la vie”. Life is not prefab. Life is made by yourself. You are the designer of your destiny. I fully agree. When I meet persons like Abhinav and Niko, it is not meant to be, it has us who create the right circumstances. I genuinely believe in magnetism. We are always radiating our energies around us. And these energies are picked up by others. With some people you click. Then you are definitely vibrating your energies in harmony. With others, it doesn’t match, and your energies are conflicting or simply not connecting. But there are always persons that are very strongly attracted to you and vice versa. I am now not only talking about physical attraction but more about mental and emotional attraction.
Of course you run into persons all the time with whom you have nothing in common or who are obstructing your goals and your lifepath. Life is not destined. Life is chaos and in this chaos people can cross your path who are not in your benefit or you not in theirs. But when you truly feel attracted to someone, because this person has something to offer to you, or you yourself can have a tremendous positive influence on somebody’s ideas or circumstances, life can work like a magnet to my believe. And it might work like the biggest magnet on earth, like a giant force of nature when both parties have equally something valuable to share. Then distance, age, culture doesn’t count. Well, at least they play such a minor role that they can’t prevent you from meeting these people.
With Niko I have a lot in common and we both could end up as business partners. From Abhinav I learned a lot about the mind boggling changes that take place in India and will put this ernormous country on the map as the number one economy one or two decades from now. I also got a lot of inside information about the problems of cacao delivery in Ghana which could have a shock effect on the prices of the brown gold.
With Niko I shook hands and afterwards exchanged Line messages. We just paved the first part of our path. With Abhinav I shook hands knowing I would probably not see him again. His energy is on the way to the next impact. Life might be a chaos. But boy, how I appreciate and enjoy the patterns and connections in this chaos.
(picture from crystal-life.com )
Stefan Struik 