--- title: "Foreword by Andy Hwang - Empathy is all you need" description: "Read the foreword by Andy Hwang for 'Empathy is all you need'. Insights on empathy in business and life." keywords: "Andy Hwang, foreword, empathy in business, infinite game" url: "https://empathyisallyouneed.com/foreword" language: "en" --- # Foreword By Andy Hwang Start Listening 0:00 Years ago, I participated in a study abroad program in China to learn Mandarin. One day, I was feeling adventurous and decided to call a neighborhood noodle restaurant for lunch delivery to my apartment. I’ll never forget what happened next. “What time will you be done eating?” “Excuse me?” I asked, thinking that I had misheard the owner. “What time will you be done eating?” she asked again. “Why does it matter?” I asked, slightly confused. “I need to know what time you’ll finish eating, so that I can pick up your bowl and chopsticks.” That made absolutely no sense to me, as the thought of having a person wait around until I was done eating couldn’t be cheaper than simply giving me a disposable bowl and utensils. Could it? This was one of my earliest lessons in empathy - learning how to see situations from another person’s perspective. As someone who had grown up in California, I was so ignorant to think that a shop owner halfway around the world would see the situation from the same point of view\! While working at Google and Facebook over the last decade, I’ve had the privilege of visiting hundreds of small businesses across the US and Asia to help them with online marketing. While many of these businesses wanted one of three things - to increase revenue, lower costs, or save time - how to help them achieve these objectives required careful listening and having empathy for their challenges. Fast forward to 2022. When I first met Jatin, his startup Konigle was focused on helping online businesses with pricing. As I shared my lessons working with small businesses over several conversations with Jatin, I saw him change his mindset from helping customers with one part of their business to fully stepping into their shoes and imagining how to transform their operations starting from Day 1. All of this was possible because Jatin increasingly used empathy as a criteria for his decision-making — from how he interacted with customers to hiring team members who would always go the extra mile to solve their pain points, even if it was outside “business hours.” In a world that is increasingly focused and at times obsessed on cutting costs and automating processes, being able to empathize with others and walk a mile in their shoes is becoming a rarity. Simon Sinek’s book _The Infinite Game_ eloquently proclaims that in a transactional society, everyone is focused on “winning.” When this happens, it’s often that no winner emerges \(as we see through the prisoner’s dilemma\). In an infinite game, in contrast, where we surround ourselves with trusted long-term players, the goal is not to win at the expense of others, because then the game ends. We only desire to continue playing the game, again and again. This requires seeing the world from another’s perspective and finding common ground with others so we can win together. In the infinite game, we always leave something on the table for the other players, so that everyone is incentivized to continue the game together. My hope as you read this book is to immerse yourself in the rich stories across cultures and time periods, and see how the thread of empathy is what ties us together as humans. By choosing to focus on the 99.9% we have in common with others \(as measured by our DNA\), rather than our differences, we’ll be in a far stronger position to empathize with others and collectively move forward together as a society. Andy Hwang General Partner, Wavemaker Partners Singapore \(2024\) ### Further Exploration * [The Infinite Game](https://simonsinek.com/books/the-infinite-game/) \- By Simon Sinek \(Book\). * [Andy Hwang's LinkedIn Profile](https://sg.linkedin.com/in/andyhwang) \- General Partner at Wavemaker Partners \(Profile\). [← Wife is always right](/wife-is-always-right) [Introduction →](/introduction)