The Man in Kowloon Park

It was the end of February, and nobody had told me Hong Kong had a winter.

I had been in the city for four or five days by then, and I was not coping particularly well. Not with the cold I had not packed for. Not with the bristling, oscillating energy of the place—a frequency I could feel moving through my nervous system day and (unfortunately) night but could not tune out or settle into. Not with the absence of somewhere to sit with a decent coffee, which sounds trivial until you understand that for someone far from home, a familiar cup of something warm is not a luxury. It is an anchor.

I had been calling home. I made expensive calls from wherever I could find a connection, lasting longer than they needed to. My partner wondered why I went. I now did the same, as things weren't really working out between me and this fascinating but utterly alien megacity. I was also, by that Saturday morning, profoundly sleep-deprived and quietly homesick in a city that did not care about any of that.

I went to Kowloon Park because it was large and green and close to the water, and I needed to be somewhere that did not vibrate.

The park was full of families. Large families that appeared to come from India and Bangladesh, mostly, spread across the grass with food and children. The particular ease of people who have found, in the middle of a dense city, a few hours of something resembling ordinary life. The harbour was somewhere nearby. It was just sunny enough that staying in the warmth made perfect sense.

I was walking, not quite aimlessly, when the man approached. He was calm and friendly in the way of someone who has done this many times. He had a photograph—a guru of some kind, I think, though the details have softened with time. He spoke to me for a few minutes. Was interested to hear if I was a father. It did not take much to figure out I was missing home.

He was right. Of course he was right. I had spent four days and more money than I should have on phone calls trying to bridge a distance that phone calls cannot bridge. I was standing in a park full of families on a Saturday morning, watching other people be near the people they loved, and I was alone and cold and had not slept properly in nearly a week.

Who could say no to a ritual that might make good things happen to the people you love?

He led me through some movements. Simple, deliberate, the kind of thing that requires just enough concentration to quiet the analytical mind without demanding anything from it. At a certain point, the movement involved placing something—an imaginary object, cupped in my left hand — into his outstretched palm.

This ritual was repeated several times. And then he asked for money to be included in that motion. And I gave it to him. Some local notes that I estimated at roughly ten euros. Without significant resistance. Without the kind of internal negotiation I would normally apply to a stranger asking for money in a park.

I gave it to him, and then I stood there for a moment understanding exactly what had just happened. Not with anger. Not with embarrassment. With something closer to professional admiration. I knew what priming was. I had read Cialdini. I understood commitment and consistency — the deep human instinct to behave in ways that align with what we have already done, to be the person our previous actions suggest we are.

And I had placed something in his hand. A gesture of giving, performed voluntarily, with my full physical participation. My body had already completed the transaction before my wallet was involved. The money was almost a formality — the conscious mind catching up with a commitment the nervous system had already made.

He had not tricked me. He had walked me, step by careful step, to a place I arrived at entirely of my own volition. I wasn't sad about the ten euros. I was, if anything, impressed. And I have never quite forgotten the feeling of watching myself do something rather atypical and still being unable to stop—the gap between knowing the mechanism and being subject to it anyway.

The NDA is not a ritual in a park. Nobody is being manipulated. The information shared under an NDA is real, the relationship is professional, and the commitment being made is entirely voluntary and mutually beneficial.

But the psychology is the same.

When you ask a counterparty to sign an NDA before sharing sensitive project information, you are doing something more significant than protecting your data. You are inviting them to make a small, conscious, deliberate commitment to the seriousness of the conversation. They pick up a pen. They read a document. They sign their name.

That signature is not just a legal instrument. It is a gesture of giving—a small imaginary object placed in an outstretched hand. And the person who has made that gesture is, measurably and consistently, more likely to make the next one.

Not because they have been manipulated. Because they have told themselves, through their action, that this is a relationship worth committing to. And people act in accordance with what they have told themselves.

One signature. The first one. The one that makes the second one possible.

The man in Kowloon Park understood this better than most sales training programs ever will.

And hey, perhaps the ritual worked. What do we know, right? It might have been ten euros well spent.