The iPhone may be designed in California but it's the perfect example of what we can build when we work together. It may be hard to see the interconnectedness of all things until you look under the screen and realise that all the raw materials and components that make up the iPhone come from all over the planet — There's chips being made in Taiwan that are then shipped to Japan for assembly, while there's also miners in Chile digging for the copper that's used to create the wires that line your phone.
You can break down the chain of assembly of literally anything — ideas, shoes, novels, songs and even YOU can be broken down into a long line of inputs. Something I've said for years is 'everything is a remix of a remix' and I believe we should become more aware of how influenced we are from the world around us. All of your ideas and opinions are a mashup of the inputs you've received over your lifetime.
My own personal taste in clothes, music, movies etc. all comes from my experience growing up and being surrounded by both my mother and fathers interests. I probably wouldn't be designing clothes if I didn't have to help my Mum take photos of her own clothes for her eBay store. Perhaps, I also wouldn't be off on crazy adventures around the world if I didn't grow up playing my Dad's favourite video game Tomb Raider.
There's a great interview between Lex Fridman and Jeff Bezos where Bezos goes into detail explaining how he would've never been able to build Amazon if it weren't for pre-existing infrastructure. Without things like credit cards and the postal service Amazon would've never existed. He's now making it a priority to build the next wave of infrastructure for the next generation to iterate upon what he's managed to build.
Everything you see in this world is apart of a universal interconnected web of ideas, things and people. To think it's possible to go at this alone is ludicrous — countries need each other, couples need each other, friends need each other, companies need each other, we need each other.