By Brandon Nguyen

I read Siddhartha and a big takeaway I got from it was the lesson of “Always assume someone else knows something that you don’t.”

The biggest benefit of following this rule in your life is that it establishes mutual respect among your peers and everyone around you. Everyone started from different points in life, moves at different speeds, and has different goals. All of us have different visions on what is utopia and values. With our country so politically polarized as it is now, I believe establishing mutual respect is the first step towards reunifying.

In the story, Siddhartha pays close attention to a ferryman and absorbs the ferryman’s perspective on the river and learns that a river serves as a path to enlightenment. No one’s two stories are the same and the willingness to listen to other’s ideas is always progress.

How I applied this to my own life was being more open to my peers. My mindset on school was always your grade’s are your first priority; if your grades aren’t in good shape drop your friends, sleep, etc and whip yourself into shape. I would sometimes berate my peers when they were shocked at my score and told them, they weren’t putting in the work.

However, as I’ve decided to listen more and apply this lesson, I realized I came off as condescending and forceful. I had all the best intentions, but not everyone has the same living conditions that make it as easy or the same aspirations and have another talent in a different area.

Ultimately, while my priorities were grades, others priorities might have been sports, knitting, writing, technology, etc. As I started to realize, we need people different from us. We need different values and specialties to function as a society and forcing my world view did nothing good.

Would I prefer if everyone was like me?

We all have our ups and lows. We can never assume the person next to us has never had it bad or necessarily the person more successful than us worked harder. But what we can do is learn and having the humility to admit that even someone with lower grades might know more than you, is a powerful thing.