Ryan Bansal shares about how it’s better to ask questions than make assumptions.
The phrase “opposites attract” never made much sense to me. A good friend of mine shares the same Indian culture, crushing academic pressure and dream of a future in tech. With that much overlap, we were bound to get along. One day at school, I showed him the wax creations I’d started making, little three-dimensional figures. He barely looked at them. “That’s random,” he said. “What’s the point of making candles?”
I go to high school in Silicon Valley, where everyone seems to be chasing the same future: the right grades, the right college and the right job at one of the tech campuses we drive past. Every interest is supposed to point toward that. Making candles doesn’t fit the picture. Another friend was the opposite of who I was supposed to click with.
He wants to be a fighter pilot and climbs mountains; I’m more comfortable at a desk, working through equations or pouring wax into molds. But maybe that distance helped. He had no checklist for who I was supposed to be. So, when I told him about the wax figures, he just wanted to know why. It’s one of the only things that fully quiets my mind. As the glitter flashes through the silky stream of wax pouring into the molds, the rest of the world fades away. And when it’s done, I’m holding something that’s wholly mine, something I can use, something I can learn from and make better next time.
He sat with that for a second. Then he smiled. “Huh. That’s kind of why I climb, honestly. It’s the only thing that gets me out of my head. You just found a way to do it without leaving the ground.”