Stephen King, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, what do these household names have in common? They are all famous, successful people in their fields of work. Though many times we envy at their inborn talent, we often miss and overlooked the mentors, the people who teach everything they know to them and made them who they are today. I believe that yes, being successful requires the ability to be humble enough to learn from others.

Now, personally, I have a lot of experience on this subject. Life has thrown a lot of obstacles at me, and being a stubborn 16 year old teenager, I usually charge in blindly into problems without consulting anyone. Sometimes I succeed, but most of the time I crash and burn in a miserable and pathetic way. I remember a specific experience on this topic. It was my sophomore year, and I was at my first MUN conference. I was kind of nervous. I guess it was kind of obvious because one of my senior friends saw me and ask “Dude, are you nervous, bro?”
“Yeah” I replied “Kind of.”
“I’ll send Sam here; at the last conference, he completely destroyed his opponents ruthlessly. I’m sure he’ll give you some good advice.” He smiled and left.
Oh man… I thought, this Sam person sounds like a quite the professional. In my head, I began to picture him, tall, with striking blue eyes that could pierce and intimidate the other delegates. He probably would have a striking and handsome look to seduce the ladies too.
After waiting for a couple of minutes, Sam arrived. I stared at him blankly and laughed. Turns out, he’s this puny little freshman. I told myself that I am not that desperate to take advice from a freshman. All my worries were replaced by laughter. I slowly turned and walked away to the room of my conference, still chuckling at this amusing turn of event. As I walked in and sat down in my assigned seat, I turned and observed my opponents. Hmmm, China seems nice; Russia doesn’t look like a threat; oh, Australia looks cute! Finally, the competition began, and I smiled to myself cockily, “I got this” and high five myself. People stared at me, but I didn’t care, I was going to wipe the floor with these people. But after 10 minutes into the conference, I began to realize how wrong I was. It was like some switch was flipped because all of these nice, innocuous delegates become monsters, and I was getting massacred be them. They shot down all my contentions. They destroy my points. In the end, I just gave up. I fell asleep somewhere in the middle and woke up to the sound of people leaving. I wearily dragged my feet out the door, winced at the shining sun, and yawned. Uncannily, Sam saw me and ran over “I heard you got your butt kicked.” He said with a smirk
“Yeah,” I replied “those kids are crazy… and I thought they look innocent.”
“Well, I was going to warn you that these kids are in the advance group… but you just laughed in my face and left.”
“Sorry,” I said apologetically “my bad.”
Even though I got massacred, I learned a very important lesson. In order to be achieved anything; one must humble themselves and learn from the wiser ones, even if that wiser one is a freshman.