“First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”.
This is a famous quote straight out of my favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve recently been rereading it since Go Set a Watchman just came out. As I’m reading it, I’ve noticed the many times it shows one of our company values.
One of these times, Scout, a young girl, begins going to school and realizes that she dislikes her teacher. She states that she told Scout that her father had been teaching her to read “all wrong”. Scout also mentions that her teacher had attempted to give another student a quarter for lunch, when everyone knows that their family “don’t take nothing from nobody”.
Atticus, her father, sits her down and explains that Scout’s simply not seeing it through their eyes. Her teacher is new in town, and it was her first day teaching. She can’t be expected to know everything, and it’s difficult when a student already knows more than the rest of the class.
Atticus teaches his daughter that it’s important to step back and think about the other person point of view.
I struggled to understand the other person’s view when I became involved in student organizations. I was consistently upset about other people not putting in the same effort that I was in the projects we had to do. It took talking to the people and hearing them out to understand that there’s a lot of different reasons things like that could happen. School is busy, many people have jobs to help pay for college, and it’s difficult sometimes to get things done.
So, next time you’re unsure of why someone is acting in an odd way, or you don’t understand someone’s decisions, think about what Atticus would say and think from their point of view! Talk to them, understand where they’re coming from, and react after knowing the whole story.
