Things No One Else Can Teach Us

Things No One Else Can Teach Us Plot Summary

Introduction

Have you ever found yourself stuck in a situation that seemed impossible to escape? Perhaps you were trapped in a toxic relationship, a dead-end job, or simply caught in a cycle of negative thinking that kept you spinning in circles. We've all been there—moments when life feels like it's happening to us rather than for us. These are the times when our perspective becomes our prison. This book invites you on a journey of perspective shifting—a transformative approach to viewing life's challenges not as obstacles but as opportunities for growth. Through powerful personal stories and hard-earned wisdom, you'll discover how changing the lens through which you view your experiences can dramatically alter their impact on your life. You'll learn to appreciate the temporary nature of both pain and pleasure, find purpose in service to others, and embrace the journey rather than fixating on destinations. Most importantly, you'll develop the ability to see beyond immediate circumstances, finding beauty and meaning even in your darkest moments.

Chapter 1: Everything Is Temporary, So Appreciate What You Have

I was obsessed with success. After quitting my teaching job to pursue my creative career full-time, I found myself in Los Angeles, surrounded by palm trees, sunshine, and ambitious people. I was staying at my friend Lilly's place, watching her work tirelessly on her projects, starting her day before me and finishing long after. Her work ethic was intimidating, and I felt I needed to catch up. I forced myself to hit arbitrary daily writing goals: one thousand words, sixteen bars, five pages—anything with a finish line so I could feel I'd accomplished something. It wasn't inspiring; it felt more like eating vegetables because my parents wouldn't let me leave the table until I did. The pressure was taking a toll, and I found myself procrastinating more and more, even considering returning to teaching. During this time, I met a man named Boomerang. He wasn't directly involved in my creative pursuits—he worked in insurance or finance—but he was genuinely interested in my life and work. Whenever I had events, he would show up, front and center. He regularly reached out to check in, and though I was often too busy to reciprocate, he never took it personally. One cold January night, I contacted him last-minute to hang out since I was in his neighborhood. We spent less than an hour catching up before I had to prepare for an upcoming trip. He loved hearing my stories and asked questions that showed genuine interest. Despite enjoying our brief time together, I didn't prioritize our friendship. I was focused on surrounding myself with people who could directly serve my ambitions. Months later, I received devastating news: Boomerang had suddenly collapsed and passed away after a short stint in a coma. I was shocked to realize I'd never followed up with him after returning from my trip, despite promising to do so. The text exchange—his invitation to hang out and my unfulfilled promise to connect later—would be our last communication. This loss taught me a profound lesson about what truly matters in life. I had been so consumed with chasing success that I'd failed to appreciate the genuine connections right in front of me. Boomerang had given me the gift of unconditional friendship, expecting nothing in return, and I had taken it for granted. His death reminded me that everyone in our lives is temporary—including us—and this uncomfortable reality is actually a powerful lens for viewing relationships. Remembering that the people in our lives won't be here forever is the best motivation to treat them with care while they're still here. When we chase ambition, we focus on what we don't have and spend less time appreciating what we do have. The people we have won't always be here, so let's not deprive ourselves of their presence simply because we're caught up wanting more of something else.

Chapter 2: Service to Others Is the Greatest Service to Ourselves

Dharmendra is one of the biggest names in Bollywood history, and he's Punjabi—like my family. When I had a chance encounter with him at a film festival, I knew I had to take a photo to send to my parents, who grew up watching his movies. My mother's reaction surprised me: she was upset because she had wanted to see him at that same festival, but my father hadn't wanted to go. Inspired by my father's enthusiasm when I told him about the encounter, and feeling guilty for disappointing my mother, I decided to make something happen. I connected with the friend who had taken me to the event and begged him to help my parents meet Dharmendra. After some persistence, he arranged for us to visit Dharmendra's hotel suite. I tricked my parents into coming to the hotel separately—telling my mother I needed her to translate for a business meeting and telling my father I needed a ride home. When they discovered why they were really there, my father almost walked away, embarrassed by his casual attire. I had to insist: "Dad, this is happening, let's go!" In Dharmendra's suite, the star was warm and welcoming, offering my parents tea and showing genuine interest in their villages back home. We took pictures, and as we walked out of the hotel lobby, my father said something I never expected to hear from an immigrant father: "You made my dream come true." I didn't just hear what he said; I felt it in my chest. Seven years later, this remains the most memorable moment of my career, if not my life. I was two years into my full-time journey as an artist, still not making money and unsure if I could persist through tough times, until I helped my parents meet their hero. Hearing my father say those words reshaped my purpose and resolve. We all have a higher need to contribute to things and people beyond ourselves, but few of us act on that need. For me, meeting Dharmendra meant taking a cool picture, but for my parents who grew up in villages without electricity, there was nothing bigger. Giving this gift to them was also a gift to myself: it gave me perspective, gratitude, and a reminder of where I came from. I spend most of my life pursuing my ambitions, hoping milestones will somehow make me feel better about life's challenges, but they don't. Putting my personal priorities aside to make my parents happy provided a goal that was energizing and felt much better than anything I'd done to scratch a selfish itch. Doing for them encouraged me to continue doing for others, especially if I wanted to feel good about myself regularly.

Chapter 3: Focus on the Fun, Not Just the End Goal

When I started at university, I had no idea what I wanted to study. In high school, I had read that architects and computer programmers made good money, so maybe that? To me, university was just about keeping my parents happy and finding a job. My first year, my advisor recommended taking all my elective courses since I had no direction. That year was great—interesting classes and good grades. But by my second year, my social circle grew and my academic interest shrank. My A average turned to Bs and Cs, then to Cs and Ds by my third year as I started skipping classes regularly. One evening, while watching Boston Public with my sister, I blurted out, "Wow, it must be so cool to be a teacher." My sister replied, "Why don't you become one?" The idea had never crossed my mind. She recommended I talk to a friend who was working as an elementary school teacher. I visited him in his classroom, and he sold me on the entire lifestyle in an hour. "This job is so much fun. No two days are alike. The money's pretty good. If you don't like the classroom, just become a gym teacher. The hours aren't long. The benefits are great. You have plenty of time for a side hustle if you want." He spoke about helping a refugee student acclimate to Canadian society. I was in love. With this new goal, everything changed. I began attending classes regularly and tutorials. My fourth year was the first time I learned how to study—mapping chapters, making plans, reviewing regularly. I got As in all my classes—the same math-based programming classes I had struggled with the year before. Only one thing had changed: I had a purpose. When I discovered elementary education, my excitement in school was rekindled, which pushed me into action. Moreover, that discovery provided me with an opportunity to be a lifelong learner again. This has stuck with me through my journey: I made progress only after I decided my purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche said, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." We can debate forever about whether our purpose is given or chosen in life, but what matters is identifying what that purpose is. As we get older, it gets more difficult to find people who speak about anything with their eyes wide and full of life. I'm not promising that discovering your WHY will instantly energize you forever. Unpacking our purpose is a process. The prospect of becoming an educator got me back on track and allowed me to bear any challenge. Then my interests changed, and when my enthusiasm for teaching faded, I chased another purpose: becoming an artist. Our purpose can change, and that's okay. Our job is to know ourselves better every day so we can identify the WHY to better equip ourselves to deal with any HOW.

Chapter 4: Life Isn't Black and White, Embrace the Gray

When I was in my twenties, I made a best friend who became like a brother to me. He was passionate about art, took it seriously, and reinforced the importance of good work ethic. We'd go for walks, plot our future as artists, and work. He was my guardian angel who believed I was important. When he began to have conflicts with my other friends, I chose him. When his stories contradicted others, I chose him. I chose him every time, even when it didn't make sense. It wasn't that I wanted to believe him—I needed to. As we journeyed together in the art world, business got involved, and he borrowed money from me that I couldn't afford to give him. The time to repay came and went. His excuses were lame, full of holes, and increasingly unlikely. But my denial was bulletproof; reality could not pierce that armor. I was already in too deep; believing him gave me optimism, and optimism felt good. I ignored a lot of people's advice. Even when a friend showed me irrefutable proof of his lies, I still didn't believe it and had to ask him myself. I called him about the inconsistencies in his stories. He immediately hung up, and I never saw or heard from him again. I didn't think it was possible that a dude could break my heart, but he did. I trusted him, cared for him, gave him my time, love, attention, and energy, and he threw it away with lies, manipulation, and outright disrespect. I was mad at him for being a bad person, and even more mad at myself for not seeing the deception. I felt victimized and carried myself accordingly, looking for pity from anyone who would listen. I started to think of him as The Bad Guy, the guy who was selfish, manipulative, and weak. I, obviously, was The Good Guy, the innocent, trusting friend. As time went on and more details emerged about his pattern of behavior, I realized I wasn't the first person he had lied to, and I definitely wouldn't be the last. He had created a pyramid scheme for himself where he took money from one person to give to another—but all to keep himself afloat. When I looked closely at the situation, I had to take ownership as well. I wasn't The Good Guy all the time. I didn't do any due diligence on this new friend, and I'd rejected the advice and care of my other friends. I'd let my excitement about someone so supportive of my work get in the way of my judgment. I had been generous beyond my capacities partly because I liked how he made me feel. When I came to that realization, my resentment began to fade. It's convenient and lazy to label things as good and evil, people as The Bad Guy and The Good Guy. It doesn't require much understanding, just a firm judgment. But when we zoom in closer and examine the details, we realize that things aren't as black-and-white as we thought, and there's a lot of gray to explore. In the short term, I was hurt and betrayed, but in the long term, I found the opportunity to grow from the difficulties I faced. There is no absolute good and bad; everything is what we make of it. As we strive to understand more than we evaluate, we open up more possibilities for things to improve and unfold the way we want them to. This requires paying attention, allowing a situation to be complicated, and sorting through the details to find where all the magic is hiding.

Chapter 5: We Don't Own a Crystal Ball, So Stop Assuming

I had two uncles who passed away far too early in life. Both men, brothers to my mother, had similar factors surrounding their deaths but completely opposite journeys to get there. One had some very good luck, and the other, enormous loss and suffering. Before I was born, one of my mother's older brothers won $100,000 in the lottery, which stretched pretty far in the 1970s. He decided to move back to India to stretch those winnings even further. With a juicy bank account and generational land, he didn't have to work—and developed a dependent relationship with alcohol. Within a few years, he died of alcohol-related complications, leaving behind a wife and three boys, the youngest a newborn. My mother's other brother found his relationship with alcohol not after winning the lottery, but after his marriage turned sour. Following a bitter divorce, he quit his job and isolated himself from the family. Throughout my childhood, we'd receive drunken calls from him reminiscing on happier times. When he was married, he and his wife had lost their first and second children at birth. This grief intensified after his divorce, especially since he was estranged from his surviving children. Even as his alcoholism worsened and dementia kicked in, his adult children had no interest in seeing him. My mother visited him every day at the hospital. He would speak to her as if it were thirty years ago in the village in India, with no concept of the present. A year after moving to a nursing home near our house, he died. One brother wins the lottery and drinks himself to death; the other loses two children, then the rest of his family, and drinks himself to death. No one would have thought they'd have the same fate, given where they started. When my second uncle died, I thought I understood the lesson: We can't predict the future. But there was more to it. Years later, after I performed at the Southbank Centre in London, my mother's eldest brother took me to dinner. I asked him about my grandfather. "Ah, my father worked hard," he said, "and provided for me to get set up to start earning so I could support the family from here in London. Once I did, he stopped working, and passed away within a few years." When I asked how he died, he looked off into the distance and simply said, "Oh, he drank." Until that point, I hadn't updated my James Bond vision of my grandfather. I had heard he was in the military so assumed he had gone out to save the world and never came home. Unfortunately, this thread of alcoholism in my mother's family is nothing unique in the Punjabi community. Would things have been different if my uncle hadn't won the lottery? How many people ever think of the lottery as bad luck? Would things have been different if my other uncle hadn't lost two children or gotten divorced? We all have stories about something we think is bad news that turns out to be not so bad. And we definitely have stories about things we think are good news that don't turn out that way. We can't see the future, and that simple fact is why we can't get too excited or worried about a situation; we just have to let it play out. Both my uncles reacted to their circumstances with either an optimism or a pessimism that were both unhealthy in hindsight. Though we can't tell the future, we can pick up patterns. We can discover common threads in history to help us improve our present and future. Learning about my grandfather helped me see the pattern of alcoholism in the family, and that saved me from making some of those same mistakes. Sometimes, deciding our futures is the reason they turn out the way they do. If we think something is bad news, we can make it worse. On the flip side, thinking something is good news can also hurt us, because it may leave us with our guards down and encourage us to make decisions with more emotion than logic. The truth is, we don't know what will be good news or bad news in the end.

Chapter 6: Self-Pity Is Convenient but Unhealthy

I got a text message from a friend three time zones away asking if we could talk. When I called, he immediately dove into problems with his on-again, off-again girlfriend. He wanted me to help interpret text messages and motives behind her decisions. Having met her only once, I couldn't offer much insight into her mind. As he continued sharing stories and asking questions, it became clear he was frustrated and hurt and wanted to hear something to make him feel better. He wanted to hear things like: "She still loves you. You're too good for her. Give her another chance. She sounds toxic. If she's worth it, make the effort." But I didn't want to say just anything to pacify him, so I tried to listen and understand as much as I could. Most of my questions were answered with, "You don't understand..." followed by another story. The situation wasn't healthy, and he needed to focus on something better in his life. So I suggested he take a trip with his mom. "Bro, you just need to be around people who love you unconditionally, and who you can let your guard down around. Take your mom on a trip somewhere nice, sit on a beach, put your head in her lap, and just cry this out." Although he had the money to make this happen, he replied, "Bro, you don't understand, I can't go anywhere, not right now, just in case she calls." "Bro, your phone will work in Hawaii; you can still answer the call." "No bro, I need to be here, in case she wants to see me." We spoke for another hour the next day, and the next, and the next. It became clear that even when she did come back to him, he still liked to rehash the bad stuff. He continued to bring up how she hurt him in the past and would relive the drama, continuing the on-again, off-again cycle. He was hurt, but why would he make choices that made things worse when there were options that would make things better? It was because he, like many of us, was addicted to self-pity. He didn't want to solve the problems, because that meant he could no longer feel like the victim. Self-pity is a tricky thing—an addiction like any other, often birthed from our need to connect and bond with something or somebody. When we feel sorry for ourselves, we decide that no one understands us, and that lets us create a temporary connection to ourselves. It's one of the most convenient ways to feel a connection. My friend didn't reject the idea of taking his mom on a trip because he didn't want to hang out with his mom; he did it because he had found comfort in his self-pity and didn't want to leave its familiarity to do something that would help him get out of it. We could all order salads at McDonald's, but French fries are so addictive. Quick, easy, and cheap choices will always be more appealing than more responsible choices. Self-pity, among other things, is the fast food of connection. I've lost contact with that friend, most likely because I wasn't encouraging his self-pity and self-victimization. He probably moved on to people who told him what he wanted to hear and gave him what he wanted to feel: pity. I've been there, but this experience helped me realize that I don't want to be there for long. Quick, cheap, and convenient sound wonderful in the short term, but in the long run, they just supersize our problems and continue our spiral downward.

Chapter 7: There's Only Win or Learn, Never Lose

I got a text wishing me a happy birthday from a number I didn't recognize. It turned out to be a friend of my girlfriend at the time, who was out of town and had asked her friend to deliver my gift. When we met up, he gave me specific instructions about which boxes to open first, and my excitement grew. In the boxes were assorted little gifts with more sentimental value than anything else. My girlfriend was traveling to a wedding with her family and knew she would miss my birthday, so she had planned this out. I don't remember the details of the letter except it was covered in kisses, and in one part she wrote: "I know we've been having trouble lately, but we love each other enough to make this work. I'm not going anywhere." That part of the letter made me tear up. There was a lot of tension in our relationship, our schedules didn't match anymore, and we were sneaking around our families. The promise in her letter took a massive weight off my chest, and it felt like the best birthday ever. SPOILER ALERT: She didn't keep that promise. Our problems continued, our fights got more intense, and then she asked for a break. I took that as my cue to figure out how to improve our situation after she caught her breath. I planned heartfelt monologues and cute date ideas. This wasn't going to be a Ross and Rachel "break"; this was going to be a pause before we took things to the next level. SPOILER ALERT: Things didn't go to the next level. A few weeks into our break, I called her because I missed her. She explained that a week before, she and her mom had been in a car accident. They were banged up; she was going to physiotherapy for her wrist, and her mom hurt her back. The accident had given her time to think, and she didn't want our situation to be a distraction anymore in her life. It was over. I sat on the floor crying, trying to reread her letter, but my vision was blurry from tears. They fell on the page and made her words smudge. Nothing made sense. I had it in writing! She promised we were going to make it work! I tore the letter to pieces and ate each piece like popcorn, like I was living in the saddest movie I'd ever seen. I devoted the next few months to figuring out why everyone else's relationships were working and mine weren't. I wanted to know, "What do they have that I don't?" It was a silent expedition, observing friends and family in their various dynamics. I made a surprising discovery: not many couples were any better off. They had communication issues, fought proxy wars, and left things unaddressed until everything festered. The common thread in their conflicts was unrealistic and unfair expectations—which I'd had, too. I expected my ex to know what she wanted and to keep the promises she made, when really, I knew she was just as scared and ill-prepared for the relationship as I was. I truly grasped this idea only when I was the one having to end a relationship. That's hard! It's never easy for anyone to end a relationship, let alone communicate it to an uncooperative partner. My former girlfriend needed to go because she wouldn't have been happy if she had stayed. The true failure would have been being unable to communicate this to me and sticking around to avoid conflict. Although I lost her, I eventually gained important insights on what it means to coexist with another person. It's never as simple as it looks in the movies. Love isn't the glue, it's the fuel. And it wasn't her absence of love for me that killed our flame; it was her love for herself that pushed her into a new direction—a direction that I couldn't be a part of. Each heartbreak came with a silver lining of life lessons and wisdom I could carry forward into the next relationship. I became mindful of patterns in my behavior and desires and started paying attention to how that affected the other half of the relationship dynamic. I realized that with any loss comes gain. If things don't work out my way, the consolation prize is a lesson I can keep close for the rest of my life. Relationships don't get easier; we just get more prepared because we become more aware—aware of how we view things, how to look at things in other ways, and how we react when our expectations aren't met. In the end, I didn't let the heartbreak be a tally on a loss list. I learned and gained so much from it, and found gratitude through the experience.

Summary

The way we see our experiences fundamentally shapes how we feel about them. When we shift our perspective from viewing challenges as unfair burdens to seeing them as opportunities for growth, everything changes. The key takeaway is that our power lies not in controlling external circumstances, but in choosing how we interpret and respond to them. Start practicing perspective shifts in small, daily situations before tackling your biggest challenges. When facing difficulty, pause and ask yourself: "What might be the gift hidden in this situation?" or "How might I view this differently five years from now?" Create physical reminders—perhaps a note on your mirror or a symbol on your phone—to prompt perspective checks throughout your day. Remember that shifting perspective isn't about toxic positivity or denying pain; it's about finding meaning and possibility even in your darkest moments. The most powerful perspective shift happens when you stop asking "why is this happening to me?" and start asking "what is this teaching me?"

About Author

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Humble the Poet

Humble the Poet (Kanwer Singh) is a Canadian-born rapper, spoken-word artist, poet, internationally bestselling author, and former elementary school teacher with a wildly popular blog with over 100,000 monthly readers. He has more than 930,000 social media followers, and his first edition of Unlearn is a Globe and Mail bestseller. He has performed at concerts and festivals including Lollapalooza and has been featured in major media including BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.

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