‘Siddhartha’ is a wonderful book by Hermann Hesse. It’s a novel that narrates the journey of a boy named Siddhartha on the path to enlightenment. While the main idea of the book is that every human’s spiritual journey is personal and unique and that one has to carve out their own path, there are valuable pieces of wisdom spread across Siddhartha’s story. In this essay, I’ll try to shed some light on one of these pieces.

When Siddhartha wants to work for a merchant and is asked what he can do, he replies “I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”. Thinking, waiting, and fasting is what the boy considers his most useful skills. The merchant was confused — how can these be useful, or even be considered skills? Similar were my thoughts. But as Siddhartha explains his point of view, I was pretty convinced of the value that these skills hold. Let me put it into simple terms and in the context of modern age.

Thinking

By thinking, we are referring to judgement. Judgement is a highly underrated skill. Everybody talks about hard work, but nobody talks about judgement. Forming good judgement allows you to make the right decisions, and each right decision holds more value than the amount of work put in. On the contrary, working with full force but in the wrong direction would yield nothing.

This may sound obvious, but how many people do you know who are clear thinkers? I’m not talking about intelligence. There’s a difference between intelligent people and clear thinkers. Many people can solve problems, but how many are able to choose the right problems to solve?

Waiting

Waiting is simply the virtue of patience, something that’s extremely rare these days. I’m 23 and I want to travel the world, want all the riches, all the joys and all the knowledge, today. Waiting is hard. But the fact is that everything works out in the long run. Everything works out if we are patient enough.

In the meantime, we can choose to embrace the waiting period or fight it. The outcome doesn’t change. Just like the farmer who does his work of ploughing, sowing, and irrigating the fields, and then patiently waits until it is the harvest season, we can also learn to wait until it’s the time to reap the rewards of our efforts.

Fasting

Siddhartha says that earlier, he was a slave to his hunger. Before the day ended, he was bound to take any job he got so that he could satisfy his hunger. But then he learned to fast. This enabled him to reject the jobs he did not want to do. Now that he wasn’t in a hurry to buy food, he could wait for the right opportunity and work at his own will. Fasting bought him freedom.

In the modern day context, this refers to lowering your living expenses. If your expenses are equal to your income, you are forced to work to meet your lifestyle needs. So while we don’t have to do literal fasting, if we cut the costs and live well below our means, we can be free. We won’t have to work to make the ends meet. We can choose to do whatever we feel like.

I highly recommend that you read the book. It’s an easy read and I’m sure you’ll like it. Find it here:

So this was one of the many many learnings that this book has to teach. I’ve been planning to write a long form essay on the book for several months now, but don’t really feel inspired enough. Guess I’ll wait some more.

Did you find this lesson valuable? Let me know by replying to this email or commenting on the website :)

Good night!
Aachman