What lessons has your life journey taught you?

Ben | Kirikiriroa

Ben values relationships deeply and reflects on his time at university as being the perfect time to build meaningful connections.

“When I think about mistakes and kind of where I wanna go forward, people is what always comes to mind as the overarching theme.

The mistake is quite retrospective, funnily enough. Through thinking about this, I’ve kind of realised that often you don’t realise mistakes happen until you look back.

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is now that I’ve become an adult (even though it doesn’t feel like it), I’m working full time, I’m in a totally different environment with work as opposed to at uni. At uni, people were served up to me every single day through classes and clubs and everything else going on.

And at work, it’s completely different. I’ve got flat mates and a few close friends, but apart from that you have to make a real effort to see people. And that’s made me realise that people are the meaning of everything, I reckon.

And uni is that kind of prime situation, prime environment to really build connections, make friends, build relationships. And looking back, I think that maybe I could have prioritised that a little bit higher up the list rather than them just be a by-product of everything else I was doing.”