You Can Learn From Everything And Everybody

Learning is available from any source and any person, but only if you accept that this is actually the case. Plenty of people settle into their own narrow corner of the world and never step outside it. Worse, they mock anyone whose life looks different from theirs. They refuse to make room for a different point of view, and they certainly won't put in the effort to figure out what that view is or where it comes from.

Consider what a gift it is that we can absorb other people's experiences without having to live through every hard lesson ourselves. We get to understand something secondhand and skip the pain of discovering it the slow way. Yet most of us wave that gift aside. We lean only on what we personally have gone through, as if nothing counts until we've tested it with our own hands.

Books carry that kind of borrowed experience. So do films, television, and the stories people tell each other. None of it is firsthand, and none of it is worthless either. The real question is how willing you are to take in someone else's ideas and methods. There are people who feel safe only when their approach is treated as the single correct one, with everyone else's quietly written off. That instinct shrinks your world down to something tiny and keeps your thinking cramped.

A man I heard about put it plainly to his wife: he had never once met a person he couldn't learn something from.

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