A Wise Person Knows That There Is Something To Be Learned From Everyone

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“A wise person knows that there is something to be learned from everyone.”

Learning from other people is as important as learning from our own experiences. For one thing, learning things the hard way takes about a lifetime of failures. If we depend solely on our own experiences, it can drain us mentally and financially. Why go through hard experiences when we could learn from other people?

Problem is, we have the tendency to think we already know everything. When our parents give us advice, our impulse is to cover our ears and sing a tune to drown out their voices. Although unsolicited advice can be annoying and sometimes irrelevant to our own experiences, having open ears and an open mind might save us years of regret. Besides, we can always choose not to consider an opinion.

Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata” says, “…listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.” In some cases, we might even realize at the end that we’re the dull and the ignorant! But we’ll never have such enlightenment if we don’t give people a chance to be heard. We can learn from people and understand where they come from by letting go of our biases and delusions of being always right.

Nothing sounds better than one’s own voice, but as Larry King remarked, “I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.” A wise person knows that every life is a lesson to learn from.