Learn something from everyone you meet
Minh Tan
This is the first time I’ve done this in my quote posting, which is write a little something in less than 500 words about the quote and why I believe in it. I’ll go back and write a little something for the other quotes soon enough, I hope. I may not always have time to write something with the quote as life sometimes gets busy, but I will ultimately have some writing with every post. Whether people just care for the quote, or some other thoughts with them, is up to them.
This quote about learning someone from everybody I “meet” applies to those I meet in person, no matter how fleeting, as well as those I communicate with online to some extent. It is something I truly believe in and work to answer each time I “meet” someone. The thing is what I learn doesn’t have to be profound, or even new. In the latter, it is then an affirmation or confirmation of something I’ve already believed in, which isn’t a fact since so few things I learn from people are facts that holds at all times. Life just isn’t that way. In that sense, I “learn” whatever I do in the sense of it being like another data point in an experiment, or a reproducible trial, if you want to think about it scientifically and technically.
But if you don’t believe in that as learning, just try this exercise. After you meet someone, ask yourself, so what can I learn from him/her? Don’t try for a grand answer. If there were one, then it should be obvious to you. It doesn’t have to be a “life” sort of answer, either. It could be something about yourself, like I really dig women with pig tails, LOL. But try to have it be something about life or lifestyle, or personality, that you could take in life.
Now, for people who end up sticking around in your life for a while, strive for a bigger answer. Try for a sort of answer like “if nothing else comes of our interactions, I will have learned this from you”. This is really great for acquaintances we have in life, cause closer friends will bring easy answers to the questions of what you’ve learned from them. For example, my Meet 365 resolution, as I call it, to be more extroverted, came from something a colleague I sometimes saw told me. She said she tried to meet one new person at any social occasion, so long as it’s not generally considered awkward to do so. Someone else, I just found out he did astronomy photography and guess what I’ll be learning from him?
Try it!
Digital Citizen 