Pay Attention to Learn from Anyone and Anything
A few days back Mark Manson sent a newsletter titled "Everyone has something to teach." This is very much true. This "everyone" includes the boring people we see every day and even our enemies! In fact, every thing—alive or lifeless—and every incident, good or bad, also has something to teach us. Only if we pay attention.
It is very easy to miss the lessons from people you find boring or consider toxic or irritating. For boring people we don't pay attention because we consider ourselves superior and don't think they're worthy of notice; for toxic people we avoid them and don't follow them on social media.
The same is true for things or events. It's easy to get hooked on interesting things or incidents and draw insights from them. But, like we do with people, we also tend to avoid looking into mundane, ugly, or painful things. Life, however, never stops giving us lessons. We can learn from everything—what seems useless in the short term often proves useful in another context. Hardly any experience goes to waste.
In my last post I wrote about how I suddenly learned about polymaths and mental models from reading a blog article. It was shared by a batchmate on Facebook. That person was so annoying that most of us used to avoid him and called him "virus." But we were "friends" on Facebook, and usually I didn't interact with anything he shared because I despised most of it. Thankfully I didn't unfollow him, so when he shared that article it appeared in my timeline. Given that it was completely different from what he usually shared, I opened it and read it, and I'm glad that I paid attention.
It's not that this was my only route to discovering the concept of polymaths. Since I was already into investing and devouring any useful article on investing, I could have stumbled upon Munger's idea of applying a latticework of mental models to investing and life problems soon anyway. Nevertheless, I was surprised to discover how I learned about it from a completely unlikely source. This incident taught me never to underestimate anyone by assuming they have nothing to teach me.
Sure, given the information overload and the plethora of notifications we receive every day, it's sensible to focus on limited sources and follow fewer people for improved productivity. I'm not saying you should pay attention to everyone and everything. Rather, if something unique reaches your attention from an unlikely source, don't discard it as unworthy.
It's useful to quickly skim most things that enter your attention zone without judging the source, and then invest time in those that deserve it. It takes practice to skim effectively, but it's worth doing.
Life is about having various kinds of experiences and finding meaning in them. So let's try to pay attention when anything worthy comes along from any source.
