One mark of a smart person is the ability to learn from people they don’t like. — Shane Parrish

One mark of a smart person is the ability to learn from people they don’t like.

Author: Shane Parrish

Insight: We naturally learn best from people we enjoy—they hold our attention, make us curious, even make learning feel fun. But there's a peculiar blindness that comes with liking someone. We're more likely to absorb their ideas wholesale, to assume they're right because we like them, to miss where they might be wrong. Learning from people we don't like forces us to think harder. We can't just ride the wave of chemistry; we have to actually examine whether what they're saying holds up. This matters more than ever because our social feeds and friend groups increasingly filter out the people who irritate us. We unfollow, unmute, or simply never encounter the annoying coworker, the family member with different politics, the mentor who delivers feedback unkindly. But some of the most useful corrections to our thinking come from exactly those people—not because they're always right, but because their wrongness or their approach makes us defend our position clearly, or reconsider something we've been taking for granted. The smart move isn't to pretend you like them. It's to get curious about what specifically bothers you, and whether that discomfort is masking something useful you could actually use.