You Can and Should Learn From Anyone and Anything.

You can't overestimate the importance of learning from the people around us.

As we become teenagers we believe we know better than our parents and teachers. Have you ever wondered why this is? As a parent of three children I certainly have.

The reason why teens behave like know-it-alls is because a significant part of your teenager’s brain, the prefrontal cortex, is undeveloped. The prefrontal cortex is in fact not fully developed until age 25! This is why, even after you explain the dangers and consequences, as teens we still made poor choices. 

The prefrontal cortex is typically referred to as the “CEO of the brain,” and is responsible for planning ahead, managing emotions and delaying a response, empathy, self-awareness, cause and effect, and morality.

Assuming those reading this are over 25 years of age, what's our excuse?

Executive leadership coach Lolly Daskal says, "When we’re open to learning from others, we benefit from their experience as well as our own and we can inherit their wisdom and knowledge. Learning from others is not a passive process, but one that requires work and commitment on our part."

There are times when I am asked what I do for a living I answer that "I am a student of sales, marketing, branding, and storytelling." In fact, it's in my Linkedin profile headline. One of my most used hashtags is #learningisearning because I truly believe that having a learning mindset is directly connected to how and what income you earn.

It 's with this mindset that I have collected a personal board of advisors and groups of mentors that range from the ages of 23 to 88. The mentors I most heavily credit to my career of building relationships and sales is Harvey Mackay (88) and Jeffrey Gitomer (74).

I connected today with a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business who after accepting my invitation to connect commented, "hopefully we can both learn in this process." (referring to marketing and teaching in the current state of the world) That is a student of the world around him. (With 40 years of teaching marketing)

The founder of Alibaba and one of the wealthiest people in the world Jack Ma was approached by Standford University to conduct a case study on his success. Listen to why he feels so strongly to learn from people's mistakes, not their success.

If you are open to learning, you can not only seek the advice of the successful but also regular people on a daily basis.

Here's the funny thing about advice: We often take it from the wrong people. We overvalue the advice of credentialed experts while undervaluing the input of regular folk.

Expert advisors often make surprisingly unrealistic predictions about the future, yet people take their advice nonetheless,” concluded Stanford psychologists in a study published last year. Now, not everyone heeds experts’ advice. True to status theory, powerful people are less likely to do so, Harvard researchers found. “High-power participants in the study ignored almost two-thirds of the advice they received. Other participants—the control and low-power groups—ignored advice about half as often.”

The more powerful people become, the smaller the pool of advisors they trust to steer them right. So it requires a leap of modesty.

Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan found himself benefiting from advice from a humble source. Shyamalan was puzzled why his movies were so divisive: People either loved them or hated them. After the huge commercial and critical success of The Sixth Sense, his fortunes had grown cloudier. Box-office was decent, but critics turned on him. One likened his psychological thriller The Village to an episode of Scooby-Doo.

But instead of shrugging off this critic as a poser, Shyamalan wondered instead if there might be something to the dig. Shyamalan shelved his ego and took the criticism to heart. “Don’t pretend you’re not hurt by what that dude just said,” he explained to psychologist Adam Grant, but “don’t deny the feeling, either. Go with it.”

Shyamalan stuck to the template in his next film, Split, which was quirky even by his standards. His agent didn't think he could sell it, so Shyamalan financed on his own. It became the most profitable picture of 2017. And it won back his critics.

Here are some ways that you can position yourself better to learn from others:

• Express genuine interest in other points of view. - In his book, How To Win Freinds and Influence People, Dale Carnegie writes, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Being interested also helps you learn.
• Learning is a practice, not an event. - I often say, "if you can't learn something and laugh at something each day at your job, find another job."
• Ask open-ended questions and close your mouth. - Open-ended questions are questions that allow someone to think and share freely their answer. Closed-ended questions can be answered with “Yes” or “No". The urge to interrupt someone answering an open-ended question is at times extremely strong. Don't. And if you don't understand their answer, be polite and ask them if they can explain it differently as you are not fully understanding them.
• Read. - Whatever industry you are in, whichever skills you are trying to improve on, or however you are supposed to solve something, there is someone that has come before you that you can learn from. Chances are there are experts with a proven track record that have shared their experience and knowledge as well.

I would love to hear how you learn and whom you learn from. Who knows, I might learn a thing or two.