Shaping our future by learning from others

In my last post I talked about gratefulness and its importance in life. In this post I would like to share with you my thoughts about how can we improve our life and our future by engaging with other people, and learning from them, while also enriching them with our knowledge.

Importance of team work and social interaction

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Life is all about having interactions with other people, from just chatting, to exchange polite phrases like “good day”, to more professional interactions like a job meeting or attending customers. Our existence is based on interactions we have with fellow humans.

Having said that, we can realize our own personality is the final product of those social interactions, mostly group experiences since these are the ones with the most impact on our development. We are the manifestation of everything that happened to us. Every memory and experience shaped us and made us what we are today.

For example, we can start from the very beginning. In order to be born, we depend on the relationship of two people, our parents, and nothing else that we peek into life, we need the processes of socialization to become people. Could we be able to develop our brain, our values, our emotions and feelings, language, etc., without a proper social interaction? Probably not.

We are so immersed in our social interactions that sometimes we do not give importance to it. If we made a daily description of our activities, we would realize that most, if not all, of the things we do are group interactions: family, work colleagues, friends, etc.

Working as a team is not just the mere sum of individual contributions. Two plus two are not necessarily four because when a team works together and it’s member “clicks” between each other’s, the productivity reach such a high level that it’s difficult to replicate otherwise. The best things in life are always created by people working together and sharing their ideas in order to enrich every one in the group. There is always something to learn from another person, no matter the age nationality, education, everyone of us has unique experiences that makes our knowledge about life also unique.

Importance of sharing ideas

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There is a great phrase from the author George Bernard Shaw that says:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. | Source

That phrase is something that should make all of us think, and is perhaps one of the main foundations of whole communities like the ones about Open Source software, where one of its objectives is to encourage the exchange of ideas in order to know more ideas and we all benefit of this.

If the diverse interactions of the group’s members are well connected, the final result will be very enriching for everyone. Hence, working as a team is a specific care to carry out a work activity and assume a set of values. It is a spirit that animates a way of being among the people that involved. It's a style of doing things, which is based on trust, communication, sincerity. It is to assume the activity and identity of the team as their own. It is planning and performing tasks together. It is to solve conflicts as an opportunity for mutual enrichment that ends up with an attitude of permanent learning.

Nevertheless, we have to be aware that not only do we must have goodwill when doing a task, but we also have to know how to do things well. No matter how good a person you are friends with, would you let him/her manage for example a surgery of yours if he/she weren’t a surgeon? We must question the lack of awareness and training about the reality of teamwork. On the one hand, we must acquire knowledge and on the other, develop skills and abilities to put these knowledge into practice, only this way can we enrich ourselves and others simultaneously.

Conclusion

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Our lives are full of constant interactions with other people’s, and we can always learn something if we pay attention. Wisdom is present in every one of us shaped by our unique experiences and thought processes, and if we are humble enough to accept the fact there is always something new to learn, we will find tons of opportunities on a daily basic to learn from the people that surrounds us.

The same way happens the other way around, by being open about our ideas, thoughts, and opinions, we can teach other people something new without us realizing it, enriching this other person with knowledge and helping him/her to be smarter.

If you want to reach your maximum potential in life, being open about this subjects (sharing ideas, teamwork) will help you, and if you get use to share information constantly with other people, if you get use to participate in discussions about interesting subjects, you will eventually be wiser than you ever thought you could be.

It’s all about engaging and learning together.

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What about you? Do you constantly share your thoughts with the people around you? Do you feel enriched by your social interactions?

Image Sources
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This are my last posts, if the title sounds interesting to you, I assure you the article will be even better!

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Are humans still evolving? Yes we are!

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“Today’s lesson”: About Gravity, Acceleration and their effect on Time

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Why forgiveness is important if we want to thrive?

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Can a lesser intelligence create a greater one? Of course it can!

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Don’t forget to be grateful with life