The Smartest People Are the Ones Still Learning

The greatest learner isn’t the one who knows the most, it’s the one humble enough to keep learning from everyone.

I was seated outside a little shop where I normally go to charge my phone, when I sat behind two girls who sat in front of me, in the open, studying for an exam. They held papers, memorized a lot of things, flipped through numerous books and even tried saying them out loud to make sure it stuck in their heads, and while it almost felt funny, I couldn’t imagine the stress of learning a foreign language.

A girl, same student in their department, walked up to them, her phone was still on and from the video playing and the accent, she was learning Spanish on YouTube. The two girls were studying French. She walked up to them to try and help correct a blunder one of the girls mistakenly said without correcting herself. She tried to correct the girl, and she refused to accept the words from someone who was learning Spanish, trying to correct her who was learning French, saying she knew better, and I thought deeply about that moment.

I thought about how easily we put people off because we see that we aren’t all doing the same things, on the same page or in this invisible level society constructed. That if you haven’t been in my shoes to know more about a certain experience, then we don’t owe people a listening ear, and I couldn’t think of how wrong people with this mindset might be.

The greatest learner isn’t the one who knows the most, it’s the one humble enough to keep learning from everyone.

Learning evolves. Things change, people and information too. What used to be done a particular way, is possible to undergo a different route to achieve same results. How they go about it, achieving the required result, is what matters. Same rule applies to learning, because it takes different forms.

Whenever I wanted to learn something new, I’d always meet someone who knew much more on the topic than me, but I noticed something while learning from these people. When they begin educating me, I often felt threatened or a subtle need to question and challenge their ideology of a particular topic. Like how you know when someone’s values and beliefs don’t align with yours so you try to put one off so the other can exist as the only correct perspective.

People do this a lot. When you’re scrolling and decide to check the comments and see people going against someone else’s opinions about a particular topic interest like no one is allowed to have first-hand opinions, least the ones that weren’t edited to fit in.

Having opinions feels like intelligence and liberty. That we have opinions no one else does about something and can’t wait to let others know, because it feels liberating when we can think for ourselves without checking to see if it aligns with everyone else’s thinking before speaking.

That if someone where to oppose your opinion about something, how would you react to it? My guess would be that you would try to defend why you think yours is the only socially acceptable and correct opinion, because you believe there are people who would support you, so you shift your voice to please the crowd, because to you, people aren’t well-read to have opinions of their own. But what if I told you, no matter how well you think you know something, there’d always be someone who knows better than you. And this is not to put anyone off, or say we aren’t smart enough to have opinions, but there’s always someone who knows better.

There was always that need to go against their knowledge, to prove myself, to be validated in a way that says “I know more about this than you. I read about it” but that kind of arrogance to learning is often what kills the joy of learning something new and reshaping it into literacy or intellectual ego—that you are wiser, that you know better than the person who is advising you, because for some reason, learning now looks like a test of who’s more read, disgustingly educated and presented to be non-challengeable to that of the humility that exists from lowering our egos to actually learn.

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I once challenged a friend’s opinion about a specific issue I needed clarity on, and while we went back-and-forth on the topic, I noticed what I was doing was putting them off just so I can have space to shove my opinions down their throats, and at the end of the day, later that evening, after I thought I’d won, they sent me a five paragraph long text which they wrote out on the topic and with the first three lines, I confirmed I was truly just ignorant on the topic and the next time I went to them to explain something to me, I listened more. Not that I didn’t have things to add or question them with, but because I understood this: we often think we’re the wisest, until we meet someone who shows us what we know, hasn’t even scratched the surface of the answers.

And I couldn’t help but think that we are all that girl. We always think we’re right and fail to accept corrections because we feel we know well enough on a topic that we don’t need unsolicited advice from people who we think don’t know anything about the issue and then, are left in awe when we see that they do know.

Just because someone might come with a different approach to solving a problem, or with a different ideology about a specific topic, doesn’t mean what they’re saying, you can’t learn from it. That’s why learning exists — to be educated on so many things at once and gain necessary awareness.

And I want you, from now on to learn from other people, to gain necessary insights on other areas and minds. If you do wish to oppose an opinion, you can do so in a way it doesn’t put off someone else’s opinion about the topic too.

The smartest people are not the ones with the answers. They’re the ones least afraid to be wrong.