Learning From the Other Side

Who do you consider "the other side"?

In other words: your enemies, your opponents, your competition. This could be politically, or it could be in animal advocacy, or whatever.

Pick whichever group comes to mind first. Who's not on "your team"?

Now, ask yourself: What can you learn from them? 📖

I don't necessarily mean this in a negative way, either—as in "well, these people are totally evil so I can learn how not to act."

I mean, what do they know that you don't? What do they do well that you don't? What are they really good at? Do they excel at something that you can learn from?

This can be an uncomfortable question to ask. It might even be taboo in some contexts to ask what the enemy does well, or what you can learn from them. 🙊

Importantly, you don't have to condone the behavior of a group (or individual) in order to learn from them. You might even think that certain abilities of theirs are unethical to begin with. (Perhaps your opponent is good at using violence to achieve goals, and you don't want to be good at that.)

But if you want to be impactful—if you want to be truly excellent at what you do—then it's useful to analyze your opponents for what they do well. Sometimes you learn in order to emulate someone's actions; sometimes you learn in order to better counteract someone's actions.

If someone does something well, you can learn from that—regardless of if they're "your team" or not.