Learning From People

The best education I have ever received did not happen in a classroom.

It happened in conversations. With clients who had done things I had never done. With candidates who had navigated institutions I had never seen from the inside. With founders who had built things that were still unbuilt ideas when I first met them. With people much older and much younger than me, whose different vantage points made my own vantage point visible.

This is not an argument against formal education. It is an observation about where the most important learning actually happens — and a concern that most people, including people who think of themselves as learners, are not paying enough attention to the conversations in front of them.

What people know that books don't

Books are excellent at transferring codified knowledge — things that have been articulated, refined, and turned into text. They are poor at transferring tacit knowledge — things that experts know but have not fully articulated, or cannot fully articulate.

The difference matters.

Most of what makes an experienced executive good at their job is tacit. It is pattern recognition built from thousands of situations. It is judgment developed through failure and recovery. It is the ability to read a room, a market, a person, in ways that come from having read many rooms and many markets and many people.

None of that is in a book. It is in the person. And the only way to access it is through conversation — real conversation, where you are asking the right questions and listening to the answers more carefully than you are preparing your next question.

The question is the skill

The quality of what you learn from a person is almost entirely determined by the quality of the questions you ask.

This is a skill that is rarely taught and rarely developed deliberately. Most people treat conversation as exchange — I say something, you say something, we move forward. That is not learning from people. That is socializing.

Learning from people requires going into a conversation with genuine curiosity, with specific things you want to understand, and with the discipline to follow the thread when something interesting appears — even if it takes you away from your prepared questions.

It also requires the humility to ask questions that reveal your ignorance. The most useful questions are often the ones that feel embarrassing to ask. "How do you actually decide that?" "What do you do when that doesn't work?" "What would you have done differently if you knew then what you know now?"

These questions work because they require the other person to access the tacit knowledge rather than just rehearse the codified version.

The compounding of learning

The returns to learning from people compound in ways that are not immediately obvious.

Every person you learn from teaches you things that make you better at learning from the next person. Every question you ask teaches you how to ask better questions. Every conversation that goes deep teaches you what deep conversations feel like — so you recognize when you are in a shallow one and can redirect.

The learner who spends ten years in genuine conversation with thoughtful people has access to an education that cannot be replicated in any institution.

I have tried to be that learner. I have not always succeeded. But when I think about the things I understand that I did not understand ten years ago — about hiring, about institutions, about how organizations actually work, about India, about people — almost all of it came from conversations.

Pay attention to the people in front of you.

They know more than they've written down.