The Anonymous Expert

In Mark Twain’s short story, Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, once Captain Eli Stormfield makes it past the pearly gates and gets his bearings, he begins to learn about the other inhabitants of heaven.

He learns about the greatest poet who ever lived — one whose poetry even Shakespeare couldn’t equal. This poet was a tailor from Tennessee named Billings and no one would print his poetry. Worse, his neighbors laughed at it when they read it. Then there’s the greatest military mind ever, in all the universe…a man who was a greater strategist than Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon rolled into one. This man was Absalom Jones, of Boston. Though he tried to join the army, the recruiter refused to allow him to enlist because Absalom had lost a thumb and a couple of teeth before he tried to join. Absalom then became a professional bricklayer.

Twain’s tongue-in-cheek point is that we dismiss the tailor and bricklayer at our peril, as they may well have much to teach us…and if we assume it’s only about making suits and laying bricks, the joke is on us.

If we want to maximize our opportunities for growth, one way to do it is to be alert to others’ expertise. Not their job titles or what others say about them, but their actual areas of excellence (which are often not immediately apparent). This is because each person we meet has talents/abilities/insights that make their capabilities and performances unique.

If we enter each new relationship intentionally valuing the other person for strengths we don’t yet know about, we’ll be open to discovering those strengths.

But this isn’t just about appreciating others, though our lives will be infinitely richer for that. This is also about learning from them. When we can meet another and assume that we will be learning from them, we have taken on the mindset that not only allows us to discover and value the other’s strengths but begin to learn how to emulate them.