{"id":138,"date":"2023-01-18T19:05:19","date_gmt":"2023-01-18T18:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pcrest.com\/blog\/?p=138"},"modified":"2023-01-18T19:05:22","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T18:05:22","slug":"the-anonymous-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/18\/the-anonymous-expert\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anonymous Expert"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In Mark Twain\u2019s short story, <em>Captain Stormfield\u2019s Visit to Heaven<\/em>, once Captain Eli Stormfield makes it past the pearly gates and gets his bearings, he begins to learn about the other inhabitants of heaven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He learns about the greatest poet who ever lived \u2014 one whose poetry even Shakespeare couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s the greatest military mind ever, in all the universe\u2026a 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Twain\u2019s tongue-in-cheek point is that we dismiss the tailor and bricklayer at our peril, as they may well have much to teach us\u2026and if we assume it\u2019s only about making suits and laying bricks, the joke is on us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If we want to maximize our opportunities for growth, one way to do it is to be alert to others\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If we enter each new relationship intentionally valuing the other person for strengths we don\u2019t yet know about, we\u2019ll be open to discovering those strengths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But this isn\u2019t just about <strong>appreciating <\/strong>others, though our lives will be infinitely richer for that. This is also about<strong><em> learning from them<\/em><\/strong>. 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\u2019s strengths but begin to learn how to emulate them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Mark Twain\u2019s short story, Captain Stormfield\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"fifu_image_url":"http:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/images\/experts.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,39],"tags":[5,16,18],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-attitude","category-relationships","tag-intentional","tag-opportunity","tag-responding","post_format-post-format-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.pcrest.com\/images\/experts.jpg?fit=900%2C600","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139,"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions\/139"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pcrest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}