Don't let hate get in the way of learning

I think we can all agree that throughout school a lot of people's enemy number one was Mathematics, or anything involving it. Some people liked it, but those were the exception to the rule. Most hated it and either never really bothered to learn it, or just did whatever was necessary to pass the class so they can move on.

There are a lot of things in life just like Mathematics, things we might not like for one reason or another. Now that it's been several years since I finished school I realize that math wasn't really that bad. What was bad was the way it was explained to me, and others, by our teachers.

In my case, with certain things, it takes me a bit to understand them. I'm a visual learner, and math isn't the most visual thing, therefore I had quite a hard time understanding some concepts when I was young, and the fact that teachers didn't really care, and just moved on and focused on other people, ignoring me and anyone else who didn't understand everything perfectly, didn't help.

I can safely say that teachers were one of the main reasons I hated math. Math itself can be nice, and it can definitely be useful. But, if you're trying to learn it from someone you dislike, especially when you're at a period in your life when you want to be against the system and rebel yourself, then you might actually stop yourself from learning anything just to annoy specific people.

I experienced a similar thing at my former job. My objective, every month, was to sell as many cellphone plans + phones as possible. And I quite hated it, mainly because of the company I worked for. They did not care about customers, and did everything in their power to get as much money from them as they could.

My managers weren't any better either. They were the type of people you see in movies that are always pushing people to do more, to do better, telling them that they're not doing enough, that they need to change their attitude, implying that they should be fake, and so on. They even ignored obvious problems that were making our job harder, such as programs on our computers not working properly.

One of the funniest (and at the same time saddest) memories I have from that place is when we were visited by one of the managers and I, being the first one to learn a new piece of software that we had to implement in our daily selling routine, complained about how slow it was.

I even showed her how I had to wait for around 30 - 40 seconds for each individual thing I was doing, because everything was so slow, and I explained how such a long waiting time was literally driving clients away. Who in their right mind would wait 30 minutes to get something done when the same thing took less than 5 just a week before?

The manager literally looked at the screen while I was waiting for my click to actually do something and when it finally loaded the thing that I needed, she said "See? It works! It works fine, stop complaining about it! Just keep using it!"

I doubt I'm gonna have to tell you how much I disliked my manager. The only thing that mattered to her was selling, regardless of how it was done, and who we had to trick and cheat in order to sell. Being fake was an obligation, and words such as "energy" and "optimism" and a lot others became words I despised.

Because of all that, for quite a while, I absolutely refused to learn anything related to communication or selling. I had such a hatred for the way the company I worked for did things, and for the way my manager did things, that I just didn't want to become in any way like them.

I avoided reading books about communication, I avoided reading books about businesses, I avoided reading books about selling, and I focused on other things, such as Stoicism, which helped me keep my sanity.

But back then, I didn't really realize all that. I was aware of my hatred for everything the company did, and everything it stood for, but I couldn't see how it affected my willingness to learn, and how it made me stay away from anything containing words such as "selling" or "energy" or "optimism" or "smile more".

And while my hatred was justified, the fact that I stopped learning about certain topics didn't help me with anything. Quite the opposite - learning more about communication back then maybe would've helped me find another job faster. Learning about selling might've helped me sell myself better and be able to find another company to work for. Learning about money would've been an incredibly useful thing to learn that would've helped me be more financially secure.

Hatred for the company and for my managers made me avoid those subjects completely and focus on something different - until recently. As I mentioned in past articles, I started reading a lot lately. I finished books about money, about personal development, about how the human mind works, and I recently started reading a bit more about communication.

The only thing I can say is that I now realize that learning to better communicate is a really good skill (obviously). It can help me better communicate my ideas. It can help me ask people for help in a much better way. It can help me share my experiences with others a lot better.

I now realize that learning things such as communication, and money handling, won't transform me into my former managers. My managers were like that before they learned those skills, and before they became more successful. Communication and selling were just two things that were part of them, and nothing more.

It's really obvious, but how many of us realize it? Just think about all the people out there who absolutely despise vaccines, who absolutely despise technology and anything involving it, who think that their phones are constantly listened to, and so on.

Those people refuse to learn anything about any of those things out of hatred. They hate technology without understanding how it works. They hate vaccines without completely understanding how necessary they actually are. They hate phones and think they are being listened to constantly because they lack the self-awareness to realize just how insignificant they are, so much in fact that no one needs to listen to their phones because there's nothing useful they will ever talk about.

Hating certain teachers might get us to refuse to learn a subject that we might like, or at least a subject that might be useful to us a the future. Hating a coworker or a boss can get us to refuse to learn things that they know, out of disgust or/and fear of becoming like them.

The examples can keep going.

But, the good thing, is that our willingness to learn can change in time. As time passes by, and we begin to forget the things that made us so mad before, we can slowly become more okay with learning certain things, just as I understood, after two years, that learning about communication, about money, and how to sell, won't transform me into my managers.

If you work towards building a good character, and being a good person, you can learn anything and still be a good person. Learning how to sell won't make you take advantage of people - it will make you know what to offer them to improve their life. Learning how to handle money won't make you obsessed with them - it will help you live a more secure life by controlling your expenses and investing. Learning how to better communicate won't make you manipulate people - it will help you have a much better relationship with others because you'll know how to listen, and how to better say what's on your mind.

I can keep going, but I think you get the idea.

Don't let your hatred for certain people decide what you want to learn.