Seek Like-Hearted, Not Like-Minded, Friends
Today’s social communities are designed against differences.
Due to the varied amounts of information we are exposed to each day, we simplify our interactions to make this exposure more predictable and safe. We create smaller spheres of human contact, where selected information is shared amongst its members. Our social groups are thus divided based on the unique perspectives, aims, and values each have — and the particular kinds of information we wish to consume.
In other words, most of us spend time in narrow-minded (like-minded) communities, where others hold the same perspectives as us.
What we should do instead is to spend more time with open-minded (like-hearted) people, who make a difference in our lives by allowing us to look at things from another point of view.
Writer Alan Jacobs distinguishes between two types of people:
- Like-minded people think and behave like you. Your opinions and interests are reflected in them, and nothing about them particularly inspires thoughtful discussions or changes in perspective.
- Like-hearted people are open and empathetic enough to listen and understand you despite your differences. They are kind and reflective— and they challenge your ways of life, much like you challenge theirs.
When you surround yourself with only like-minded (and no like-hearted) people, you quickly fall into an echo chamber, where everyone is exposed to the same information and perspectives.
Colloquially, this echo chamber is the sibling of the comfort zone.
As Austin Kleon writes in Keep Going, spending time with similar people might be comforting at first. In this isolated community, no one challenges your thoughts or actions. After all, everyone thinks and does the same.
But as the saying goes, all growth exists outside of comfort.
You need to listen to others’ perspectives to learn and improve. Much like how a researcher adds to the scientific canon by discovering something new, a person who wants to become a better, more knowledgeable human being needs to seek out information that challenges their own.
This is uncomfortable at first, but it is necessary.
Because without this initiative, you will remain stagnant in your growth.
This is not to say that you must find friends who are very different from you.
We do naturally gravitate toward those who are similar to us, either in personality, lifestyle, interests, or values. And that is okay. These deeper connections are how we find meaning, fulfillment, and closeness.
But these people — no matter how similar they are to you — should make way for growth. Interacting with them should allow you to learn and develop a deeper appreciation and understanding of them as a person. And your disagreements should be sources of learning, not conflict.
Said differently, you should be able to nurture the inevitable differences you have. You should be able to listen to and understand each other. You should be able to connect, not in spite of your dissimilarities, but because of them.
As with anything, it all comes down to perspective.
Spend time with the like-minded, and you see yourself a hundred times.
Spend time with the like-hearted, and you see the world in a million different ways.
