Every person is my superior in some way,

in that I learn from him or her.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist

You can’t force yourself to listen to people. It is not a legal requirement, punishable by a spell in prison. In most cultures it is considered polite to listen – or, at least, to look as if you are doing so. But how do you persuade yourself to really listen?

The trick, I suggest, is to convince yourself that virtually everyone you meet, whether it be on purpose or by accident, is your potential teacher, if only you can find out what they have to teach. Nor will they charge you a fee. Even a bore can teach you something – patience.

Always keep a pocketbook or some paper at hand so that you can take notes of any new ideas or information. The creative thinker knows that ideas are elusive and often quickly forgotten, so he or she pins them down with pencil and paper. Heed the Chinese proverb: ‘The strongest memory is weaker than the palest ink.’

Konosuke Matsushita used to keep such a listener’s notebook in his pocket. ‘A person who can create ideas worthy of note,’ he wrote, ‘is a person who has learned much from others.’

You may be disappointed ninety-nine times, but the hundredth oyster you open will yield you its lustrous pearl. It may not exactly be a pearl of wisdom. But it will be something that strikes you as important, relevant or interesting, something that you can take away and make your own.

The best exemplar of this willingness to invest in listening that I have so far met was the Canadian magnate Lord Thomson of Fleet. In a commemorative article soon after his death, the editor of The Times, one of the newspapers then owned by Roy Thomson, described his passion for listening thus:

Roy was never interviewed by anyone who could match him in the eliciting of information. His interest was in the hope that the companion might add information to some current concern, or even reveal some world which Roy had not so far entered.

One of the best-known women journalists in the United States spent some fascinated hours with him, and said: ‘You can say I found him disarming in his simplicity … I was totally unprepared for his childlike curiosity about everything. He is full of questions on every imaginable subject. He pumps everyone dry which is enormously flattering. Small wonder he knows something about everything.’