How learning philosophy helped me
It took a lot of time and experiences in my adult life to understand that there are different ways to see the world, and each one is right. I am someone who has much more idealistic values than most people. And with that came strong beliefs in ideals. These ideals were not something I picked up after a lot of deliberate thinking but rather unconsciously during my upbringing.
Now I know that while ideals and values have places in giving a direction and meaning in life, being too strongly attached to many ideals will make you a small and narrow minded individual who won't be able to fully grasp the beauty and experience of different worldviews. My aim is to find a good balance between becoming too rigid and becoming devoid of personal values and ideals.
This shift in my thought process to be more open minded came from learning philosophy. This is one of the reason I became interested in philosophy, because for the first time a subject made me think in a fundamentally critical way about the world and my basic assumptions and showed me the limitation of my worldview that formed during childhood and early adulthood. I was introduced to philosophy through self help genre, like being exposed to stoicism. But as I got more into it, I became more interested and realized there was a whole domain of knowledge I was unaware of being a student of science and engineering.
I am also interested in exploring literature of great writers, because through literature the writers expresses their own philosophy and worldview in an emotionally engaging way. As my younger brother pointed out to me, to explore the different range of human emotions and life's circumstances, great fictions can be more impactful than reading dense philosophical commentary on the same.