Some of the essays on this website are for my kids. This is one of those. However, if you are not one of my daughters, you are still welcome to read it.
I'd like to tell you about a shortcut I take.
Most shortcuts in life are not worth it. That's because most things in life worth doing are worth doing the right way. Never take shortcuts on your spouse or family, or on self-improvement. In most areas, putting in the hard work is the best (and only) way to find enduring success and happiness. If something is quick and easy to gain, it is quick and easy to lose as well.
However: there's one situation in which everyone takes shortcuts all the time, and there's no other choice. That area is character assessment.
Here's what I mean. You will meet thousands of people in your life. Hundreds of them will play important roles - a few of those for a long time, but most of them for a season or less. Trusting someone enough to let them play an important role in your life is no small matter. Words aren't enough - you need to use actions. Ideally, observing a lot of them over a long time would be possible to really assess if someone is worthy of trust.
However - we can't possibly spend hours and days with every person who might enter your circle of influence prior to deciding they are allowed in. It's just not possible. So, we save that process for the most important ones of all: Spouses. Maybe business partners, and a few other roles too.
Most of the time, however, to determine how much we can trust someone, we need to take shortcuts. That goes for teachers and professors, group project partners, bosses and coworkers, and almost everyone we interact with all the time. It starts in seconds with that first impression; did they smile? how was their handshake? what did they say? Our brains are nonstop workhorses for making snap assumptions about others. Sometimes they are helpful, but other times they are wrong.
Here's my favorite shortcut. I hope it serves you well.
Look for the people seek nuance. They shouldn't just recognize it when they see it, they should actively try to find it.
Why is nuance important. Well, life is filled with problems we'd like to solve. From big societal problems down to intensely personal ones. Some of them are easy, but those don't typically require much collaboration to solve. As a result, most of the unsolved problems you tackle with others will be the harder ones.
When you meet people who look at a hard problem and act like the problem is obvious, you have met someone who lacks the ability to see the nuance. They actually don't understand the problem at all, or they are afraid to or have some more malicious reason to pretend it's simple when it's not. Politics is awful for this.
"Those [Democrats/Republicans] are SO stupid. Why don't they simply do [xyz]?? It's so obvious!"
Anyone who says something like the above sounds tremendously arrogant to me, even if they don't intend to be. If any problems at the level of government were simple and obvious, they would have been resolved long ago. Even if a solution seems obvious, there must be some complicated reason or incentive structure that explains why the problem still persists. In my experience, the best thinkers and most wonderfully curious people look at problems and immediately look for the thing(s) that make it complicated, and THAT is what they want to talk about.
I've successfully taken this shortcut in school, in the workplace, and in social settings as a way to determine who actually knows what they are talking about and which people are most curious, which is a great character trait since it leads to empathy.