Why Wisdom (Not Knowledge) Will Get You Through Tough Times
In the 1500s, one man sat down and invented a word we all take for granted: essays. In his native French, sitting in his family’s chateau, Michel de Montaigne put his pen to paper and created the first modern essay: a piece of writing that blended philosophy, stories, and the writer’s own perspective. Shocking at the time, it has become one of the bedrocks of writing in our modern world (and led to what you're reading right now!)
In his essays, Montaigne proposed the then-radical idea that the world was far too concerned with consuming other people’s knowledge, which he argued stifled original thought. Consuming knowledge also made us feel, quite mistakenly, that we were the wiser for having consumed it. He wrote, “It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.” Wisdom was anything that would “help a man live happily and morally, and that we should gauge any knowledge by “its usefulness and appropriateness to our life.”
In the half-century since Montaigne lived, the production of "knowledge" has exploded, making the development of wisdom even harder to fulfill. Today, Americans spend an average of 11 hours a day consuming media — and while there are no statistics on it, I’d venture to guess that most of us spend seconds or minutes developing wisdom. We do trick ourselves into thinking our hours consuming other people’s thoughts make us wiser — but as Montaigne would remind us, that’s just knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
Developing wisdom is more important than ever right now, because it gives us a superpower: it helps us to navigate hard times and turn them into moments of growth, personal development, and benefit to ourselves and others.
This pandemic might be the perfect moment to begin cultivating wisdom. By far, the strongest predictor of wisdom (accounting for more than 25% of the variance) is how we respond to life experiences. Wise people take whatever life hands them, and then they do something different than the rest of us: they use that life situation to help them develop wisdom. They consciously choose to make lemonade out of lemons.
This pandemic is certainly giving us lemons — and we can choose to use it to learn even more about ourselves, life, and the world, coming out the other side wiser, more resilient, and happier. Paradoxically, wise people are able to take stressful, negative, hard situations, and use them to improve their well-being. Imagine that you knew that any hard situation you faced could be transformed to ultimately benefit you? What a relief it would be!
While the research has multiple definitions for wisdom, my favorite breaks it into three parts, which support, build upon, and amplify one another:
Cognitive: developing a deep understanding of life and human nature, including the positive/negative parts of humanity and the unpredictability of life, and knowing how limited that knowledge is
Reflective: examining oneself and choosing to see things from different perspectives
Affective: accepting and empathizing with others, seeking out the positives, as well as developing a motivation towards helping others
The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “No man was ever wise by chance.” Unfortunately for all of us voracious knowledge-consumers, the research backs him up. Wisdom is something that has to be actively and consciously developed. But no one puts ‘become wiser’ on their to-do-list. Instead, we drown ourselves in other people's minds and lives. It's time to claim our birthright of finding our own inner treasures, heeding Montaigne's advice that "we are richer than we think, each one of us.”
Wisdom can be cultivated, one small step at a time. Here are some of my favorite research-backed practices for developing wisdom.
Cognitive Wisdom Habits
Accept the limitations of your knowledge. It is possible to not have an opinion. It is also possible to not share your opinion. Add phrases like, "I don't know" or "I was wrong" or "I want to learn more before I comment" to your vocabulary. Remind yourself that you can change your views when you learn new information.
After consuming knowledge, set aside a few minutes to reflect upon and integrate it. Rather than just jumping to the next article, book, podcast, or video, pause. What do you think about what you just learned? How does it challenge your existing mental models? Keep an ongoing document of your reflections, adding to it throughout the day.
Seek out different perspectives. Consciously and deliberately look outside of your personal bubble. Choose to read and engage with diverse voices, across every possible spectrum. Diversify your social media feed. Hunt for the quieter, but no less valuable, voices. When you're inclined towards an opinion, seek out information that disconfirms your point of view. Read multiple works on the same idea that approach it from different perspectives.
Do something different. When we get stuck in our standard routines and practices, we limit our chance to encounter new situations. Take a daring risk. Do something completely out of the ordinary. Respond differently to a situation than you normally would.
While consuming information, allocate a small part of your brain to analyzing the context of the work. When was it created? What are the author's biases, interests, and goals? How is that influencing you, in ways seen and unseen? This context will help you sift more effectively and with better judgment through the content.
Reflective Wisdom Habits
Make a practice of taking a minute to check in with yourself for a minute after meetings, conversations, and projects. What did you learn? What did you struggle with? What created tension inside of you? How did you show up in alignment with your goals? Jotting these down will help you to ensure you're not letting important reflections pass you by.
Frequently ask for feedback to better understand your strengths and your flaws. The more self-aware you are, the more likely you are to be wise (ego-centric people are very low in wisdom!) My favorite way of asking for feedback, which ensures that you always get a piece of helpful data, is to say "What is one thing I could have done better in that situation?"
Journal. Writing for a few minutes each day will help you to notice patterns within yourself (to stimuli, people, challenges, and information) that you can then consciously address.
Meditate. Developing a meditation practice strengthens your 'attention muscle', which is what is used to label and investigate your thoughts and emotions. Meditation is essentially weight-lifting for wisdom!
Evaluate information based on your own values. As you engage with content, ask if it holds true for you and your experience, and how it aligns (or not) with your mental model, the person you want to be, and the world you want to live in.
When someone does something that upsets, confuses, or angers you, pause and ask yourself, "What am I not seeing or considering?" Our brains have a bias to judge others by their actions, even though we judge ourselves by our intents. Consciously looking for other information will help to form a more balanced picture.
Affective Wisdom Habits
Whenever you greet someone, mentally say to yourself, "This is a person like me who wants to be happy." This is one of the most powerful practices in my own life, and it inspires such deep love and empathy. From this place, you can accept and love people so easily.
When someone is suffering, don't immediately try to fix it. Wisdom is knowing that what heals pain is presence and attention. While it can be uncomfortable, try instead to sit with them in their pain, and to help them to understand it more by asking questions. From this place of connection and empathy, you can help them in a wise way.
Every day, ask yourself how you can make someone else's life better. Consciously considering what you can do will help inspire greater motivation to help others. Doing it will in turn help you to learn and grow.
Practice looking for the positive. We all have a negativity bias which we need to consciously address. Choose to find things that are beautiful, loving, and true in your life, and endeavor to help others see them, too.
One of our New Happy members asked me on Instagram, “How do you know that you are wise?” I answered her with my own definition, but in rereading some of Montaigne’s writing as I wrote this piece, I miraculously came across his answer, directly.
He wrote, “The most manifest sign of wisdom is a constant happiness; its state is like that of things above the moon: always serene.”
That's the power of wisdom: a state of happiness that is unaffected by external circumstances.