In Search of Wisdom
Sweet Bites for June 7, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
This week we kicked off our monthly theme of Virtue by exploring the topic of wisdom (links below).
Elevate your everyday. Our premium content does more than inform—it inspires.
Choose Your Dessert for the Week
🍰 Mini Bite # 1
Look Deeper, Adjust Accordingly
Each week at Amazon, Jeff Bezos would hold Weekly Business Reviews (WBRs) wherein he would meet with the heads of his departments to get a pulse on the state of the business.
One week, Bezos brought with him several emails from customers who had been complaining about customer service wait times. The head of customer service showed Bezos the metrics they were tracking and told him all calls were being answered in 60 seconds or less.
After some back and forth, Bezos said to the team, “Let’s just call.”
The team called and listened live for how long it took for their call to be answered. Suffice to say, it was longer than the 60 seconds the team was tracking.
What this showed Bezos and the team was they were collecting their data wrong, there was something that needed to be adjusted somewhere in the pipeline to get a better sense of what the business was doing.
By not just relying on the metrics presented, by questioning the disconnect between what customers were saying and what the business was observing, Bezos and team were able to see the flaw in their knowledge and pivot.
When we look beyond the surface level knowledge we get, when we are interested and want to know more, we’re more inclined to ask probing questions that reveal truth.
📖 Book Recommendation
Morality by Jonathan Sacks
I read this over the last year and it is pretty high on my list of best reads during that time. Sacks dives into one of the most important issues that face our society today: a missing shared sense of morality. Sacks investigates what it means to be moral and attempts to trace the flaws and possible solutions to some of the biggest issues.
Favorite Passages
“Morality cannot be outsourced because it depends on each of us. Without self-restraint, without the capacity to defer the gratification of instinct, and without the habits of heart and deed that we call virtues, we will eventually lose our freedom.”
—
“Everyone pursues happiness, but not everyone achieves it. Some fail through no fault of their own. But for the most part eudaemonia is a matter of living nobly, courageously, temperately, and wisely. It is not about having wealth or popularity or power. It is about what kind of human being you become.”
—
“A healthy culture protects places that welcome argument and respect dissenting views. Enter them and you will grow, others will grow, and you will do great things together. But resist with all your heart and soul any attempt to substitute power for truth. And stay far from people, movements, and parties that demonize their opponents.”
📚 This Week’s Monday Meditation
🍰 Mini Bite # 2
Keep an Open Mind
During the filming of the movie The Nice Guys, Ryan Gosling’s character finds himself cornered on a toilet by Russel Crowe’s. Gosling’s job was to bring comedy to the scene by attempting to keep the stall door open with his foot while smoking, covering himself up, and waving a gun at Crowe’s character.
But he wasn’t achieving his desired outcome. After a take, Crowe pulled him to the side and gave him some advice on how to accomplish the scene.
“He knew immediately what I was trying to do,” Gosling would later say. “He stepped right in and helped me so much.”
Everything we learn in life is built upon the shoulder’s of those with knowledge who came before us. We become wiser and more educated by keeping an open mind and accepting help when others are willing to provide it. When we put aside our fear of not being good enough and silence our ego, we open ourselves up to accepting feedback and assistance from others. From this, we grow.
For Gosling, and ultimately the film, the assistance helped solidify the scene and keep the chuckles alive.
🎶 Fresh Sounds
This week, I’ve been listening to my brother’s latest single he just released. It’s available on Spotify and Apple Music. Below is a preview for those interested.
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
🍰 Mini Bite # 3
Curiosity’s Guide
By the time the famed physicist Richard Feynman was 12, he was already fascinated with science and the mechanics of how things worked.
Each night while his parents were out for the evening, Feynman would put headphones on and listen to the radio until he fell asleep. His parents would always return home and remove the headphones, “and worry about what was going into my head while I was asleep.”
From this, Feynman got the idea to create a homemade burglar alarm. He took a “big battery and a bell” and connected them with wires. He then set it up so that whenever the door to his room opened after he’d gone to sleep, it would trip the alarm, pushing the wire to the battery and sending off a BONG! from the bell.
The next time his parents came home and attempted to remove the headphones they were met with the BONG! BONG! BONG! of the bell.
Feynman, in his excitement, jumped out of bed and exclaimed, “It worked! It worked!”
This childlike excitement is something we all possess within ourselves. When we discover something, when we find something that speaks to us, when we learn something we’ve been deeply searching for, we’re rewarded with this energy and excitement. In a sense, we’re completing a piece of ourselves.
It is this that drives us to find our interests in life and connects us to the broader world. Wisdom grows exponentially when we provide ourselves the opportunity to reconnect with this curiosity. We are drawn to the things we like and from them, are drawn to explore more of life’s treasures.
🛠️ Tactic
One of the best ways to accumulate knowledge and learn how to connect it to broader topics is through the ancient art of commonplace books. The Oxford English Dictionary dates commonplace books back to the poet John Donne who used to piece together in a notebook his interests which ranged from nature and animals to love and philosophy. His poetry would then weave together these vast ideas into a single and cohesive narrative that spoke to the reader and evoke vivid imagery.
According to Donne biographer Katherine Rundell, “The ideal commonplacer is half lawyer, building up evidence in the case for and against the world, and half treasure hunter…”
The philosopher Erasmus who is perhaps most known for his work The Praise of Folly, once wrote that “whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is especially striking, you will be able to note it down in its appropriate place: be it a story or a fable or an example or a new occurrence or a pithy remark or a witty saying or any other clever form of words.”
Modern day versions of this tactic are The Notecard System by Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday, a “Second Brain” by Tiago Forte, and the idea of adjacent possible by Steven Johnson.
💡 Concept
In the below video, the psychologist Barry Schwartz breaks down why practical wisdom is so needed today and why it is practical wisdom, not just knowledge, that changes the world for the better.
🍰 Mini Bite # 4
Pursue Wisdom on Your Own Terms
W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge loosely follows the character Larry Darrell over the course of many years as he drifts in and out of the lives of those around him.
A War World War I veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after losing his friend in the war, Larry is not content with the every day life of those around him. He wishes instead to “loaf” around and live out his days seeking answers to the questions of life that nag at his soul.
At one point, after years of loafing, his fiancé Isabel says to him, “People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they'd have been answered by now."
Larry smiles back at her and says, “it's not true that no one has found the answers. There are more answers than questions, and lots of people have found answers that were perfectly satisfactory for them.”
Larry, like many of us, has deep questions about the human condition. Not everyone knows what it is they are seeking when they start their journey, and in fact, often times, it is tied to a certain hole we feel within ourselves, as thought something were missing. Isabel is right to point out these questions have been asked for thousands of years, but it is about the search, it is about the journey to learn, to look for answers, that our wisdom comes about, that we find answers to our soul, to the deep questions we have.
As Larry summarizes in the novel:
“When a man becomes pure and perfect the influence of his character spreads so that they who seek truth are naturally drawn to him. It may be that if I lead the life I've planned for myself it may affect others; the effect may be no greater than the ripple caused by a stone thrown in a pond, but one ripple causes another, and that one a third; it's just possible that a few people will see that my way of life offers happiness and peace, and that they in their turn will teach what they have learnt to others.”
🦉 Wisdom
"Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results and in the laggard way in which you reach the end."
Robert Greene
Source: Mastery
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.