Wednesday Wisdom: Practical Wisdom, Life’s Immediacy, and Exceptions to the Rule
February 21, 2024's Wisdom
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living by presenting three quotes, three observations, and three questions.
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Practical Wisdom
🤨 Quote
“Wisdom isn't a body of information. It's the moral quality of knowing what you don't know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.”
David Brooks
Source: The Road to Character
Observation 🧐
Questions act as a companion to our every day existence. They help us to better interpret the world we are enveloped in at any given time. They, in short, help ground us within our experience of life.
Questioning what we know is key to properly understanding these experiences. Each new experience provides another opportunity to see a deeper layer of the world. The psychologist Adam Grant says this ability to rethink what we already know is a mindset we can all cultivate.
It is through this rethinking that we develop practical wisdom, knowing when, where, and how to use certain knowledge to get the most out of a situation.
"In matters concerning action and questions of what is beneficial, the agent must consider on each different occasion what the situation demands…”
But if we choose to live a life of dogmatism, of known knowledge, of static acceptance to the world at hand, then we run the risk of outdated reasoning.
By rethinking our current logic and knowledge, we provide ourselves an opportunity to solve issues with new solutions. This is no easy feat, it takes tremendous wherewithal to understand the complexities and depths of life as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in The Bed of Procrustes:
“It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.”
But easy or not, it is necessary for rational thinking in today’s world—it is a requirement. By looking deeper, by questioning our currently held knowledge, we give ourselves an opportunity for new information and a path forward we would not have otherwise seen.
🤔 Question
What is one area of knowledge you have actively resisted updating? What about this is preventing you from challenging your held belief? If you are to challenge it, what is the worse possibility that will come from it?
Life’s Immediacy
🤨 Quote
“Life feeds anyone who is open to taste its food, wonder, and glee-its immediacy.”