WISDOM
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian American spiritual guru of the 1940s through the 1980s, was quite the jokester. According to Krishnamurti’s still-functional website, one of the funnies he liked to tell was the story of a young man who leaves home to look for wisdom. The man goes to a well-known guru who lives on the banks of a river. “Please, sir,” he says to the old man, “allow me to stay with you. I want to learn the truth from you.” The guru agrees and so the young man spends five years washing the guru’s clothes, cooking for him, and performing all kinds of tasks for the presumably wise old teacher. And after five years, he says to the master, “I’ve spent five years with you but I still don’t know the truth and haven’t learned a thing. So if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you. Perhaps I can find another teacher from whom I can learn more about the truth.”
“Sure,” says the old man, “go right ahead.”
So the young man goes off and finds several other gurus, from whom he learns various tricks. After another five years have passed, the man remembers his old teacher and goes to visit him.
“So what have you learned?” the old man asks. And his former student tells him that he can walk on hot coals, levitate, and pointing at the river, says proudly, “And I can walk on the waters of that river to the opposite shore!”
“It took you five years to learn that?” exclaims the old master. “Didn’t you know that not more than fifty yards from here, you can take the ferry boat across for two pence?”
Please take as much time as you need to control your paroxysms of hilarity. Are you finished? OK. While the joke isn’t necessarily LOL funny, it makes an important point: intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing. In this story, the young man returns to his old master with learning and skills—the trappings of intelligence—but without wisdom. But if wisdom isn’t intelligence, then what is it?
First, it’s a paradox: wisdom is one of the most studied and admired human abilities in ancient traditions ranging from the Greek philosophers to the Hindu Vedas. But of the skills in this book, it’s probably the least represented in modern labs. The few modern experts working on wisdom disagree on exactly what it is, but can generally get behind the idea of wisdom as the sum of cognitive, reflective, and emotional components.
In the cognitive component, a wise person comprehends the truth—the world as it is, unclouded by the way we want it to be. In the reflective component, the wise person thinks objectively and from perspectives outside that of self-centeredness. Finally, the emotional component of wisdom trades depression, anger, and hatred for empathy, sympathy, and compassion. Science considers the reflective component the keystone for developing the other two—if you can reflect from outside your own point of view, you can learn to see the truth and feel/act accordingly.
For example, in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, psychologists Ethan Kross and Igor Grossmann asked strongly liberal and strongly conservative subjects to think about what the world would be like if their preferred candidate lost. Some were asked to reason as US citizens and some were asked to reason as if they lived in Iceland. Reasoning with distance—from outside the self-centered viewpoint—allowed the erstwhile Icelanders to recognize that no matter who won the election, the world was unlikely to fly from its orbit and spiral into the sun. People who went to Iceland in their minds were also more likely than immersed observers to list their contact info on a sheet gathering names for a bipartisan discussion group. In short, metaphorical distance allowed the “Icelanders” to act more wisely than the group that reasoned from an embedded perspective.
So now we see not only what wisdom is but the first step to achieving it: reasoning from many perspectives, and specifically from outside your own. Wisdom is not all about you.
Perhaps, as popular opinion holds, the second ingredient of wisdom is age? Science has asked this question, and it turns out there’s a somewhat nuanced answer. See, in nearly any measurable decision-making task researchers throw at them, younger people act more wisely than older ones. With youth comes wisdom; with age comes foolishness.
But there’s one kind of decision-making game the elderly totally dominate.
“In many real-world contexts, our present choices often determine our future possibilities,” writes Darrell Worthy and his colleagues in a 2011 article for the journal Psychological Science. In his game, subjects had to extract an ever-decreasing amount of virtual oxygen from Mars. One extraction method pulled more oxygen per round but quickly degraded the ability to extract more—it was like eating chocolate cake: good right away but with decreasing gains in the long run. Another method was slow and steady, extracting less oxygen per round but only slowly degrading subjects’ ability to harvest oxygen in later rounds—it was like eating a quinoa-chard salad: joyless in the moment but with benefits over time. Older subjects chose the “salad” option and thus won the game by maximizing the long-term payoff of the system as a whole.
It turns out young people are better at associating choices with their direct values, but older people are better at describing how “various options and their associated rewards are connected to one another,” Worthy writes.
With age comes wisdom—at least in the system-wide, slow-burn sense of the term.
But as the venerable Robert Sternberg points out, with age, “Some people become truly wise and some become old fools.” If that’s the case, there must then be even another ingredient. What makes this difference? Maybe as Aeschylus wrote, “Wisdom comes alone through suffering”? Maybe it’s the accumulation of suffering that brings wisdom, and those who become old fools instead of growing wise simply haven’t suffered enough?
There’s a bit of truthiness in this. In 2001, a study at the University of Michigan showed that women who went through major upheavals in love or career in their thirties generally had more wisdom in their fifties than those who coasted through middle age on waters of serenity. That is, as long as one important thing was true: overall, good experiences had to outweigh bad experiences. Suffering leads to wisdom only as long as it’s balanced by joy. Otherwise, you can live as wretchedly as you like without gaining wisdom to show for it.
So we’ve talked about a few important factors in building wisdom: perspective, age, and joy overbalancing suffering. Mix them all together and you get what Sternberg calls the genesis of wisdom: “The main way wisdom is created is the extent to which you learn through your experience.” It’s not just the fact of accumulated experience that creates wisdom, but what we get from these experiences. “It’s how much you observe, how much you want to learn, how much you process,” says Sternberg.
Krishnamurti summarizes this recipe for wisdom in slightly different words: “Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.”
Reflect on the experience of these words, Grasshopper, and wisdom you will find.
THE WISDOM OF PROVERBS
Paul Baltes of the Max Planck Institute, one of the founders of the modern study of wisdom, showed that wisdom really can be captured by proverbs. Unfortunately, he showed that the opposite is true too—proverbs may also crystalize rules of thumb that make us feel better, without necessarily recommending wise thoughts, feelings, or actions.
The wise among us know the difference.
In fact, Baltes showed both that wise people consistently choose wise proverbs over attractive alternatives (whereas unwise people are suckered by the panaceas), and that by reflecting on the difference between the two we can develop this wisdom. Here’s a test similar to one pioneered by Baltes in 1999:
In each of the following situations, choose the proverb that best represents the wise action or attitude. Some will seem ambiguous at first and, of course, the choice is supposed to be difficult. The true training in this exercise comes from the explanation in the answers section at the back of the book—but to avoid spoilers, please answer these before you flip to the back for the punch line.
1. If something matters to me …
A) Procrastination is the thief of time.
B) Time will tell.
2. When a worthwhile task proves difficult …
A) Don’t change horses midstream.
B) Enough is enough.
3. When an entrenched practice proves not to be a best practice …
A) Don’t shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.
B) A stitch in time saves nine.
4. When struggling to decide …
A) Between two stools you fall to the ground.
B) Tomorrow is another day.
5. When feeling spread thin …
A) Enough is as good as a feast.
B) Jack of all trades, master of none.
6. When things fail to click into place …
A) It’s no use crying over spilt milk.
B) When there’s no wind, grab the oars.
7. When your goal may require a contentious struggle …
A) Leave well enough alone.
B) Strike when the iron is hot.
8. When presented with a setback …
A) If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
B) Time heals all wounds.
9. When a first attempt fails …
A) Desperate times call for desperate measures.
B) After a rain comes sunshine.
10. When you have set something in motion that is failing …
A) Easy come, easy go.
B) God helps those who help themselves.
11. In the face of many goals and limited resources …
A) Variety is the spice of life.
B) Those who follow every path never reach any destination.
12. When things seem more difficult than you imagined they would be …
A) Practice makes perfect.
B) Good things come to those who wait.
13. When looking ahead at impending challenges …
A) Don’t cross a bridge till you come to it.
B) Make hay while the sun is shining.
14. When forced to choose between two alternatives …
A) You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.
B) Good things come to those who wait.
15. When setbacks force you to revise your goal …
A) Those without a horse walk.
B) Out of sight, out of mind.
16. When time is tight …
A) Everyone has his cross to bear.
B) One can’t have everything.
17. When one method fails …
A) Man gets used to everything.
B) There are many hands; what one cannot do, the other will.
18. When presented with unforeseen challenges that make a goal seem more difficult than you imagined …
A) Don’t lose the ship for a hap’orth of tar.
B) Everything comes to him who waits.
Click here for answers.
IMAGINE WISDOM
Paul Baltes writes, “There exist cognitive strategies, readily adoptable by most individuals, that can increase the expression of wisdom-related knowledge.” One of these strategies is imagination. In a 1996 study, Baltes showed that people presented with a life problem who then imagine a conversation with a significant other act with more wisdom than those who spend a similar amount of time learning academically about the idea of wisdom. In a follow-up, Baltes and his colleagues asked people to imagine floating to different countries on a cloud and to reflect on the cultures and peoples they visit. Afterward, these dreamers gave measurably wiser answers to dilemmas like the Meaning of Life Problem, as follows: “In reflecting over their lives, people sometimes realize that they have not achieved what they had once planned to achieve. What should one/they do and consider?” So next time you’re in need of an instant, small boost of wisdom, take a minute and just imagine chatting with a trusted partner or visiting other cultures.
Click here for answers.
MORAL REASONING
In 2001, Baltes’s frequent collaborator Ursula Staudinger proved what you might already suspect: moral reasoning and wisdom are linked. Specifically (and this is kind of cool albeit technical), for those who possess strong moral reasoning, wisdom increases with age. If you have lower moral reasoning, you gain no wisdom as you get older. So if you want wisdom later, train your moral reasoning now.
OK, so how do you train moral reasoning? Well, a slew of studies show that you can do it by thinking through moral dilemmas. Read the moral dilemmas below, write your well-reasoned answers, and then flip to the answers section of this book for discussion.
You’re staying late at the law office where you work to finish a project and realize you’ve lost materials a coworker sent to you earlier in the week. You accidentally learned this coworker’s e-mail password and so log on to her account to resend yourself the materials. But while on her account, you see she’s been spending a good part of her workday playing Internet poker. Either ratting out your coworker to management or suggesting she curb her poker playing at work will require admitting you used her account, which is strictly verboten. What should you do?
Your friend Egbert just started an intimate relationship with the woman of his dreams. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Egbert, the woman is your other friend Ronald’s wife. Ronald, suspecting something, asks you for friendly counsel. Where does your loyalty lie? Whom should you crush? Or should you just stay quiet and hope it blows over?
Your spouse is sick and a drug will cure him/her. But you can’t afford the drug. In this situation, is it justified to break into the laboratory of the drug manufacturer who sets the high price? Would it change the morality if the sick person were your child, your parent, or your dog instead of your spouse?
You are a conscripted soldier in a war you think is wrong and in which you’ve lost belief. Still, you love and respect your country and its laws of conscription. Are you right to go AWOL?
Your daughter was murdered, and while you’re certain of who her killer is, there isn’t enough evidence to convict him. You start spying on the killer in hopes of building a case. One of these spying evenings, the killer’s wife is herself murdered and the killer you’ve been following is convicted of the crime. But you know he’s innocent—you were watching him at the time of the crime. Is it your duty to offer an alibi?
An adult woman blames her parents’ continuing iron-fisted control of her life for her indigence and substance-abuse problems. But when her parents don’t watch over her, she spirals further into substance abuse. As her social worker, what would you counsel and why?
Click here for answers.
TEACH TO THE TESTS
How do you train wisdom? Well, if tests like the widely used SAWS, 3D-WS, and WDS measure wisdom, then activities that increase your scores on these tests train it. This was Robert Sternberg’s reasoning when he designed a school curriculum around wisdom—he used the tests to break wisdom into its components and then trained each piece.
Below are components common to the SAWS, 3D-WS, and WDS tests, along with simple, life-based strategies to train them. Pick one a day until you’ve exhausted the list and then repeat as necessary.
1. Don’t take yourself so seriously: Find at least one opportunity to laugh at yourself—bonus points for allowing others to laugh at you, too.
2. Think about how the past affects the present and future: Remember how a past event informs one of your present decisions or actions. Spend the day trying to recognize these present-to-past connections.
3. Learn something new: Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s not wisdom—find an opportunity to learn about something completely foreign to you.
4. Regulate your emotions: Flip to this book’s chapter on emotional intelligence and practice transforming your emotions to match the needs of situations.
5. Find humor in the rough: In Bill Cosby’s wise words, “Once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.” Nurture the wisdom of the Coz. Today, pick something difficult in your own life or in world events and find humor in it.
6. Accept diversity: Instead of summarily foreclosing on people who don’t share your opinions, walk a proverbial mile in their shoes. Today, have a constructive conversation with a family member or Facebook friend who doesn’t share your political views.
7. Be curious: It’s easy to get stuck in the rut of cooking chicken with peppers while listening to classic rock. Instead, wisdom comes from curiosity—today, listen to new music, be it country, salsa, Stravinsky, or gamelan. And eat a new food—maybe check the ethnic aisle in the grocery store for something you’ve never seen before.
8. Experience compassion: Have a conversation today with someone who needs help. Chances are someone who fits the bill is all too easy to find. If not, search for online support groups and lend your compassionate voice to whatever chat you’re most drawn to.
9. Ask for help: The wise know the limits of self-sufficiency. Look for an aspect of your life that’s slipping through the cracks and ask for help. Do you need help keeping the house clean, saving money, enjoying life? Today’s the day to get the help you need.
10. Accept ambiguity: Some problems have no answers. Spend today giving brainpower to one such intractable problem whose changing, contradictory, or ambiguous circumstances means there’s no actual answer.
Click here for answers.
ANCIENT WISDOM VS. NONSENSE
This exercise is just for fun. Mostly. Just over half of the following sentences are ancient wisdom (or at least real quotes) and just fewer than half are nonsense from a range of random sentence generators. Sort the wisdom from the nonsense. And then before you look at the answers to see which is really which, try to interpret the phrases you labeled wisdom. What do you think makes something “wise”?
The gleaming darkness confounds the fault.
When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of its momentum.
A thesis presupposes the waste of this gleaming sky.
This thaw took a while to thaw; it’s going to take a while to unthaw.
A dream presupposes wisdom: it is the immanent decision.
High-five is a skin ballot.
All you need is ignorance and confidence and then success is sure.
Our thinking and our behavior are always in anticipation of a response.
Any light cannot be the charm of our omnipotent passage.
I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river.
Ignorance is enhanced by the prudence of the benevolent thought.
The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer.
The pure thought falsifies any passion.
Should a bass frown at an insult?
A wheel clicks before a sniff.
The poet extends into the rabbit.
One of the things important about history is to remember the true history.
Swift as the wind, quiet as the forest, conquer like the fire, steady as the mountain.
Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.
Some divisibility reveals the passion of any original void.
The idea of the hidden performs the epistemology of unsituated knowledge.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?
The baster makes a good chicken nervous.
A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean.
One moon shows in every pool in every pool the one moon.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
Any universal thought destroys the spirit, which is the brilliant totality.
Any fertile vision is balanced by passion.
Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
Click here for answers.