A colleague of mine said this morning that he was awaiting mine.
After about ten minutes, I realized I was probably being insulted. Wisdom is often defined as the ability to perceive, think, decide and act rightly, developed from experience. To get that experience, you have to attempt things you’ve never done before, over and over again. Which means you’ve made a lot of errors. So my friend was saying, “You’ve obviously made a lot of mistakes. Share some of them with us.”
But that’s not the only way to define “wisdom”. The Qur’an contains a Surah Al-‘An`ām (The Cattle, verse 151): “Come, I will rehearse what Allah hath (really) prohibited you from. Join not anything as equal with Him; be good to your parents; kill not your children on a plea of want (famine, scarcity). We provide sustenance for you and for them. Come not nigh to shameful deeds, whether open or secret; take not life, which Allah hath made sacred, except by way of justice and law: thus doth He command you, that ye may learn wisdom”. So wisdom means treating your Mom and Dad nicely and not killing people, especially your kids. (This passage clearly demonstrates the chasm between the teachings of Islam and the actions of suicide bombers who claim to follow Mohammed.)
Going back further, Confucious wrote that wisdom can be learned by three methods, i.e., reflection (the noblest), imitation (the easiest) and experience (the bitterest, and my personal favorite). He further advises that the wise do not share their wisdom with more than one person at a time. That’s an interesting notion that I will have to ponder to understand. Makes me wonder what Ghandi and Martin Luther King would say on the topic. They addressed thousands, and shared much. But was that wisdom, or a sales pitch for peace? The product they sold is certainly high quality, but would they say it was wisdom they were sharing?
Research in brain function has tackled the definition as well. In 2009, Drs. Thomas Meeks and Dilip Jeste evaluated many studies, finding possible neurobiological bases of wisdom involving frontostriatal and frontolimbic circuits in the brain, including certain monoaminergic pathways. Physiologically, wisdom may involve an optimal balance between functions of phylogenetically more primitive brain regions (such as the limbic system), and newer ones (the prefrontal cortex). The human prefrontal cortex, (which is the area most involved in reason, judgment, emotional integration and maturation), develops last. Not until one’s early twenties does this area of the brain finish construction. To parents of teenagers, this is far from news.
Being somewhat egotistical, we humans have named our own species based on the quality of sapience, i.e., Homo sapiens. The word sapience is derived from the Latin word sapientia, meaning wisdom. Related to this word is the Latin sapere, which means “to taste, to be wise, to know”. Carolus Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, dubbed humans thusly. Linnaeus had originally given humans the species name of diurnus, meaning “man of the day”. But then, probably while out late one night drinking too much with his mates, he had the wisdom to determine that the dominating feature of humans was just that, hence the name. A biologist from another solar system, observing our species from afar, might not conclude the same.
In business, the quality of wisdom seems to connote an incisive ability to distill myriad complex factors and changing dynamics to pithy principles and elegantly powerful decisions, relatively quickly. Since most decisions that a business leader makes can take months if not years to provide evidence of success or failure, the determination of what constitutes a “wise” decision or bit of advice is largely left to experimental result. It may sound wise at first, even inspiring or brilliant. But it may be flat out wrong after years of effort.
A warning flag for me is when I say something or make a decision, and somebody else says the equivalent of, “Whoa, that’s good. You are a wise man.” Mind you, this is not a frequent occurrence, but when it happens, I recognize that I’m beginning to think I know something. That’s a very dangerous place to be. To “know” is to stop learning. And as history would so far support, today’s fact is tomorrow’s fallacy. Have you heard that there’s a good chance the universe (all that exists, everywhere, all the time) is comprised of eleven dimensions, not four? Is it news to you that it’s currently thought to hold four dimensions and not three? Stay tuned. Next we’ll discover that the concept of distance is a mental construct, not based in physical fact.
My observation is that people who think they are wise are merely the first to prove their own folly. And the people who think you are wise haven’t yet tested your wisdom to see if it’s of any true use. Life is an experiment, not a conclusion.
That may sound like wisdom, but it’s just my hypothesis.