A BIT DODGY | №38
Smart Is Not Always Wise
The case for humility and experience in the pursuit of wisdom
You know you’re in interesting times when the powerful attack the intellectuals. Interesting times are what wise people used to curse each other with. May you live in interesting times, is akin to praying that someone’s tent be cursed with the fleas of a thousand camels. We are living in interesting times.
What I’m about to say is not terribly difficult to understand or over anyone’s head. It’s just that it’s more work than most people are looking for in this simple medium of listicles and travelogues. We want amusing anecdotes and easy-to-digest narratives that fit into the space in time allowed by the average toilet visit.
That doesn’t mean it has less value. Not everything is a popularity contest. Not everything is dessert. Sometimes spinach is called for. Iron sharpens the mind. Eat your spinach. You’re going to need your strength.
In the world of modern karate, the black belt has long been a symbol of a certain mastery of skill, maturity, and accomplishment. Age and size aren’t always relevant. The youngest black belt in history was five years old, and Indian, if I’m not mistaken. The thing is, a five-year-old cannot take on a full-grown man no matter how much training and skill they have, so a black belt isn’t everything. You still need the strength, size, and experience to know what to do with it.
Someone once said that wisdom is knowing what not to worry about. There’s a lot of truth in that because wisdom infers experience, which is what it takes to stop making the same mistake twice. Experience allows us to focus on the most important aspects of life and ignore the extraneous noise. Experience is what turns mere intelligence into wisdom.
As a culture, we often confuse intelligence with wisdom, but they are not mutually exclusive concepts. You might have extraordinary intellectual capacity and unique abilities, but that doesn’t mean you know what to do with them. Wisdom requires experience and empathy, in addition to intellectual capacity. It is the product of knowledge and awareness.
They say some people are wise beyond their years, preternaturally perceptive despite the number of trips around the sun, but this is less a sign of wisdom than our surprise at youthful displays of skill or talent. That’s the thing about wisdom. Unlike intelligence or natural ability, it is not a gift of birth, but a product of time and experience. No one is born with wisdom. You can be born smart, fast, or even beautiful, but wisdom comes from pain.
Jerry Seinfeld claims that “Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void. You don’t know that the post of your bed was not where you thought it was, but when your foot hits it, that knowledge is going to come rushing in really fast.”
Knowledge is a cumulative thing, something we acquire over time, regardless of academic research or studied effort. Not all knowledge is theoretical in nature. You might know the best way to gut a fish or bait a trap for rats. Someone out there knows the best way to dig a ditch or degrease a carburetor, and if you’re in need of those things, that is invaluable information. Even an idiot can build up a wealth of knowledge, even if it’s things not to do. Knowing where the potholes are can be critical intelligence if you’re traveling down a dark country road. Doesn’t make you a genius, but it can make you indispensable.
In this crazy Information Age, we find ourselves in, it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that intelligence has value that can be calculated by monetary value. We see it daily in the tech sector, where start-up bros with Lamborghini’s demand respect regardless of whether their contributions are worthy. This leads to the seriously dubious thinking that financial success is a sign of intelligence.
I have spent most of my life railing against the status quo and thumbing my nose at the establishment. What do these people know about what’s happening now? How will they help us navigate the future when they’re constantly looking to the past? We can’t solve the problems of the 21st century with 20th-century solutions. Give me talent over experience every time, and I’ll teach them what they need to know.
So, which is more important, intelligence or wisdom?
There are many types of intelligence, and they are not equal. You can be book smart and street stupid. You can be technically brilliant and socially inept. You can be the wealthiest man on earth and still unable to communicate effectively with other human beings. You can also be a working-class nobody who has seen a thing or two, who it would be helpful to know if your shitter stops working. It’s all relative. It’s all important.
It’s time we dispersed with this codswallop that intelligence makes you wise or that wealth makes you competent. It’s all dependent on the whole package. It doesn’t really matter whether you inherited brains or stocks. You’ve still got to do the work if you want it to mean anything. Oh, you can be born rich and stay that way, but you’ll die an empty shell, having contributed nothing to humanity and forgotten quickly. No one will care that you once graced the tennis courts of your country club.
For me, true wisdom is about balance. Not too much of any one thing. A beautiful medley of intelligence, experience, humility, and confidence. A wise man, or woman, knows enough to know how little they know. They have enough experience to know what has worked in the past, but the modesty to know that may not apply to the future.
They say an expert is never surprised by the outcome because it was always one of the possibilities. It is the small-minded who are constantly surprised by the unexpected. They don’t have the imagination to foresee a potential future that hadn’t been previously contemplated. It takes someone who has been perpetually wrong because they weren’t afraid to fail to realize the possibility of many different futures. This takes intelligence, experience, and humility. This is wisdom.
I hate spinach.
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