This Is Where Wisdom Comes From
Wisdom comes from three things:
- The Experiences.
- The Lesson in the Experiences.
- The Trained Ability to see Through the Experiences.
#1 — The Experiences.
Wise people are those that experience a wide variety of things and/or create deep experiences in certain areas.
This is the main reason why the elderly are often considered wise, simply because they have had more time to collect a bigger pool of experiences.
However, age is not the main factor.
If you sit in your house all day, watching the same kind of TV shows, interacting with the same people and reading the same books, your experiences will stay very limited.
Your pool will not expand and instead will be filled with the same things over and over again.
On the other hand, if you try out new things every day, if you challenge your comfort zones, travel the world, meet new people and talk about new topics with them, if you go out of your way to experience the newest, craziest, most unusual things, you have the potential to be among the wisest people before you even turn 20 years old.
#2 — The Lesson in the Experiences.
Many different people live through the same, or at least, very similar experiences.
They enter similar situations and yet, take something very different from these situations, creating their own, unique experience.
The problem and the opportunity here lies in the fact that every experience has something to teach us.
You do not only have to draw upon the big, unorthodox experiences to teach you something.
Even in complete silence, doing absolutely nothing, you can learn an incredible amount about the world.
As long as you take more experiences seriously and look for a lesson in the experiences rather than just passively absorbing it and living through it, you will increase your chance to become wise exponentially.
#3 — The Trained Ability to see Through the Experiences.
This is the ability to see the bigger picture.
The ability to look past the curtain, look past what is presented in front of them and getting to the core of the situation is an ability that can be trained but leads to a lot of wisdom.
Why are you really having this argument? Why are you really sad? Why are you really not producing at the level you want?
Self-awareness, honesty with oneself, and the desire to achieve something more all play a role in this.
This is often something that comes to people with age, due to older people often learning what matters with time, but it can come to people earlier if they train it.
Being able to disregard the things that do not matter and focusing on the things that do instead requires a lot of different aspects to come together, which is usually summarized as being wise.
These 3 things, together or alone, make up wisdom.
Different people will therefore become wise through different means.
But, if you want to gain an unparalleled depth in your wisdom, then I suggest you get as much of all of them as you can to become truly wise.
Originally published at http://quora.com.
