“Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can always be pretended.” – Thomas Jefferson

A Musing on Wisdom

But what is wisdom exactly? Like love, everyone wants wisdom, but we’re unsure of how exactly to acquire it. We may not always know what it is—but we do know what it isn’t. We can describe it as many things: prudence, discernment, or superficially waxing poetic. Here’s what I think wisdom is: making clear and compelling connections between two otherwise unrelated “buckets.”

The key word there is “compelling.” And this definition is synonymous with another term: creativity. Steve Jobs said,

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

And another time:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

But it’s not simply connecting dots and lines. The awesome power of wisdom is in making connections that make sense by minimizing the degrees of separation. (Personally, I think that the greater the degrees of freedom, the more likely that the “wisdom” you’ve “discovered” is nothing more than a conspiracy theory.)

Wisdom is derived from knowledge. More practically, knowledge helps us go beyond the facts we know. It helps us understand the decisions we make.

When we apply this to learning life lessons, I’m reminded of a Soren Kierkegaard quote:

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

If you don’t know how to turn sterile data (that is, your memories, reflections, and cause and effect of your actions) into meaningful knowledge (and internalize those synaptic lessons into lessons learned), how do you share insights those with others? How can you expect to lead others if you yourself haven’t done enough reflection to understand how it is that God has led you? Once you know that story, you have your testimony. You have a story of the transformative (and transcendent) power of God in your life to share with others. You have the seeds of wisdom.

There is a heirarchy that we must abide by in order to draw insightful conclusions about the world around us. Information can be drawn from data, but data cannot be drawn from information. These “stories” that we create using observational data can change from person to person; everyone’s story is filtered through a person’s individual background, social circumstances, and so on. So if it’s all relative, how do we reach an objective point of view? If an entire group of people corroborate the same story, is that evidence of objective “truth”? To respond to this, we need to have an objective standard to which we compare our conclusions. That objective standard, as I’ve talked about in previous blogs, is a Bible, a God, an unbiased third party arbiter (to use a legal analogy) to separate fact from fiction when we are too mired in confirmation biases to do it ourselves.