The Difference Between Wisdom and Smarts
When slight differences lead to big outcomes.
Hi everyone,
Thanks for joining me this week. It’s been an eventful two weeks for me, with me moving from one place to another, but also another big move from London to Singapore at the end of the month. I’ll be there from October till the end of March next year, so if anyone fancies a coffee, let me know and we’ll see what we can do.
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Work and Performance
Reject the Algorithm: “This is the problem of our age. We’ve become obedient to algorithms. But this goes beyond content creators on Twitter and YouTube. Following the algorithm pervades our society. It’s when you take a career in consulting or banking because your college classmates did so. It’s when you invest in a new cryptocurrency or tech stock because it’s popular. Ultimately, it’s when you let others shape your life instead of building your own.”
I’m guilty of this. I’ve written articles that were engineered for search. I’ve written twitter threads in formats optimised for virality. Heck, my career in law is something that’s safe and popular as well.
In many of the cases when I’ve done something that is optimised, I haven’t really been happy. But when I’ve tried something new - when I’ve pushed boundaries - I always feel a little excited knowing that I’ve just made a small act of rebellion against society (and the algorithm), and that’s a feeling I hope I’ll experience often for the rest of my life. And guess what? Most of the time you don’t get punished for it.
Thinking Better
Is It Worth Being Wise?: "Wise" and "smart" are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that "wise" means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and "smart" means one does spectacularly well in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person would have high peaks.
[…] Society seems to have voted for intelligence. We no longer admire the sage—not the way people did two thousand years ago. Now we admire the genius. Because in fact the distinction we began with has a rather brutal converse: just as you can be smart without being very wise, you can be wise without being very smart. That doesn't sound especially admirable. That gets you James Bond, who knows what to do in a lot of situations, but has to rely on Q for the ones involving math.”
I don’t know how accurate PG’s distinction between smart and wise is, but I think it’s a pretty good one. Wisdom after all, comes from experience, while intelligence is something you can easily spot in the young. You’d call a college dropout billionaire founder smart but probably not use the word “wise”. That has some serious implications on what to chase, and just as importantly, the kind of advice you should take from someone. It comes down to what you want, and the two are not the same.
Respect and Admiration: “Let me first distinguish nice stuff from fancy stuff. Someone once noted that a high-end Toyota is a better car than an entry-level BMW, because the nice Toyota is filled with things that make driving more pleasant, while the entry-level BMW is mostly just status and bragging rights. Using money to buy nice stuff is great. Fancy stuff is a different animal.”
There’s premium goods, and then there’s luxury. Premium improves your life in the same way that a high end Toyota has better features than most cars. Luxury on the other hand, is about signaling, and telling people that your car has better features than theirs (whether it really does being a secondary matter). I think a good medium is not necessarily to be minimalist, but to spend money on premium things that you enjoy, and perhaps luxury on a few choice items.
Lessons Learned The Hard Way: "Tests aren’t nearly as useful as projects. Just about anything worth learning is worth learning the hard way."
There’s nothing quite like pain, embarrassment, or just about any other strong emotion that helps us to remember a lesson. Another timely reminder on the value of experience.
Human Behaviour
Why You Believe The Things You Do: “The dangerous thing is that beliefs based on experience seem evidence-based. But when we’re overwhelmed with observations in a complex world, we cherry-pick the most attractive evidence to appease our simple, story-loving minds.”
I think Morgan Housel said it best, “best story wins”. The story we like most, and want most to be true, is the story that we end up believing in. Good stories however, aren’t what’s necessarily true. One heuristic I’ve learnt is that we should discount whatever story that will most benefit us - oftentimes that helps to give us a little more clarity on what the actual truth is.
As usual, let me know what you think.
Talk soon,
Louis
I really like the the comparison of premium quality vs luxury. We get what we pay for and at the same time we need to realize our materialism is more damaging to our self worth than we can imagine.