Those who no longer make mistakes are the wise. And what is a sage, if not someone who knows? What separates ordinary people from these persons is nothing other than a quantity of knowledge – often lived directly through experience.
One must not lament failures, which are only the materialization of our ignorance
One can blame oneself for making mistakes, except if one realizes that most of them are inevitable since they are attributable to the ignorance of one or several pieces of information. There are other mistakes that are avoidable in the sense that we had knowledge of the information but did not have the certainty of having to apply it. It is therefore through pain, in those cases, that one must learn. Essentially, there are three ways to learn: through reflection, through the mistakes of others, or through one’s own mistakes. Someone who has the capacity to learn mainly through reflection and the mistakes of others will have a certain advantage over the others. This explains in particular why it is important to read.
To become wiser is therefore to make fewer mistakes
Contemporary society does not necessarily admire wise people, for it is not in the interest of the forces of money to have us pay attention to them. Someone who advocates peace and harmony is of little interest to those who sell weapons or sweets. These two products are in fact the opposite of a life lived under the prism of wisdom. The wise advocate moderation and popular culture, excess. This is after all logical: it is only in excess that one materializes consumerism. And it is only through excess that one can come to damage one’s health, to then be dependent on the pharmaceutical industry, for example. Popular culture is a dangerous distraction, for it distances us from the true meaning of life and makes us believe that a happy life is permanently unattainable, since the proposed solution (hedonistic race through consumption) is not sustainable.
To be happy, one must begin by turning one’s back on popular culture
The idea is not to live totally out of step with one’s time. It is good to understand the era in which we live in order to understand people, and this necessarily passes through a discovery of its mass culture. The idea is to be a simple observer, not a victim of this system of distraction that pushes us both to consumption and to idolatry. The sublime is elsewhere, and it is therefore elsewhere that one must seek it. Happiness is possible only through the dilation of the soul. It is therefore above all the work of spiritual labor.
As one becomes less ignorant, one becomes wiser, which necessarily pushes us to seek beauty in a domain that is not incarnated. Spiritual seekers are the first aesthetes, but what they seek is ethereal. Art, originally, is only the consequence of a beauty found from an etheric point of view and wanting to materialize in an object.
The difference between a wise man and an intelligent man: the intelligent man knows how to solve a problem that the wise man will have known how to avoid
Intelligent people are put on the front of the stage, for they are the ones who solve the problems that they sometimes even contributed to create. What about those who avoid them or who organize themselves in such a way that these problems never occur? We are very often not aware of their existence. Those who allow dangers to be avoided have more value than those who fight them. Yet society will tend to put forward the latter (firefighters, soldiers, etc.) rather than the former (philosophers, spiritualists, etc.). Likewise, the former will generally be less well paid than the latter if they belong to the same sector (surgeons vs nutritionists). To be intelligent is good, but to be wise is better. It all depends on the type of life you wish to lead. If you think life is more thrilling through action, become intelligent. If, on the contrary, you think that life is more interesting through apparent inaction (wu wei), choose the way of wisdom.
Facing or mitigating risk
Societies adore heroes, that is to say those who risk their life to save others. What about those who do not risk their life but who save others all the same? Well, they go almost unnoticed.
The mitigation of risk consists in limiting the manifestation of an event. For example, if you wish to reduce friction with your clients when you create a business, it is without doubt preferable to think about an online opportunity rather than in the physical world.
Multiply failures while mastering risk
A quick way to gain competence is to throw oneself body and soul into a project. A characteristic example is entrepreneurship, which is in reality only learned through experience. You may read hundreds of books, listen to podcasts on the subject, nothing replaces confrontation with the real. Only practice and failures can truly teach deep knowledge. Of course, it is important to consider the consequences of a failure, and in particular to evaluate whether this one will induce our disappearance – whether physical or economic – or, on the contrary, whether it can be overcome and thus be a source of wisdom, in accordance with the adage: “What does not kill me makes me stronger”, in Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche, 1888). In order to know whether one can recover from a failure, it is suitable to make a two-column table listing the advantages and disadvantages of your choice, applying a coefficient to each criterion according to its importance. The total points of each column for the different criteria (self-assessment of each criterion multiplied by the coefficient) can give you more certainty about your choice. Generally, if you are without experience, it is good to have a greater appetite for risk since you do not have much to lose, so to speak.
What risks can you take?
Risks are linked to the resources you have at your disposal: time, money, energy/attention.
Time
One of the main traps is to persist in a way that is not yours: it is the time that you waste there, and therefore the opportunity cost linked to another way that would be more suited for you. Time is a value that one could say relative, in the sense that you can “compress” it by applying more attention and energy. A simple way to put it is that, if you do something you love, you will have the possibility to increase energy and attention for the same duration and thus give more value to that time.
There is the famous theory of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in order to reach the level of master. This figure is incomplete in the sense that one must associate it with 10,000 trials and errors for it to truly have meaning. That means that time only has real value if we associate it with more or less constant failure in one’s learning.
Money
It is a resource which is in reality the easiest to spend when our income is decoupled from our time and our energy. The problem being that the majority of people earn their living by spending their time and energy, and it is therefore costly for them to spend their money. Money allows you to test things and to have leverage on a project: the more you pour money into it, the more you can increase the effects. Money is that one franc coin that you put into an arcade game to see how far you can go: it is in itself the opportunity to try your luck. For sometimes, it is not time or energy that are lacking but only money. Money can be seen sometimes as a barrier to entry, sometimes as a ticket to try one’s luck (e.g.: buying a plane ticket to go on a spiritual retreat). Generally, I would say that the lack of money is not truly an obstacle to the development of wisdom and that often, it is even the catalyst.
Energy/Attention
We live in the age of the attention economy, which means that this has a certain value. To make the best use of this period, it is suitable to allocate this faculty as best as possible, with discernment and intention, so as to make our wisdom grow. The one who masters where he puts his attention is the true master of our generation.
Memory alters the perception of the past
We often like to remember the past in order to unearth nuggets of wisdom. Most of the time, there is more good than bad in that. The only difficulty is that our memory is malleable and will tend to transform the real perception of our experience. Very often, our memory will be imbued with love and we will tend to see things in a more sugar-coated way. This is not bad in itself, in the sense that the brain seeks to make peace with the past and in some way to become its master and not its slave. It is good always to keep in mind that memory generally embellishes things, and that it is therefore necessary to consider this bias before making radical decisions that take into account only what our memory dictates.
