In February 2009, Barry Schwartz (an American Psychologist) gave a talk on "Practical Wisdom" at TED. It has been quite a while since I listened to his great talk but one recent encounter of a highly educated friend of mine proudly selling his moral for what he calls "privilege and successful life" triggered my memory.
Barry's major thesis focuses on the gradual degradation of wisdom in the modern American Society. However, I think that almost all arguments he made hold mostly true elsewhere in the world. Citing what Aristotle told us about practical wisdom, "Practical wisdom is the combination of moral will and moral skill", Barry emphases that wisdom is usually measured by how often and how right we do the right thing as compared to what is expected/required or profitable.
This mysterious world is full of rules and procedures in different walks of life. Rules often impair our imagination and our potential to think outside the box. For the world to operate in an orderly manner and to deal with the chaos we invented ourselves, the importance of rules is of course undebatable. But, for a person to do the right thing, following rules may not always lead to the right outcomes. Sometimes, by completely disregarding rules, one can rightly use his moral skills to do the right thing under the cloud of ill-thought rules for the sake of serving his fellows.
The question of being wise comes when one has to make the right exceptions to the right rules under the right circumstances for the right aim and in pursuit of serving the right people. This requires and depends on experience, compassion, selflessness, failures and the ability to invest on our stupidity to learn from failures and protect others from repeating the mistakes we made. As the saying goes "A wise person is made not born".
So, if we are wondering that being brilliant implies being wise, there is more to wisdom than just brilliance. Of course, we need to have both the theoretical grasp and the practical exposure of a subject to be of some help to the people we serve. Brilliance is just one ingredient to cook wisdom. The bottom line in my view is, it is one thing to be brilliant, rich, or even famous, all these gadgets are of no meaning if they are not firlmy-wrapped with wisdom. A wise person is like a Jazz musician-using notes on the page but dancing around them, inventing combinations to the situation and the people at hand. A wise person knows how and when to improvise. The TED talk is here.
