Podcast
No Stupid Questions
The book presented an argument that people want to succeed but also want to do the right thing, and exercising practical wisdom is the way to balance these aims. The authors offered six key qualities of how a wise person should behave, including knowing proper aims, knowing how to improvise, and being perceptive.
And it dawned on me that ruts with wagon wheels and the like are probably not an accessible analogy right now. But if you could go back to that visual of a rut in the mud that gets deeper and deeper a...
— Episode: 36. Which Matters More, a First or Last...
Episode: 36. Which Matters More, a First or Last Impression...
The book presented an argument that people want to succeed but also want to do the right thing, and exercising practical wisdom is the way to balance these aims. The authors offered six key qualities of how a wise person should behave, including knowing proper aims, knowing how to improvise, and being perceptive.
And it dawned on me that ruts with wagon wheels and the like are probably not an accessible analogy right now. But if you could go back to that visual of a rut in the mud that gets deeper and deeper and it's very hard to get out of that groove.
I did come across this book. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but I'd like to tell you about it a little bit. Maybe this would prove useful for Yvonne as well. It's written by two authors, one of whom I know you know, Barry Schwartz, who's a psychologist at Swarthmore, and Kenneth Sharp, who is a political scientist at Swarthmore. And it's called Practical Wisdom.
The second one, a wise person knows how to improvise, balancing conflicting aims and interpreting rules and principles in light of the particularities of each context.
Wisdom rule number three from Practical Wisdom. A wise person is perceptive, knows how to read social context and knows how to move beyond the black and white of rules and see the gray in the situation.
The last landmark of this book, Practical Wisdom, is as follows. A wise person is an experienced person. Practical wisdom is a craft, and craftsmen are trained by having the right experiences.