Tag Archives: wisdom

The (grey) sands of time

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It has been several years since I’ve left my beard for over a week, and now that I have done so, I’m a little surprised by how much grey I see. My beard used to be mostly pepper with a hint of salt, but now the salt has really taken over.

For years now, a passing conversation with my mother-in-law has stuck with me. She was only a few years older than I am now when she shared the following. She said, (and I paraphrase because this was over 25 years ago), ‘You’ll see. You’ll get to my age and you won’t feel old. Your mind will still tell you that you are young, but then you look in the mirror and you see an old you looking back.’

She didn’t say it lightheartedly, but rather with a hint of duress, which is probably what made me remember the conversation. It comes back to me more frequently as I age, and especially when I have moments like this, looking in a mirror and seeing so much grey in my beard. These are ‘where did the time go?’ kind of moments.

And then I shift my thinking. I realize that a lot of time has indeed passed. I see my grown, adult kids and recognize that they too have moments like this, where they wonder how they got to be as old as they are. I see what I’ve built around me with my career, my family, and my friends. I see the commitment I’ve made to care for myself, to dedicate time to writing and to my health… this all takes time. And while I can’t stay young forever, I can continue to feel young.

The grey has come. It will spread. Wrinkle lines will deepen. Reflexes will slow. But I will not yield to these things. I will not accept them as signs that I’m old. No, instead I will work hard to slow the decline in ways I have the power to, and I’ll accept the things that age will make inevitable. Let the grey come. If I still have ways to grow, things to learn, places to see, and experiences to have… I’ll still be young at heart and mind.

Let the grey come.

The Wisdom Gap

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It’s easy to espouse and share wise words. It’s much harder to empathetically and meaningfully live by those words.

The gap between saying and sharing insightful thoughts and actuality representing those thoughts with meaningful action is what really matters.

Empty words or words demonstrated? Vapid ideas or insightful endeavours? Wisdom in platitudes or wisdom fully expressed in a measurable way?

How big is the gap?

It’s easy to say the right thing, it’s only when we do what’s right that we truly show how wise we are.

Odds and ends

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I spent a good part of the afternoon figuring out how I’m going to set up the new solar heaters I purchased for our above ground pool. I used to have 4 large panels that I laid across our garage roof, but I’m not going up on the roof anymore.

This was a decision I made at the start of last summer, deciding that it would be my last season using the roof panels. The process of pulling large plastic solar panels up on a roof and fastening them both together and to the roof is a bit challenging: Completely doable, but challenging. I could probably do it for another 10 years. But I don’t want to play the odds and so I’m putting an end to going on the roof.

The odds that I don’t want to play with are the fact that for older men over 50% of serious injuries and accidental deaths are from falls. The higher the fall, the great odds of it leading to death. A roof is a very high place to fall from. So at the start of pool season last year I decided that I was no longer going up on the roof. I don’t have a fear of heights, I don’t feel unstable. I just know that it’s easier to overestimate my capabilities as I get older, and I’d rather go up on the roof a few less times than possible rather than 1 more time than I should have.

I made a similar decision last summer. My buddy and I took scooters on a 10 minute ride from his house to a pizza place, where I had a couple beers with my pizza. Before heading home, I apologized to him and said I wanted to Uber home because I’m a lightweight with my alcohol and I didn’t want to ride the scooter home feeling a little inebriated.

Essentially, I’m reducing my injury risk, recognizing that even a small fall would mean significant recovery time at my age. This doesn’t mean that I’m living a life of minimizing the odds of every possible danger, but it does mean that at my age I’m getting smarter about when to end things and reduce the risk of injury.

Batteries recharged

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Tomorrow is the last day of our winter break and I have to say that I feel fully ready to get back to work. January is probably my busiest month and if I’m honest, I was not looking forward to starting back after the break.

And now I’m ready.

I can’t say that I fully shut down, but I did so far more than usual, and I think that’s part of the reason I feel so recharged. It’s a little unfortunate that I’m figuring this out so late in my career. For example, I didn’t ignore email, but I realized that there really isn’t much that can’t wait for a response this coming Monday or Tuesday. So I let it go. Earlier in my career I would have felt compelled to respond right away, often unintentionally inviting another email and more work… when the need for a response was not urgent.

Both ‘letting go’ and ‘turning off’ are cathartic, refuelling. Understanding that not just my body but my brain also needs a break is the reason I’m ready.

But first, I have one more Sunday to enjoy.

To be ever better you better never…

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In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear shares the idea of getting 1% better. What’s fascinating about this is that the evidence of improvement is not something you see early on.

Going to the gym 6 days a week for 2 weeks will not have your muscles bulging out of your previously loose shirt, but 2 years later you might need a new wardrobe. Reading just 10 minutes a day doesn’t make you an avid reader in 2 weeks, but 2 years later you’ve read a couple dozen books.

The idea of working to be just 1% better is fantastic, and it has some great long term benefits, with no downside. However, there is one thing to consider and that is avoiding pitfalls that set you backwards. The simple example is that you are making great progress in the gym then you push too hard and get an injury. Now it takes months of rehab before you can get back to where you were before the injury. That’s a lot of days not getting 1% better. Sometimes these injuries are from pushing too hard, sometimes it’s from a simple movement that your body wasn’t expecting. These are understandable, and not always avoidable.

On the other hand, sometimes these injuries fall in the ‘you better never’ category, fully avoidable and preventable.

You better never pick up a football and throw it to almost your maximum distance without warming up with a dozen or so short passes first.

You better never challenge someone half your age to a race and go from zero to full speed in 12 seconds.

You better never do that Instagram challenge where you contort your body and try to pick something up off the floor with your teeth.

Essentially, you better never do dumb shit that your body used to do easily when you were half your age, letting your ego get ahead of your current abilities.

On a journey to be ever better, you better never choose to do something where 10 seconds of misguided effort sets you back months of consistent progress.

The ego and the way

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Intelligence is blind to ignorance. While it is true that the smarter you get, the more likely you are to realize how little you know; It is also true that the smarter you get, the less likely you are to listen to opinions and ideas which you do not agree with. You easily dismiss opposing views, you do not challenge the ideas as much as you challenge the intelligence of those that share them.

Imagine an upside down bell curve. On the X-axis is level of intelligence, on the Y-axis is knowledge of your intelligence.

I think both extremely intelligent and unintelligent people are aware of where they are on the scale, but most people are in the middle. They are somewhat intelligent, and yet blissfully unaware of where they are on the scale. They don’t know what they don’t know, and so they think they are more intelligent than they are. Their knowledge of their intelligence does not match their actual intelligence. I think here, where most people live on the scale, their egos get in the way. Not too many people think, “I am dumber than most people think,” while many would consider, “I’m smarter than people give me credit for.”

And so most people in the world think they are smarter than they are. For that reason, their political, scientific, economic, technical, social, and cultural perspectives are ‘correct’. For the same egotistical reasons, the views of others that oppose them are perceived as less intelligent. I fear that sometimes I too may be guilty here.

And so we live in a world we’re people are egotistically unaware of their lack of intelligence. Crazy conspiracies fool them. Legitimate conspiracies are dismissed. Intelligent sounding pseudoscience convinces them while counterintuitive facts and evidence get easily dismissed. They are smart enough to think they are smart, while scoring high enough on the Dunning-Kruger scale to be easily fooled. Smart enough to do their own research, but not intelligent enough to evaluate that research with intellectual rigour.

And so egos grow with intelligence, and in turn intelligence wanes when the ego interferes with the wisdom that should come with intelligence. Meanwhile, the best and the brightest, the ones who are truly both intelligent and wise, they know just how little they still know. They give up trying to convince the ones who let ego cloud intelligence.

They find themselves lonely, uninterested in bickering over opinions that dismiss and alter facts to win petty arguments. They are labeled as the crazy ones. Their wisdom ignored; they are helpless to bypass the egos and support intelligent growth. Because for most of the world the ego gets in the way.

We don’t need more inputs

I heard a quote on a podcast today and I really felt it: The podcast is Jimmy Carr on Chris Willamson’s Modern Wisdom:

“The answers you’re looking for is in the silence you’re avoiding. You need fewer inputs, not more.”

How often do we seek answers externally when what we should be doing is looking inward?

Teaching wisdom

We all know that one person who didn’t do well in school and isn’t ‘book smart’ but if there is a problem to solve he or she will figure it out. Or someone who’s a tinkerer, who dabbles in fixing anything from a small electric toy to a car engine… maybe they were good at school, maybe not, but they solve problems we would struggle with. This isn’t traditionally the kind of wisdom taught in schools. It’s born out of curiosity and ingenuity.

How can we make learning at school more like this? More like the problem solvers we are going to need. We aren’t going to out book smart AI. We aren’t going to write reports as well as a smartly prompted AI. But even a good AI isn’t going to figure out why a sink suddenly has low pressure any time soon.

Maybe that will come, but for now we are going to be able to out problem solve AI or at least be the ones that figure out what to ask AI to help us out.

So how do we maximize the learning at school to provide students with the kind of wisdom they need to be resourceful in an AI filled world? It won’t be with wrote memorization. It won’t be the review tests. It won’t be the book reports or the 15 math questions going home for homework.

What kind of learning experiences are we creating at school? Do they foster wisdom, systems thinking, and/or problem solving? Are we getting students excited about being learners and problem solvers? Are we creating environments for creators or compliant workers? Because the path of AI and robotics is quickly making compliant workers redundant.

I don’t know if we can explicitly teach wisdom, but we can create experiences where wisdom is valued and the right answer isn’t predetermined. We can design problems that require collaboration, creativity, and insight. And we can teach students to harness AI so that it serves us and we add value to what it can do with us.

Creating unique and challenging learning experiences, with students helping us design these experiences or even designing them themselves…. This is the path forward for schools. If a student spends the day only doing things AI can do better than them, what’s school really teaching?

Put your own oxygen mask on first

Arianna Huffington is 74 years old and she just recently started a new AI business. She started the Huffington Post at age 55 and sold it 6 years later for 315 million dollars. In this The Diary of a CEO podcast interview with Steven Bartlett she shares this gem of a story.

The moral of the story is simple: Leaders need to take care of themselves, and get enough sleep, in order to be at their best. She says, “All the science now makes it very clear that when we are depleted we are going to make bad decisions.”

Then quoting Jeff Bezos, “I sleep 8 hours a night… I’m judged by the quality of my decisions, not the quantity of my decisions.”

As the new school year begins, take this as a reminder to take care of yourself first, if you really want to take care of your staff and students. It’s not good enough to only exercise, and eat well, and get enough sleep when you are not busy. You owe it to yourself, those you serve, and your job, to treat yourself well. It’s not selfish to put on your oxygen mask first, it’s how you get enough air to take care of others.

Build good habits and take the time to care for yourself first, when you are busiest, and it will become very easy to do so all the time. You will benefit as a person, as a friend, as a partner, as a parent, as an employee, and as a leader. It starts with you taking care of you.

Reflections of the past

I noticed it just as I was hitting ‘send’. My daughter had sent a Snapchat from a cottage she was leaving, a quick note to her family to say that she enjoyed her little getaway. I sent a response photo, a quick selfie as a replay with a comment like, ‘Hope you had fun’ written over the image. I didn’t pose. I didn’t concern myself with how I looked. It was only a quick picture going to my family, and so I just clicked the photo, wrote the text, and sent the image off to the group chat… knowing that it would disappear just after my family saw it. That’s the thing about Snapchat, unless one of my family saved the image in the chat, it would be gone after they look at it.

Except, for a split second before I hit the send button I saw something I didn’t expect. I saw a reflection of my grandfather in the image of myself. This was unusual, because I don’t really look like him. Sure, I often see reflections of my dad in my own reflection, we have similar traits and they seem to converge as I age, but I don’t have a lot of similar features to my grandfather, my mother’s dad.

I’d only seen this once before, years ago, and again on Snapchat. I used the aging filter and for the first time ever I saw a resemblance to my grandfather when I added about 25 years to my current age. But this time there was no filter, no gimmick, just a quick, unposed image of myself and a peek of my grandfather looking back at me.

It has been almost a quarter of a century since my grandfather passed away. Just over 38 years since the other one passed. That amazes me, because some of the memories of them still feel close. A friend recently shared this about aging, “The days seem longer, and the years seem shorter.” This resonates with me. A day seems to last about a day long, it doesn’t fly by, but the years have. My reflection in the mirror is somehow older than it should be. The man looking back has seen more years than I expect him to see.

It was just a quick glimpse of my own reflection, but one that has me reflecting on how quickly time passes. One that has me appreciating those who have been part of my life, and are gone, as well as those who are here with me now. The years are short, but they are lengthened by the memories we form, the moments that are not just ordinary. If we don’t make efforts to connect with others and create special moments, then those moments are nothing more than Snapchat memories… gone moments after we look at them.