Yet, there’s something extremely odd about wisdom: nobody agrees on what it means.

Here are six thought-provoking definitions of wisdom that l find it useful to reflect on:

1) Wisdom as self-consistency: 

Wisdom is an equilibrium where you find alignment between all combinations of your:

• values

• beliefs

• actions

Inspiration: Justin Shovelain and Elliot McKernon

2) Wisdom as causal control: 

Wisdom is the ability and propensity to consider complex sets of circumstances and then, through a deep understanding of causal mechanisms regarding oneself, humans, and the world, choose actions that will (on average) lead to beneficial outcomes.

Inspiration: Vervaeke/Ferraro

3) Wisdom = Knowledge x Goodness

If you know nothing, then you have no wisdom. On the other hand, if you use your knowledge purely to seek harm, you also lack any wisdom.

Wisdom is the combination of what you know and how good the ends are that you use that knowledge to pursue.

4) Wisdom as a virtue: 

Wisdom comes about through the accumulation of character strengths like:

• factual knowledge, self-knowledge, understanding

• first-hand experience, common sense

• compassion, altruism

• impartiality, non-attachment, objectivity, epistemic humility

• courage

5) Wisdom as search: 

Developing wisdom means pursuing the virtues and knowledge of the good, exploring the essential truths about life and the causes and effects of things, and practicing applying these insights to both theoretical and real-life situations.

6) Wisdom as perspective: 

Wisdom involves seeing a situation from multiple viewpoints and weighing the strengths and limitations of each one while incorporating knowledge of psychology, biases, ethics, and the nature of reality to make judgments that reliably produce flourishing.

This piece was first written on August 1, 2023, and first appeared on this site on August 9, 2023.

That peak reflects the total sum of your achievements according to your intrinsic values. This may include, for instance, your happiness, the happiness of your loved ones, your positive impact on the world, living virtuously, achieving your deeply meaningful goals, and so on.

Unfortunately, the mountains you face are foggy as hell. Plus, they have dense forests, huge boulders, and brambles covering them. Your mountains are untamed, uncharted.

• The fog means that you can only see clearly for a short distance, and the further you look, the harder it is to tell what’s out there.
• The dense forests mean that to go a considerable distance in most directions, you’ll have to whack your way through with substantial effort.
• The huge boulders will sometimes make a path impassible that had looked promising from around the bend.
• The brambles mean that certain paths will cause considerable pain if you take them. Even more inconveniently, beautiful grasses and flowers sometimes conceal the brambles.

These are your personal mountains, unique in all the world. Your mountains are determined by a combination of:

(1) Your intrinsic values. It is your values that determine the height of each landing and peak, including the height of wherever you’re standing right now.
(2) The structure of the real world, which makes some paths easier to traverse than others. The locations of the forests, boulders, and brambles are metaphors for this structure.
(3) Your current life situation. This is represented by your current latitude and longitude on the mountain range, as well as your physical and mental health, resources, and skills.

Looking out from a distance, you can see the dim outlines of many high-up peaks far away that look promising, but they are in different directions from each other. That means you’ll have to make tough choices about what direction to go, even at the beginning of your journey.

This journey will take your entire life. If you’re like most people, it will be long and hard but also too short. It will be wondrous, terrifying, joyful, and sad.

Rather than trying to travel a great distance in order to climb to great heights, it is easier to find the first comfortable spot, set up a hammock and tent, and make camp there forever. Who can blame you for making that choice (except, perhaps, yourself)?

If you decide to take the journey, you’ll need to use your tool belt, which (if you’re lucky) comes equipped with five (metaphorical) tools.

To have the greatest chance of reaching the highest peaks, you’ll want to train yourself to be a master of each tool.

Here are the tools to master.

Tool 1: The walking stick, which is what you use to move forward along the path you’ve chosen.

By far, the most common tool you’ll use is the walking stick. For every choice of path, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time walking.

Maybe you’ll give up and turn back at the first encounter with a snake, tiger, or tornado. Or maybe you’ll use the walking stick to keep going.

You’re using the walking stick when you create a to-do list and tick items off of it. You’re using it when you push through fear to do something valuable.

Mostly, climbing a mountain involves using your walking stick, but if you only use that, you’re doomed.

Tool 2: The telescope, which allows you to peer at the shape of the mountain, collecting data and facts about the world that you can use to select your path.

The questions that guide your use of the telescope are ones like:

• What questions could I ask that would help me choose my path?
• What do I need to know about the mountains that I don’t yet know?
• What important question am I confused about?
• Where is my lack of knowledge showing?

The scope, like each of your tools, takes many forms. In a start-up, it may look like talking to customers, running surveys, examining other products, or scrutinizing the structure of your own product, keeping a keen eye out for flaws. In your career, it may look like researching career paths, talking to others who have tried different routes, quickly trying things out, and soliciting feedback on your work from your colleagues.

What you’re looking for with the telescope are indications of which nearby paths lead quickest up the mountain, as well as hints for other (potentially faraway) parts of the mountain range that may have yet higher peaks (even if you have to go a ways back down the mountain to get there).

Being good at using the scope means being observant, impartial, curious, methodical, open to criticism, and empirical. And it means being able and willing to cope with reality.

Tool 3: The notepad, which you use to formulate your theories about how the world works, as well as to devise plans.

This tool will most dramatically increase how effectively you use the telescope because there are far too many potential things to point the scope at. Your theories on the notepad, therefore, guide your use of the scope. At the same time, the scope provides data to go into your theories in the notebook.

Some of your theories will be explicit, penned in detail with full awareness, but most will be implicit, born out of the things you’ve seen, etched in your subconscious with a shadowy ink.

In your personal life, your notebook contains your understanding of yourself, your partner, your parents, your friends, and human nature. It contains your understanding of your mountains (as well as other people’s mountains) and your beliefs about where the brambles, boulders, and high peaks lie.

To use the notebook is to sit and reflect, to make predictions, to spell out your thoughts, to reduce ambiguity through precision, to derive new knowledge from other things you already know, to come to new conclusions.

Being good at using the notebook means being thoughtful, philosophical, reflective, logical, cautious, precise, and rational.

Tool 4: The jump rope, which you use to practice and improve your skills.

Sometimes, this will take the form of physical training – maybe you don’t yet have the bushwhacking skills to knock away the brambles. Oftentimes, the training and practice will be mental rather than physical. Maybe you don’t know enough about how to use the scope, or your facility with the notepad is not where it needs to be.

Early on in your journey, you’ll need to use the metaphorical jump rope a lot so that you can build the skills you’ll need for the journey. Over time, you’ll need it less often, but there will always be new skills that are useful to train as you climb higher.

The jump rope is informed by the scope and the notebook. Sometimes the scope will tell you about the sort of paths you’ll soon need to face, and the jump rope will help you prepare for them. Other times, you’ll turn the lens of the scope on yourself to see your weaknesses. You can then use the jump rope to work on these, to reshape yourself.

You’re using the jump rope when you’re reading to learn, taking a course to understand something important, practicing how to do something, asking someone to teach you, breaking a difficult skill into smaller pieces, or asking a question when you’re confused.

If your walking speed is slow, or you find another weakness that is slowing you down, use the jump rope to get that skill up to par. But just as importantly, use the jump rope to hone what you’re already good at, to sharpen it into an exceptional skill.

Tool 5: The whistle, which is how you get the help you need from others.

Most things that are worth doing can’t be done alone, and those that travel without a whistle put themselves in great peril. Sometimes you’ll need the help of others to clear a path, to show you how to use the other tools effectively, or to help you understand why you’re stuck. No matter where you’re headed on the mountains, there are those that have gone that way before who have advice to share.

Using the whistle may mean requesting assistance or a favor, but it can also mean asking advice, asking a simple question, or getting support when you’re mentally exhausted.

Being good at using the whistle means investing time in your relationships, developing deep connections, being a good friend when others use their whistles, meeting new people when you perceive gaps, and being bold enough to call for support when you could use it.

Never travel without a whistle when you don’t have to.

So how, then, do you get to the top of your mountains? Well, you will never get to the very top – the mountains stretch forever. But you can climb high. To maximize your chances, use:

(1) The walking stick (to keep moving forward without giving up).
(2) The telescope (to investigate the mountains carefully and with minimal bias so that you can understand where the brambles and boulders are).
(3) The notepad (to reflect carefully on your beliefs and formulate your plans).
(4) The jump rope (to improve your weaknesses and enhance your strengths).
(5) The whistle (to get help and support).

Good luck – may your climb be a joyous one!

This piece was first written on May 19, 2023, and first appeared on this site on September 22, 2023.

Principles act as shortcuts to help you make choices that you’ll be satisfied with, and they serve as beacons to guide you toward a better version of yourself. They also serve as an encapsulation of important lessons you’ve learned throughout your life.

We recently released an interactive module to help you determine your principles. It also makes it easy to save or print off a beautiful depiction of your principles to help you keep them top of mind. You can use the module yourself here.

A big shout-out goes to Adam Binks who created this module!

Here are the principles I attempt to live by as of Jan 3, 2023:

1. Seek the truth on important topics, even when it’s difficult. Listen carefully to all plausible sides. Aim to avoid all self-deception.

2. Aim to have opinions on most topics that are important to you, but view your beliefs probabilistically. Be quick to update your view as you get new evidence.

3. Always strive to become a better version of yourself. Take constructive feedback with grace and use it to improve.

4. Try to understand your intrinsic values and avoid confusing them with instrumental values. Aim to be highly effective at generating what you intrinsically value.

5. While capable, devote a substantial percent of your time and effort to improving the world.

6. Try to always be kind.

7. Try never to tell lies. White lies are okay only when they’re what the recipient would prefer.

8. Don’t let anyone of low moral character be a recurring or substantial part of your life.

9. Try to be grateful for all that you have. Take pleasure in simple things.

10. Take care of your physical and mental health.

11. Always have a self-experiment running to find new ways to better yourself and your life.

12. Aim not to avoid anything valuable just because it makes you feel awkward, anxious, or afraid.

13. Remember that you will usually fail many times at any difficult thing before you succeed. Try, fail, learn from your mistakes, and try again.

This post was first written on December 31, 2022, was edited slightly on January 3, 2023, and first appeared on this site on July 26, 2023.

I think one of the big choices to be made in life (once basic needs are well met) is whether to try to optimize more for a life of stability or for a life of acceleration. There is a tension between these two types of lives because they imply making different decisions in many realms.

From what I can tell, the significant majority of people on this planet (even among those who have their basic needs already well met) seek a life that is more one of stability than one of acceleration. And I think that, to many, stability epitomizes most elements of what it means to live “the good life”: forge friendships you can keep for decades, find work you can be a master of, meet a life partner with compatible goals and values, buy a house you will live in indefinitely, spend your free time doing the hobbies you love most, etc.

Yet, in some social circles I encounter in New York and San Francisco, the presumption seems to be that acceleration is the obviously superior goal.

So which do you seek more: stability or acceleration?

Optimizing for stability may involve things like…

(1) hobbies: figuring out what you enjoy doing most and doing those things whenever you have time,

(2) friendship: figuring out who you like being around and turning that group into your permanent circle that you spend almost all your social time with,

(3) work: getting skilled at some type of work that provides the lifestyle you want and doing that thing you’ve mastered day after day,

(4) risk: avoiding substantial risks, even if they have high expected value, or avoiding situations that seem very difficult or that provoke anxiety,

(5) romance: finding a reliable partner who shares most of your values and long term goals,

(6) beliefs: being skeptical of bizarre or wacky ideas, especially if they contradict your deeply held beliefs or challenge what has worked well for you,

(7) location: finding the place you want to be and putting down permanent roots,

(8) behavior: developing habits that work well for you and making them permanent,

(9) self-improvement: working on the behaviors or traits you have that increase instability in your life, for instance, those that cause conflict with people you care about or that make you unhappy in your current situation,

(10) mindset: treating your values as relatively static (i.e., you value what you value), your talent level as relatively fixed (i.e., fixed rather than growth mindset), mistakes as something you should seek to minimize, your optimization procedure as seeking something “good” rather than spending more time attempting to find “the best” (i.e., “satisficing” instead of maximizing), “exploitation” (as opposed to exploration – “exploitation” in this context doesn’t refer to exploiting people but refers to going with the best things you’ve found so far), and

A focus on stability may also be associated with: conservativeness (“if we’ve always done it this way and it’s worked for us, why change things?”), older age (“I’ve already explored enough”), and coming from a region/upbringing with economic or structural instability (e.g., “I want the stability I never had”).

On the other hand, optimizing for acceleration may involve things like…

(1) hobbies: regularly trying new activities, including ones that you don’t predict you’ll enjoy much, or doing hobbies that cause perpetual learning,

(2) friendship: regularly making new friends and interacting with people that are different from the ones you already know,

(3) work: switching jobs or pushing to get promoted whenever your work feels too routine or easy, or when it feels like you’re not pushed right to the edge of your ability,

(4) risk: periodically taking significant risks when you think the expected value is high, or throwing yourself into situations that are very difficult or anxiety-provoking when you believe they will make you better in the long-run,

(5) romance: finding a partner that challenges you to become a better version of yourself, or to do things outside of your comfort zone, or that you can learn a lot from,

(6) beliefs: taking bizarre or wacky-seeming ideas seriously before deciding whether to reject them (at least, when they come from sources you have respect for), even when they challenge your basic premises or lifestyle,

(7) location: exploring many different places to live (e.g., countries or regions) and environments to live in (e.g., alone/with groups, around different subcultures),

(8) behavior: regularly discarding old routines and trying on new ones to see if they have benefits, or resisting making routines at all,

(9) self-improvement: pushing yourself to always learn new things and to work on the behaviors or mental habits you have that may be limiting your potential, and

(10) mindset: thinking of your values as continually evolving, believing you can improve yourself in nearly any capacity if you work hard enough (i.e., growth mindset), treating mistakes are an opportunity to learn and as a positive sign that you are trying things that are sufficiently hard, and believing you should strive to do the very best you can and to be the very best you can be.

A focus on acceleration may also be associated with: liberalness (“we should be open to and learn from the ideas and practices of those who are very different from us”), younger age (“I want to explore all that’s out there”), and coming from a region/upbringing of abundance (e.g., “I want something even better than what I had”).

Note that acceleration is not necessarily exponential. In many cases, especially when trying to accelerate an area that you’ve already spent a lot of time working on, improvements will be slow and linear (whereas acceleration may be rapid in areas where you’ve done relatively little optimization before).

Some life choices cause an interesting mix of focus on stability and acceleration. For instance, having children is, I think, very much an action that drives acceleration: it annihilates routines, carries significant risk, speeds up maturity, and challenges you to be a better, more selfless person. On the other hand, once you have a child, there is pressure to seek stability for the sake of that child. So perhaps it is a choice that produces a focus on acceleration in the short term but on stability in the long term.

Of course, you can seek stability in some areas (e.g., romance) while seeking acceleration in others (e.g., work), but I think as a simple, compressed model, it can be useful at times to view stability and acceleration as existing along a continuum.

Some people seek neither stability nor acceleration, but I don’t think it is terribly common to seek neither of these for a large proportion of life. Counterexamples, though, would include hedonists focussed on maximizing their pleasure and a subset of people with long-term severe depression who have stopped actively seeking any improvements to their life (perhaps due to “learned helplessness”).

The idea of stability vs. acceleration is related to (and includes in it) the idea of an “exploration vs. exploitation” tradeoff (discussed in the machine learning literature, and more recently, in a self-improvement context). However, I intend this concept to be much more general, as it also encompasses ideas like risk aversion, openness to ideas that challenge your lifestyle, and how you choose to direct your self-improvement efforts.

I don’t think that either stability or acceleration is “better” than the other. Where you should ideally fall on the spectrum right now depends heavily on what you value, as well as your life circumstances and opportunities. You may choose to emphasize stability at one point in your life and acceleration during another, or you may be caught right in the middle, trying to strike a balance between the two (even as they tend to be in tension against each other).

I suggest running experiments every month or two to find new ways to improve your life. The basic procedure is simple:

(1) Think of something important you’d like to try to improve (e.g., your fitness, sleep, anxiety, dating life, friendships, productivity, happiness at work, etc.).

(2) Come up with a few ideas for something safe you could start doing (or start doing differently) that you think may have a reasonable chance of substantially improving the situation. (Don’t aim for things where the best case is that they would only very slightly help.) Pick from among them the one that you think is most likely to work.

(3) Do that new thing for long enough that you have a reasonably reliable guess of whether it caused an improvement (usually 1-6 weeks, depending on what you’re trying).

MORE ABOUT HOW TO DO SELF EXPERIMENTS WELL

It’s usually smart to limit yourself only to experiments that are very unlikely to cause a significant amount of harm. Otherwise, if you do enough of these trials, then eventually, you may be likely to significantly harm yourself. Remember that if you do N experiments, each with an approximate probability, p, of causing you significant harm (where p is smallish), then you’ll have roughly an N * p probability of significantly harming yourself at least once. So you’ll want to keep p (the probability of significant harm) very small if you make N (the number of experiments you conduct) large!

As I mentioned, it’s also usually a good idea to focus your experiments on interventions that could plausibly cause moderate to large impacts since you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between no effect and a slight effect, given the amount of day-to-day variation we usually experience. For instance, if something improves your mood by 2%, my guess is you won’t notice it unless the effect occurs within seconds. And if something improves your mood by 5%, my guess is you won’t notice unless it happens within 30 minutes. So unless the effects of an intervention are immediate each time you do the thing, I suggest you stick to looking for reasonably large effects.

With more careful data tracking, you can try to detect more subtle effects as well, but this is quite tricky and time-consuming to get right (it could take 1-3 months of careful data collection, and even then, you may not be able to tell what caused what, only that certain correlations exist). So I think it’s usually not worth it unless you enjoy tracking data, or the problem you’re working to solve is serious (e.g., you get terrible migraines once per week, and you want to pinpoint the cause, or you have started to experience an unpleasant chronic condition that varies in intensity day-to-day, and you want to figure out what might be causing it to be worse on some days).

TRACKING FOR SERIOUS PROBLEMS

In cases where you are trying to track something serious, consider recording all the relevant variables you can think of every morning and evening, and even consider randomizing behaviors that you think might be a cause (e.g., flip a coin to decide whether you do or don’t eat that food that you think might be a migraine trigger). You’ll want to choose a consistent method for measuring outcomes. For instance, if you are recording migraines, you might want to rate whether you have a headache or not, and also how bad it is on a “1=mild” to “5=severe” scale.

For interventions that have effects shorter than 24 hours (i.e., you expect little or none of the effect to spill over from day-to-day), you can try alternating or randomizing which days you do the intervention to make it a bit easier to tell if they’re working. Randomizing whether or not to try something on a given day makes it dramatically easier to determine causality (since otherwise there may be confounding variables that correlate both with the outcome you’re measuring and with whether you decided to try that thing). For instance, does sleeping late actually make you feel crappy, or do you just decide to “try out” the intervention of sleeping late when you’ve been drinking the night before, and it is alcohol that makes you feel crappy? Randomizing when you choose to sleep late will pull apart the two effects, so you can tell if it’s actually sleeping late that is causing you to feel bad.

A FEW EXAMPLE EXPERIMENTS

I try to run such an experiment on myself every month or two. Some of these are flops (they don’t make my life better or even make it slightly worse for that period). But when that happens, I stop, and it’s not a big deal since I usually avoid risky experiments. On the other hand, some of the experiments succeed, which means I’ve learned something new and potentially quite beneficial. At that point, I usually try to integrate whatever succeeded into my daily life as a more permanent change.

For instance, here are a few of the experiments I’ve tried just on my own sleep to give you some examples of what self-experiments can look like:
(1) Using a night mask when I sleep at night: makes me sleep longer, but I don’t seem to feel less tired afterward, so it seems to make me slightly worse off.
(2) Using earplugs when I sleep: I get woken up less often by random noises, so it seems worth it.
(3) Alternate using a pillow and not using one: I actually find it more pleasant not to use a pillow, as it turns out.
(4) Using small pieces of black tape to cover about 80% of every electronic light in the bedroom to make them less bright: I can’t tell the difference, but since the tape is already there and looks fine, I might as well leave it.