Here is one way to become wise:<\/p>\n
1. Start by getting really good at one or more skills.\u00a0 It isn’t important how useful the skill is for “real life”; it only requires that it be something difficult which requires you to improve.\u00a0 It could be gardening, video games, cooking, sports, or whatever.\u00a0 This requires:<\/p>\n
a. large amounts of practice
\nb. feedback from reality — notice what works and what doesn’t.
\nc. take the feedback into account and change what you do so that it works better
\nd. but it is okay to deliberately experiment with making “mistakes” as long as they contribute to learning.<\/p>\n
2. Now formulate the lessons you learned from #1 as maxims:<\/p>\n
a. try to put it into words (though some people do it more intuitively).\u00a0 Keep it simple enough to remember, and abstract enough that it has a chance of applying to OTHER situations as well.
\nb. notice when it actually does so
\nc. take this wisdom into account when dealing with the other subject matter.
\nd. but every rule has exceptions!\u00a0 You can’t list all the exceptions, so only obey the maxim when it actually makes sense to do so, or when you are deliberately trying it out as an experiment to see what happens.<\/p>\n
3. Other people are probably better than you at discovering maxims:<\/p>\n
a. learn from people who are doing this
\nb. but recognize that the maxims (2) are based on an invisible pyramid of observations (1) and can’t be appreciated without you doing some amount of 1 and 2 yourself
\nc. so you still have to check what actually makes sense and works!\u00a0 Just because it sounds good doesn’t mean it is useful to YOU (or anyone).
\nd. even wise people can still be idiots, especially when they trust too much in their own wisdom.\u00a0 (But sometimes it is good to experiment with trusting too much to see what happens as a result, etc.)<\/p>\n
In all of the above, there are two completely different kinds of risk, one good and one bad:<\/p>\n
DANGEROUS RISK that will possibly seriously hurt you, or things\/people you care about.\u00a0 The wise person almost always<\/strong> steers widely clear of this.\u00a0 The only exception is a risk for great gain, and even then it is usually better to formulate an alternative safer plan.\u00a0 (But if your heart tells you to put yourself in danger, sometimes you need to put yourself in danger.)<\/p>\n SAFE RISK where failure is primarily a learning experience with no permanent harm.\u00a0 The wise person seeks out this kind of risk on a regular basis, because learning is extremely important, especially if you want to avoid dangerous risks!<\/p>\n Some amount of moderation is needed to ensure you can emotionally recover.\u00a0 If failure hurts enough to make you reject future learning, then that was actually a dangerous risk!\u00a0 But usually the difference between these kinds of risk is assessed objectively, not based on your feelings.<\/p>\n All of this is more oriented around how to excel at whatever you put your mind to, rather than<\/em> what your goals should be in the first place.\u00a0 There is also a spiritual wisdom that enables us to have the correct goals (hint: worship God and serve him alone) but this post isn’t really about that more important subject.\u00a0 It’s more about how to get better at practical applications of life skills.<\/p>\n Perhaps there is some even higher perspective from which practical wisdom and spiritual wisdom eventually converge and become the same thing.\u00a0 This blog post isn’t exactly about that either.\u00a0 That is, I won’t tell you how the convergence happens, but it is possible that if you pursue wisdom heartily enough, you will find this out on your own (possibly by straying from the techniques mentioned above, if you learn that something else works better).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here is one way to become wise: 1. Start by getting really good at one or more skills.\u00a0 It isn’t important how useful the skill is for “real life”; it only requires that it be something difficult which requires you to improve.\u00a0 It could be gardening, video games, cooking, sports, or whatever.\u00a0 This requires: a. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-spiritual-counsel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9983"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10020,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9983\/revisions\/10020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}