Wisdom Takes Work: Learn. Apply. Repeat. (The Stoic Virtues Series)

virtue—arete—translates to something very simple and very timeless: Excellence. Moral. Physical. Mental. In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key components. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom.

They’re called “cardinal,” C. S. Lewis pointed out, not because they come down from church authorities, but because they originate from the Latin cardo, or hinge. It’s pivotal stuff. It’s the stuff that the door to the good life hangs on.

Four virtues. One aim: to help you choose… Courage, bravery, endurance, fortitude, honor, sacrifice… Temperance, self-control, moderation, composure, balance… Justice, fairness, service, fellowship, goodness, kindness… Wisdom, knowledge, education, truth, self-reflection, peace… These are the key to the good life, a life of honor, of glory, of excellence in every sense. Character traits, which John Steinbeck perfectly described as “pleasant and desirable to [their] owner and makes him perform acts of which he can be proud and which he can be pleased.” But the he must be taken to mean all of humankind. There was no feminine version of the word virtus in Rome. Virtue wasn’t male or female, it just was.

Wisdom, then, we might say, is knowing… …what to do, …when to do it, … and how to do it. Wisdom is knowing what’s what.

We pursue wisdom for one essential reason: We need it. Later and right now. Life is a thinking person’s game. A decision about our future appears before us one day, a moral dilemma the next. Complex problems. Complicated people. Confusing situations. Hidden opportunities. In these moments, big and small, the wisdom you need will either be there or it won’t. The experience and knowledge and understanding will have been accumulated or not. We’ve either done the study necessary or we haven’t. It is in that moment that we discover the reason that you can’t spell learned without earned.

The most important decision a person makes is to become a student and to remain one not just in school or in their profession, but for life.

A good education instills us with good morals, good ideas, good habits—the skillset that allows us to learn everything that the world is able to teach.

He would have learned, as great legal minds have all learned, that theory has to be made to fit reality and not the other way around, and that only real, painful experience can teach someone how to master their profession.

Imagine being able to talk with the wisest people who ever lived, as Tolstoy said, and not doing it!

That’s the thing about focus. Sometimes it helps you see what’s there. Other times it can help you see what isn’t there.

For hundreds of years, lovers of books and ideas have kept what was called a “commonplace book,” where they collected observations, quotes, ideas, diary entries, and anecdotes that they wanted to preserve. As far back as the Greeks and Romans, ars excerpendi—the art of excerpting—was a skill to be taught.

It’s not enough to read. One should engage in a practice of capturing information and recording it so it can be drawn on later.

“A collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest treasure for a man of the world,” Goethe explained, because we can draw on it in conversation and in moments of personal crisis.

Write it down. Write it down. Trust nothing to memory. Capture it before it passes.

Study all systems but make your own—one you’ll actually use.

This is the key to life: finding the classroom that works for you, that allows you to take over your own education. Because an education is not something you “get,” it’s something you take. It’s something you make. It’s there, if we want it badly enough.

Musonius understood the necessity of making the student an active participant in their education as a vehicle for transformation.

As his biographer Robert Caro wrote, Johnson understood that the old possess a “sagacity” that can be of use…if only the young would ask.

You will get to lead one day. But first you must figure out how to obey. First you must learn how to serve.

It’s not a stretch to say that most of these people were extraordinarily talented on their own. Many were out-and-out geniuses. Yet even they needed a community.

History is not just something that happened. It is not theory. It did not happen in black and white. It was alive. It was new. It was touch and go at every second, and so easily could have turned out some way other than it did. That’s why we study it. We study history because it’s… …biography. …psychology. …philosophy. …human greatness. …human evil. It’s the splendid and the vile, the possible and the impossible. Historia est magistra vitae. History is the teacher of life, and Clio, the ancient muse of history, is our teacher.

The Stoics said that by studying philosophy, we annex every age into our own. Each era, epoch, and event that we study is a way to live through those times. “By means of history,” Montaigne said, we “frequent these great souls of former years.” They become our companions, our enemies, our Cassandras, our inspirations, our cautionary tales. We absorb their lifetimes—and their life lessons—in our own. We get a wider perspective, a bigger view, while turning down the volume on the frivolous opinions and biases of the moment.

History, you must understand, is not about the past. It’s a lens for understanding the present (that’s why we fight over what gets taught). It’s a way of predicting, even determining, the future.

“The only thing new in the world,” Truman liked to say, “is the history you do not know.” Very little changes over time. Very little wisdom is new. What prepared Patton for all the innovation and disruption the future would bring? The history that he knew. History shows us that change is constant, and for everything that changes, much remains the same.

nomos, the people’s customs, and the ways they differed from his own. He wanted to hear their stories. He wanted to know why they did things the way they did.

The idea was that you need to be a person of action—because no study is complete without an interplay with the people and places around you.

“Writing,” he explained, “is a form of contemplation.”

In his books, letters, and notepads, Merton was not telling people what he thought. He was figuring out what he thought. He was meditating on the page, sharing, generously and courageously, his thoughts with the world.

What information are we going to let in? What are we going to keep out? How do we stay informed about what’s happening without overwhelming ourselves with distractions? Just as what we put in our bodies matters, what we put—or fail to put—in our minds matters too.

Cicero, Tacitus, Livy, Juvenal, Quintilian, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Smith, Hume; logic, philosophy, literature, politics, history.

This is the main task: to protect this gift we’ve been given, to buck the trend and not go crazy as we become more successful.

Wisdom is the ability to go through life ready to change your mind. This doesn’t mean we abandon our values because they’re inconvenient, but our thinking is supposed to evolve. We are supposed to grow. New things are going to come to light. Feedback follows belief and action, which should create new beliefs and actions.

Honest answers are indications of mental strength and moral character.

The world is complicated. Things are always changing. We are constantly learning, being exposed to things we didn’t know or consider. Our minds must be flexible and open enough to accommodate this.

They say that the truth will set you free, but that’s not really true. Truth is heavy. It’s uncomfortable. It challenges you, or worse, it obligates you.

But courage and wisdom are related—the former allows for the latter. If you can’t bear to engage with new information, you can’t learn. Cowards are fools, and fools are usually cowardly.

“Criticism may not be agreeable,” Churchill once said, “but it is necessary; it fulfills the same function as pain in the human body, it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things.”

Wisdom is the ability to separate good advice from bad, knowing which notes to take and which to ignore, how to separate the raising of a problem from the proposal of a solution—how to take what we can use and discard the rest. Wisdom is, in all things, a matter of discernment.

This is nothing to be ashamed of. This is the point. We want to outgrow our childishness and evolve beyond our biases and ego. We want to achieve not just knowledge but self-knowledge. We want not just facts but understanding. Ignorance is a solvable problem…but it requires admitting the problem first.

Wisdom is not erratic. It is not impulsive or emotional. It is calm. It’s cool. It’s patient. It’s kind. It is philosophical.

umwelt, means one’s sense of the world—the experience of being a person or a polar bear or a pill bug.

it wasn’t just that she noticed. It was that she cared enough to notice. Empathy demands courage—whether it’s jumping into a cattle pen or talking to someone you disagree with. Discipline—to keep your own emotions in check. Justice—to genuinely fight for someone’s interests and not just your own. Wisdom—the curiosity to explore and then the sense to turn this information into understanding.

If study does not result in humility, it’s worthless. For the past is nothing if not a catalog of the enormous costs of ego, of impatience, of certainty, of rushing in, of wishful thinking. History is, as one historian said, “the record of unintended consequences.”

Our own experience plus the store of experiences of the past should teach no lesson more clearly than that of our limitations, of human fallibility and the costs of arrogance.

have for some time,” Admiral Rickover warned young people, “thought that a few of our present ills stem from this chiding faith in the existence of perfect answers. It requires a degree of maturity to realize that all solutions are partial ones.” And that all conclusions are snapshots, estimations, and guesses. Art, leadership, and enlightenment demand the ability to handle ambiguity.

A journal is a means of self-awareness. Because knowing yourself isn’t just about who you are right now (after all, who we are today is a product of all the selves we have been). We have to understand who we were then and why we did what we did—that’s how we change, that’s how we make different choices now, that’s how we make amends to others and ourselves.

“too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.” Churchill also understood that this pain was power, saying that each of us must go into the wilderness if we hope to create psychic dynamite.

Our job is to make things clear. To find what is important and discard the rest. We must do the work to make the complex simple…and keep what’s simple, simple…but no simpler.

Memento mori. Remember, you are mortal. Which means you must master the ars moriendi, the art of dying.

wisdom is the mother of virtue. It tells us the what, the when, the where, the who.

We have a choice. We choose between wisdom and ignorance, cowardice and courage, discipline and excess, right and wrong, virtue and vice.

Disscepolo della sperientia. So I became a disciple of experience.

“Did you really need to say that, or did you just feel like you wanted to have something to say?”

always say less than necessary—but it is classic Zeno too. Two ears, one mouth…for a reason.

Each of us has a calling, the task of our lives is to listen to it…and be brave enough to follow.