Delphic Maxim 53: Consult the wise

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day

53. Consult the wise

At one point or another in all of our lives, we come across a situation where we feel out of our depth. This happens to me on a very regular basis — in PhD land we call this ‘imposter syndrome’, where you feel like you are a fraud and somebody is going to find out. This doesn’t only happen in research degrees though, it happens all the time in day-to-day life. We live in a culture that seems intolerant of failure. I’ve referred previously to the acceleration of life, and this might be one symptom of that.

Fun fact: it looks like there is a trend towards being more comfortable with mistakes. Design Thinking is a process of problem solving that stresses a culture of learning from mistakes — improving and iterating solutions to problems gradually. In an environment like this, mistakes are low-cost and low-risk (they don’t cause catastrophic failures), and the opportunity to learn is high. This is a good attitude, one that can be applied to other contexts.

So being comfortable with making mistakes — comfortable with failure — is one solution to our collective ‘imposter syndrome’, but the bigger question is how we can learn from those mistakes if there just isn’t enough knowledge available to us at the time. One of the traps in design thinking, I think, is that it tends to reify experimentation and first-hand research. I don’t want to suggest this isn’t a good thing, but if something has been done before, then it makes sense to turn to the experts to ask for advice.

This is where consulting the wise comes in. Wisdom is acquired across a long period of time (the wise are always older than the unwise, it’s only in rare instances in literature — like Paul Atreides in Dune — where the young are wiser than the old). Wisdom accrues through exposure to many thousands of cases and experiences, it involves the repeated application of skill, of problem solving, and of creativity in order to get an intuitive sense of the world. Intuition, says Danny Kahneman, isn’t just a gut feeling — it’s actually an acquired set of instincts, a learned behaviour comprised of micro-awarenesses in a given situation.

The wise have a sense of their environment that comes from being immersed in it — just as birds are able to detect drafts and conditions in the air to adjust their flight accordingly. The wise — whose wisdom is almost always context-dependent — take flight in a particular field. They have a feel for the world they inhabit, a sense of the game (to bastardise Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological work — more on this boy later!)

It makes sense for us to consult the wise when we are feeling stuck. Sometimes it takes humility, but recognising and knowing that we don’t know is a step along the path towards our own wisdom. The Delphic Oracle said that about Socrates: he was the wisest man in the Greek world because he knew that he didn’t know. The cure for imposter syndrome, perversely, is acknowledging that we are feeling it, that we aren’t necessarily confident in our knowledge, but that we are on the journey towards knowing.

This morning the world is foggy, very foggy. But I have an intuitive sense of what is out there, even though I can’t see it. If someone was lost, despite the fog I could give directions. That kind of knowledge and local wisdom grows through experience. Wisdom helps us to be comfortable in the dense fog. And there’s nothing wrong with asking for a guide.