- In this video we're going to talk about
the difference between wisdom and intelligence.
Those are two related concepts that often get confused,
and they're really important to
understand the difference between.
So, let's unpack the details.
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Hello there, friends, and welcome back.
If we're just meeting for the first time,
I am Alex Lyon, and this channel,
Communication Coach, is here to help people like you,
rising leaders who want to increase your
leadership skills so that you can bring out
the best in everybody around you.
And in today's video we're going to talk about the
important differences between wisdom versus intelligence.
Now, these are both really important.
I believe, personally, that in most professional settings
we overvalue intelligence and we undervalue wisdom.
And I think if you look at the last 20
or 25 years of corporate scandals of these
highly intelligent people in industry
that were making really bad decisions
that you begin to see that the lack of
intelligence wasn't really the issue.
They just made unwise decisions
that destroyed their companies,
and we'll talk about specific examples,
like Enron, in a moment.
So, first of all, let's define intelligence.
Intelligence is what you know.
It's your ability to acquire new knowledge.
It's your ability to apply knowledge to
evaluate and analyze problems and solve them.
My father says that we all have a genius in us somewhere.
What he means by that is each of us has our own type of
unique intelligence that we can cultivate and develop,
buy we're all a little different.
So, traditionally, we think of intelligence
as aligning with normal academics,
like your ability to memorize content
for an exam that's coming up,
but you could also have a creative intelligence,
a musical intelligence, or problem-solving intelligence.
Lots of different ways to look at intelligence.
And so, we don't all have the same type of intelligence,
and sometimes we take an over-favorably
generous view of intelligence overall.
So, in other words, we think that intelligence is good.
That's another way to say it.
We think, oh, intelligence is good.
But here's a question.
What about all these science fiction movies
where we have the mad scientist, the evil genius,
and the people like at Enron?
These were some of the smartest people, by the way,
these executives were called the best of the best.
In fact, they wrote a book about these top executives
at Enron called The Smartest People In the Room.
When the top executives were there at meetings,
everything they said was "incandescently brilliant."
They knew everything, and yet,
they made poor decision after poor decision
to run the company out of business.
They used their intelligence to manipulate accounting,
to manipulate perceptions of the value of
their company and fool stock analysts,
they fooled everybody, almost everybody,
with their intelligence.
What they lacked was wisdom.
They didn't consider if they should do these things,
they just did it.
Just like in Jurassic Park.
They had the intelligence to clone dinosaurs,
but they never asked if they should do it or not.
Right now we have the ability to clone,
perhaps, human beings, but should we?
That's a question that wisdom then begins to ask.
We have the intelligence now,
we're right on the edge of being able to
make really workable artificial intelligence,
but should we, that's where wisdom steps in.
So, let's turn now to wisdom and what is,
what wisdom is more generally.
The book of Proverbs describes wisdom as
better than silver, gold, and jewels.
Much better than just know-how or smarts.
Wisdom is the kind of stuff that you guide your life by.
It can really give you a good life versus a bad life.
So, let's unpack this more with some
specific definitional content.
Wisdom is putting good judgment,
sound reasoning, and knowledge into practice.
So, wisdom has practice as part of it.
It's not just enough to know right from wrong,
good from bad, but it's to make
decisions that apply that knowledge.
Wisdom is having the foresight to use
your knowledge and your understanding to move
toward the best possible long-term outcomes.
Now, wisdom is often very simple.
You don't have to have a
genius-level brain to make wise decisions.
The entire movie Forrest Gump was based upon this principle.
Here was a guy who they said in
the movie had a very low IQ.
He didn't well in school.
He wasn't "intelligent."
But he made some very simple decisions
throughout his life that created an
amazing life for him that was
far above his level of intelligence,
and you saw a lot of smart people
all around him making bad life decisions.
So, there's the difference between wisdom and intelligence.
Wisdom is often very straightforward and
very simple if you're willing to listen.
So, let's now talk about some common
misunderstandings about wisdom because
intelligence and wisdom get mixed up all the time.
And here's probably the most common misunderstanding,
and that is that, there's like a little equation
people have that more information and data
leads to more knowledge and intelligence,
then that leads to more wisdom.
And this has been repeated,
I've seen this in a lot of places,
and I think it's completely wrong.
In fact, some people say there's more knowledge
on the internet now than there's ever been.
Well, there's more web pages, there's more posts,
there's more, you know, images,
but that doesn't mean it's even knowledge, let alone wisdom.
These don't necessarily add up like that and here's why.
Information, knowledge, intelligence comes from
a totally different source than wisdom.
You can learn intelligence and knowledge in school.
You can acquire that.
But they're not teaching you about
how to live your life more generally.
They're not teaching you in textbooks about wisdom, per se.
So, where can you get wisdom?
This is a practical application now.
Some ideas that we can apply to our own life.
And I want to give this advice with some,
with some hesitancy.
I'm not saying here's how to get wisdom because,
in fact, I'm looking for this myself, as many people are.
But in my experience I like to, first of all,
talk to wise people.
Now, this is a little circular.
But talk to wise people, and for me, typically,
that means people who are a little older than me,
a little more experienced than me in whatever
I'm going to be talking to them about,
and they have made decisions in their life, wise decisions,
that have helped them have a good overall life.
If you're an expert in one little area and you're smart
and you're a genius in that one little area,
that doesn't necessarily mean you're
gonna give good advice in something else.
Like, I'm not gonna ask the top scientist
in the world relationship advice because that
intelligence doesn't extend to other areas.
But a person who has wisdom will generally have
a pretty good life they've decided for themselves,
and they've worked things out in a way that
they have good fruit, there's good fruit for their labor.
They've lived life in a way that you can look up to.
So, the first way is talking to wise people.
My mother, in fact, says very often that
she's from the future because she has
more experience than me and she's lived
through what I'm living through now.
She's 30-something years ahead of me,
so we're talking about advice and she'll say,
Alex, you have to understand, I'm from the future.
And what she means by that is
she has the benefit of experience.
So, talking to wise people, wise counselors,
is a way to get some wisdom in your life.
And the second main way to get
wisdom is reading the right books.
Now, the right books are not textbooks.
The right books are not kind of how-to books.
The right books are going to probably be like this.
They're going to be biographies of people that we admire
because in biographies you get to see
how a person's entire life developed over time
and some of the small decisions they
made early impacted their life later.
Usually you see a lot of wisdom in books about people
we admire because they overcame difficult situations.
They lived through wrong decisions and bad experiences
and they worked their way out of that,
so there's some wisdom there,
we get to benefit from their experience.
And then, other types of books that are directly about it.
Like, I like to read the book of Proverbs.
It's literally filled with wisdom on every page,
so that's another direction to go in.
So, question of the day for this video.
What did you find most interesting in this discussion about
comparing and contrasting intelligence and wisdom?
I personally believe that intelligence is overvalued,
in corporate settings especially, and wisdom is undervalued.
But I would like to hear your opinion.
What's your favorite aspect of everything
we've talked about in this video?
I would love to read your comments
in that section below the video.
I read those comments and respond
to almost every single one.
Before we leave I wanted to offer you
a free resource that I have created.
It's a quick guide to essential
professional communication skills.
It's a PDF download,
and if that sounds like it interests you,
there's a link in the description below the video.
I will also put a link in the
first comment in the comment section,
so when you're typing in your
comments you will see that one first.
You click on that, put your email in,
and then I email you this PDF download.
So, thanks for tuning in, God bless,
and I will see you in the next video.