Utilizing the Gift of Our Wisdom
How often do you embrace the gift of wisdom you’ve acquired throughout your life? Your personal wisdom began to grow the very first year of your life and you continue to utilize what you learned that first year. Examples? You most likely figured out that touching something hot hurt and could result in a burn, or that falling as you were attempting to learn to walk may result in unintended pain. Early in life is where you first began to gain lifelong wisdom using the “if/then” process of learning. If you cry when you’re hungry, then someone feeds you. If problem, then solution or If action, then consequence. Granted, crying when you’re hungry as an adult doesn’t yield the same results as your first year of life, but that’s wisdom you gained while still in single digits age of your life.
Wisdom continues to grow at an incredible pace throughout the first couple decades of our life. And the wisdom gain comes from every aspect of our life. Schooling adds usable wisdom, social interaction adds usable wisdom, family interaction adds usable wisdom and playing with others, or even by ourselves, adds usable wisdom. Our own personal wisdom grows in so many different areas of our life. It’s during our first 20-30 years of life that we subconsciously develop our own personal algorithm of if/then statements that provides us wisdom that guides us throughout the rest of our life.
With all the hubbub surrounding concerns about the impact AI is about to have on our lives, it’s our wisdom that can alleviate all that anxious worry. You see, Artificial Intelligence is able to summarize gazillions of “if/then” statements found from an incredible variety of resources, but…AI doesn’t have the ability to put the summary into any kind of usable or advantageous action. That’s where you come in. If you ask AI a question, the answer provided to you is just that…an answer. It’s YOU that can utilize the wisdom you’ve created over your lifetime that can come up with how the answer AI provided can best be put into some form of positive use.
Now, I’m not an expert on the brain but I do believe it to be incredible beyond our comprehension. And we all have one…that’s been growing since the day we were born…that’s been gaining wisdom from every experience that’s been a part of every moment of our life…acquiring, computing, sorting, filing, storing, using, and guiding us our entire life. That’s just so doggone exciting, isn’t it? I sure think so. But let’s push AI off to the side for a second and ponder if we’re making the most of the wisdom being stored in our head.
I began this article asking the question: How often do you embrace the gift of wisdom you’ve acquired throughout your life? When you ponder that question, you might consider answering with a question of your own: consciously or subconsciously? After all, we use wisdom we’ve gained to brush our teeth, tie our shoes, choose what we eat and drink each day, safely drive, and plan and strategize all the different areas of our life. While AI can determine the top ways to brush our teeth, it’s US that can tap our wisdom to know which way is best for us personally, which may be different for someone else. Thanks wisdom!
Back to the question of how often you embrace the gift of wisdom? Data shows that the average adult makes more than 35,000 decisions per day. Each of those decisions is based on knowledge you’ve previously acquired and stored as wisdom. 35,000…that’s such an incredible number, isn’t it? Can you see how the value of the wisdom we possess can play an important role in our overall happiness and well-being? And if so, is there a simple way we can increase our wisdom to an even higher level? The wiser we are, the better our decision-making yielding better outcomes in every area of our life.
So….Maybe a more important question to ask yourself is what are you doing each day to increase your wisdom and the role it can play in your life? What I mean by that is, have you ever taken a few moments to become more aware of the wisdom and life lessons you’re gaining while they are occurring? If your approach is one of being open-minded in all situations for lessons to be learned, the gain of wisdom occurs immediately and serves you in the present moment, …PLUS it then gets stored for use again at any future moment.
Do you ever look for ways to better retain new information so that you’re better able to recall it on demand in the future? My notetaking has improved dramatically through the years and gives me an opportunity to organize my thoughts into usable wisdom. Plus, we all prefer simplicity over complexity and AI handles complexity extremely well. It’s wise to let AI tackle the hard stuff and then allow our wisdom to take what AI provides and put it to good use.
I realize it can be challenging to embrace getting older, but one of the greatest benefits of aging is that your wisdom is in growth mode until the day you die. I hope you’ll spend some time pondering what a great gift our wisdom is to each of us, and then think of some ways you can increase, utilize, and then share your wisdom to benefit others. It’s a great way to make the most of those more than 35,000 decisions you’ll be making today. Hey…I Believe In YOU! GiddyUp!