22) Wisdom = Knowledge + Experience
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” ~Mark Twain
We have—or at least think we have—all the answers when we’re young. This is especially true for the highly educated, but lightly lived. The belief system of an early twenty something is nice and neat because they have yet to encounter outliers that disprove their theories, endure soul-crushing loss, or live through high-stakes professional or romantic failure. But as we experience more of life’s ups and downs (which seem to hit for most of us in our late twenties to early thirties), our datasets gets larger, and we have the potential to draw a more accurate “best fit line” through what we’ve learned and experienced.
This is not to say that the accumulation of years and knowledge automatically lead to wisdom. We all know older folks who ignore life’s lessons and fall back upon comfortable—but untrue—beliefs about the world, or who become more and more bitter, insular, and risk-averse with each each passing year.
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