confused wisdom

Do you impart your wisdom to others?

I have, but before we start discussing reasons and situations to share your wisdom we need to be clear on the definition.

Wisdom is much more than knowledge. I once told my younger sister that even if her kids achieve more advanced college degrees than her, she will still have a mother’s wisdom that their knowledge alone fails to provide.
 
Here’s a bit of knowledge I just picked up. Google docs and the blogger editor has a tool called “Define” that provides many web based references for any target word.

Perhaps it’s a tiny bit of my wisdom (or laziness?) to use that tool in this post. The tool provided this definition of wisdom (from wiktionary) - 

The discretionary use of knowledge for the greatest good; The ability to apply relevant knowledge in an insightful way, especially to different situations.

The reason I started to reflect on wisdom was a post I read recently. Marcy of “The Glamorous Life” showed her wisdom in her post about another blog post in which a recent college graduate told the world that her generation is the only generation capable of doing social media. After reading Marcy’s post, I thought, it’s common-sense that knowledge and wisdom are not the same. 

But maybe your first wisdom moment is grasping the concept of wisdom.

Doing great things within your school life can leave you with a little too much arrogance when you step into the real life.  Arrogance gets in your way when collecting wisdom.

A friend shared an email of funny and ironic pictures. Two of them illustrate my knowledge vs. wisdom comparison.

Having wisdom is understanding the meaning of “you often get what you paid for”.

Having knowledge of the pet door operation does NOT mean you have the wisdom to use it the best way.

If we are open minded we learn that our initial perceptions of others can trick us. Our wisdom regarding people increases with age because we experience different people with various levels of trust and interaction during our lives. 

If I take time to reflect on my own handling of events, I can become very frustrated in my inability in some cases to apply wisdom (one should know better situation). Wisdom goes unused when emotions like anger charge into the situation. Not all the time. Progress is emotion trumping wisdom less often. 

I don’t hold any special magic keys to happiness or success, but I seen applied wisdom and it improves life. Improve our world, share your wisdom in a comment below.