Wisdom

In my sessions as a spiritual director, I started noticing something: whenever someone described someone as “wise”, it was usually a sage or spiritual teacher of some sort: a Richard Rohr, a Ken Wilbur, a Ram Dass, a Tara Brach.

As you all know, I’ve had lots of extra time these past two weeks to become a binge watcher (not a weight watcher, though, as this surgery naturally adds 10-20 pounds within a few days). I think it’s ironic that two American film celebrities came out with documentaries telling their stories at almost exactly the same time: “Arnold” Schwartznegger on Netflix and MIchael J Fox in “Still” on AppleTV.

Wise, poetic wisdom, that’s the brand of Maya Angelou. One of her most famous quotes has defined how I’ve tried to live my life: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Our very first MEA cohort five and a half years ago named themselves after “Maya.”

MEA faculty member Dan Buettner popularized the idea of “Blue Zones,” where nine attributes in the culture create the longest-living people. But what if certain places in the world represented “Wisdom Zones,” where a constellation of influences creates a deeper and wiser culture?

At our annual MEA leadership retreat, our mindfulness teacher Teddi Dean spouted the line that is the title of today’s post. Dude, you’re deep!!

Society-altering innovations have typically happened in a way that's allowed us humans to take them in stride and adapt to them.

How do we love Chip? Let us count the ways days! (Three-hundred and sixty-six to be exact.) Wisdom Well readers have been receiving a daily microdose of wisdom online since 2019.

In honor of Kevin Kelly’s new book which has the same name as today’s blog post, I wanted to tell you why this intrepid soul has been a role model for me.

At the turn of the century, my academic friends Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton (Stanford Business School) wrote a book, "The Knowing-Doing Gap," which chronicled why there are so many gaps between what companies know they should do and what they actually do. Their terrific book was about turning knowledge into action.

We tend to consider experience our best teacher because it helps our pattern recognition and intuition. However, sometimes experience stands in our way.