America Needs More Than Innovation; It Needs Wisdom

Wisdom. It's my favorite word in English. The reason being it's the least probable word where bullshit can seek refuge (hopefully) and one of the least used colloquial words. 

They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.

- Nassim Taleb

Arthur C. Brooks makes an urgent call for the tech world::

The first, according to the British-American psychologist Raymond Cattell in his 1971 book Abilities: Their Structure, Growth, and Action, is essentially the ability to solve abstract problems; the second represents a person’s knowledge gained during a lifetime of learning. In other words, as a young adult, you can solve problems quickly; as you get older, you know which problems are worth solving. Crystallized intelligence can be the difference between an enterprise with no memory that makes lots of rookie errors and one that has deep experience—even if the company is brand new.

In the first decades of your career, whether you’re a lawyer or an electrician, you’ll probably get ahead faster by focusing on work that involves ingenuity and quick thinking, which is a function of fluid intelligence. You might call it your Forbes 30 Under 30 Brain.

People who successfully navigate their professional lives into their 50s, 60s, and 70s tend to rely more and more on their abilities to synthesize knowledge, compare current facts with past patterns, and teach others. This is crystallized intelligence, a.k.a. your Dalai Lama Brain. Used right, these abilities can be even more professionally valuable than their fluid counterparts.

[---]

For example, Chip Conley, who left his career as a hotel entrepreneur at age 52 to serve as a strategic adviser to the founders of Airbnb, developed what he calls his Modern Elder Academy to cultivate crystallized intelligence in mature leaders and the skills to share it. “Our physical peak may be in our 20s, and our financial or salary peak may be at 50,” Conley told me in an email. But our deepest wisdom and widest perspective come only after that, “because we’ve developed pattern recognition about ourselves and others.” 

[---]

This isn’t exactly an original idea; it was proposed in the first century B.C. by the Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero. At age 62, he wrote De Officiis, in which he described how older people should serve others with their high crystallized intelligence: “The old … should, it seems, have their physical labors reduced; their mental activities should be actually increased. They should endeavor, too, by means of their counsel and practical wisdom to be of as much service as possible to their friends and to the young, and above all to the state.”