Worldly Wisdom can be thought of as meta-learning or meta-ideas – essentially instruction manuals for life. These concepts are universally valuable and applicable, being time-tested and proven robust. We begin with these ideas because, if properly applied, they can form the “kernel” to your “operating system” – governing how you think and learn, paving the way for deeper understanding later on.
The kernel is a computer program that is the core of a computer’s operating system, with complete control over everything in the system…It handles the rest of start-up as well as input/output requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit.
– Wikipedia
Worldly Wisdom is, by definition, multidisciplinary. It would be an oxymoron to say worldly wisdom comes from a particular field, time, or country. It requires deep fluency in a range of disciplines, which, when combined, adds a tremendous interlocking strength to our understanding of how the world works. The world is not siloed, and our thinking must not be either.
Rather than discounting ideas simply because they come from a different field, we should embrace them! In this sense, we should emulate Lee Kuan Yew. He was Singapore’s first Prime Minister and managed to pull Singapore from third world to first within a generation. He was one of the great leaders and nation-builders of our time and his maxim was “do what works,” regardless of who discovered it, when, where, why, or how. If it helped him inch closer to his goals, he adopted the practice. This sounds so simple, but how often have we neglected or been blind to a solution simply because it hails from a foreign field? We should follow suit and not worry whether the solution to our problem comes from physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, sports, or any other domain.
The benefit of acquiring worldly wisdom is that it allows us to better understand and, as Ludwig Wittgenstein tells us, “To understand is to know what to do.” If we know what to do, we not only become more effective, but we also avoid time-sucking mistakes and the stresses that accompany them. This type of mastery requires automatic associative understanding (coming from taking the time to truly grasp general principles), and the formula lies in synthesizing big ideas – combining art and science into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
To understand is to know what to do.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Some of the most condensed sources of Worldly Wisdom we’ve come across include the following:
- Charlie Munger
- Richard Hamming1There is a remarkable amount of wisdom to be found in all of his lectures, and he is quoted often throughout his book. Stripe Press just re-published the book and it is beautiful! If interested, you can find the PDF here and my full notes here.
- Naval Ravikant2While older sources which have stood the test of time should be prioritized, this contains a tremendous amount of wisdom – mainly around wealth, status, psychology, principal-agent problems, incentives, and biology. He does an admirable job of arguing from first principles, which makes his arguments cogent, robust, and time-invariant.The full transcript of the video can be found here and a beautiful book called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is coming out soon and captures these ideas in a timeless and elegant manner.
The standard process of organizing knowledge by departments, and sub-departments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses. The optimization of the individual courses in turn means a lot of important things in Engineering practice are skipped since they do not appear to be essential to any one course. One of the functions of this book is to mention and illustrate many of these missed topics which are important in the practice of Science and Engineering. Another goal of the course is to show the essential unity of all knowledge rather than the fragments which appear as the individual topics are taught. In your future anything and everything you know might be useful, but if you believe the problem is in one area you are not apt to use information that is relevant, but which occurred in another course.
– Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
You will see similar images to the ones below in every big discipline and big idea. They are meant to help you get grounded within The Latticework – helping you know where you are and where you have yet to go. The green shaded area is the current page you are on and, although you can jump around in any order you desire, if you want to follow the roadmap we’ve designed, start at the top and move clockwise. For example, The Latticework would be your next destination from here.
