To Become Wise, Do Less

To become wise, do everything, fuck up on most of it, and know what works and doesn&#x27;t by direct experience.<p>I am a minimalist (Essentialist) by choice, but a maximalist regarding knowledge and experience. Try and do everything you can, that way you know what does and doesn&#x27;t work. Done. Anything else is overly reductive. You can&#x27;t know how to do anything if you do or experience close to nothing.<p>Leisure is good, I am a ferverent advocate of Veblen philosophy, but if you want to be wise use your leisure to do the maximum you can and want to do with that time. Leisure is different for everyone, reading, gaming, sitting on the beach, making art, but if you want to be &#x2F;wise&#x2F; with your leisure you have to do everything you want to do! Focus a lot, or focus a little, you just have to do everything possible to fuck up as much as possible.

I gotta say, articles(to use that term loosely) like this are really starting to grind my gears.<p>There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once.<p>Gotta grind for that success. But don&#x27;t grind too much. Also, remember to meditate. Disconnect from the internet. But don&#x27;t become too disconnected, because you have to stay up to date on current events, because otherwise you can&#x27;t keep up with the twittersphere. Which you should avoid, because it&#x27;s toxic, by the way. But not too much, because important people say important things there!<p>This article is particularly bad. It&#x27;s only a few paragraphs, and it still manages to be so self-contradictory that if you actually read it through, you&#x27;re literally no wiser in the end, because the advice boils down to &quot;Sometimes you need to relax, but you can&#x27;t relax all the time.&quot; Gee, thanks. Pretty ironic, considering the subject of this article.

Another take, from Yogananda: put your energy into accomplishing things in the world but when your work day is done turn off your working engine.<p>At 71 (I am still working) I have had an unusual career. Since I was 25, for the most part I stopped working full time, capping my work at 32 hours a week. I was able to do this at some great companies working in great teams. My boss from 40 years ago visited me [1] from out of town 6 weeks ago and I apologized a little for causing him any hassles because of this. He laughed and said that while it was true that I was missed in my no work Mondays, that I was the easiest person he ever managed because I really focused on my 4 work days.<p>[1] so far this year, I have had 4 visits from old coworkers who traveled to my town, ranging from working together 1 year ago to 40 years ago. I like to keep in touch with people.

It&#x27;s like their are two extremes, be a hustler waking up at 3am to do barbell squats and work on your startup or be an idler wandering in the park waiting for some socratic revelations of wisdom.<p>Why can&#x27;t we just be in the middle.<p>Use your common sense to choose where best to focus your limited time and energy, listen to yourself and not others.

To become wise, life has to beat the shit out of you. That means you will have some battle scars, and encountered yourself a few times.<p>Thinking alone won&#x27;t get you there. That will turn you into an &quot;Intellectual Yet Idiot&quot;, as Nassim Taleb calls it.

Wisdom is such a loaded term. I think the article conflates wisdom with productivity - &quot;To become more productive, do less!&quot; could have equally been an apt title.<p>On wisdom, I am reminded of the Serenity Prayer- &quot;God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Serenity_Prayer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Serenity_Prayer</a>)

To appear wise, say less.

To become wise, get beneficial results without compromising quality of life to a great extent. Much better, do this not only for yourselves, but those around you as well.<p>Prime example worth studying: Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore

&quot;Wisdom generates insights which can lead to breakthroughs that creates immense productivity.&quot;<p>It is important to emphasize that while this may be a consequence of wisdom, it is not what leisure is for the sake of. To reduce leisure and wisdom to instruments of productivity is to miss the whole point. We do not make leisure so that we may work, so that we may be more productive; we work so that we may make leisure. Wisdom is an end in itself. Work is not. &quot;Productivity&quot; is not. Work exists for the sake of leisure, not the other way around. (We must also not confuse recreation with leisure.)<p>Josef Pieper&#x27;s book &quot;Leisure: the Basis of Culture&quot; makes exactly this point. Something Pieper covers in the first chapter and worth noting here is that the word &quot;school&quot; comes from the Latin <i>schola</i> which in turn is derived from the Greek <i>σχολή</i> (<i>skhole</i>) which is the Greek word for &quot;leisure&quot; (indeed, the absence of leisure characteristic of work was defined negatively, <i>askholia</i> in Greek and <i>negotium</i> in Latin). Modern education may make this difficult to comprehend, but this is more discernible in classical education. Similarly, the &quot;liberal&quot; in &quot;liberal arts&quot; refers to the freedom to pursue leisure, and these are opposed to the so-called servile arts. And lastly, Pieper draws attention to the prevalence of religious feasts during the Middle Ages whose essential function wasn&#x27;t to stuff your face with food and drink yourself under the table, but leisure. What could be more &quot;leisurely&quot; than religion, that which is, after all, concerned with the ultimate end and the highest good?<p>We moderns live in what Pieper called the world of total work (he was writing this book in the postwar period, so this affliction is nothing new). To be sure, we must toil and till the field in which wisdom will grow, but we do not live to till the field; we till the field so that we may live. What is it that we live for, that we <i>ought</i> to live for? Perhaps it is our modern nihilism that frightens us enough to invert the relation between work and leisure, leading us to lose ourselves in work to avoid the realization.

To become rich, play lottery - worked for some! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Survivorship_bias" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Survivorship_bias</a>

I do agree with the content in the article but I struggle to see the line in between doing less and being intentionally lazy. I could make an argument that I am not doing something or probably doing the tasks slowly to make the best of the situation. Now doing something while taking some good time might be helpful in order to avoid errors but again how do find the sweet spot of taking your own sweet time versus just being lazy to do something.

I think the gist of the article is: Sometimes (not always) the winning move is not to play. I have experienced this phenomenon before where my best ideas are had in the shower, or a software bug is resolved after going for a walk in nature. Another way of putting this is: avoid the target to hit it.

To become wise, think more, do less<p>Which actually means practice (or perform) thinking more and probably reduce &quot;less meaningful&quot; work (not just &quot;meaningless&quot;)<p>Increasing efficiency &amp; accuracy in thinking and performing actions<p>Above are my very rough thoughts.

Because Elon, Gates, Carmack, Eintstein , Feynman, Bezos, Sheryl Sandberg, Buckminister, Darwin did less.<p>Right.