Legal Commentary

Intelligence. Experience. Wisdom.

By Patrick J. Lamb

Regular readers know that I am an NPR guy.  I was listening to Scott Simon this morning on the way home from the gym.  Scott had been off the air for a bit while undergoing surgery, and he made some comments at the end of today's show:

It wasn't until after Dr. Edward Benzel, Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery, got his hands out of my neck that he handed me a paper he wrote last year for the Congress of Neurological Surgeons on wisdom.

Intelligence and experience are commodities that are measured on various scales. But Dr. Benzel sees wisdom as a deepening blend of intelligence, experience, and something that's more precious, and impossible to quantify.

Intelligence is critical. You wouldn't want a neurosurgeon without it. But smart people make mistakes, not despite their intelligence, but often because they're so smart, they're sure they must be right.

Dr. Benzel quotes Satchel Paige: "It's not what you don't know that hurts you; it's what you know that just ain't so."

Dr. Benzel also quotes Einstein, Moliere and Voltaire. But when you're rolled into an operating room, it's encouraging to know your surgeon is inspired by a man who pitched baseball games for 40 years.

At first I thought Scott was going to shift into some light-hearted comments about Satchel Paige, but then he said this:

Experience can knock around intelligence, to create the kind of doubt that can lead to reflection and maturity. But if you let experience alone guide decisions, you might not try anything new, which will turn wisdom into mush.

Dr. Benzel winds up concluding that an essential ingredient of wisdom is morality, to use an old-fashioned, even unexpected word: knowing when it's right—and he thinks it almost always is—to make a decision that we won't judge by whether it's bold, clever, or without risk, but whether it's truly wise.

I love moments like this, when I am forced to pause and think. Lots of people are smart.  Lots of people have experience.  But wise is an adjective not used often.  Is it just morality applied to experience and intellect?  In our business, I think it is that, but more too.  It is the ability to see the future and also to see the future and the present three dimensionally, so you see how things play out, and whether the future, in that circumstance, would be good or not.  It is about putting off immediate gratification for future well-being.  It's about seeing the broader impact of a decision, and who, the long run benefits and who is hurt. 

Dr. Benzel's point is a good one, and I don't know if his paper goes further.  But it is a wonderful idea to think about.

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on February 13, 2010 (boomark / email).