Building A Wise Man
Today's guest post is another piece by Dr. Rajiv Vaidyanathan, Professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Executive Director of the Association For Consumer Research. His previous guest posts can be found here and here.Building A Wise Man
by Dr. Rajiv Vaidyanathan
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
I frequently find myself admonishing my son for being so sure of himself. Myself, I am constantly reminded how much there is to learn and how little I know. I love to read in a huge variety of areas. I devour information on physics, cosmology, history, language, psychology, religion, politics, sociology, philosophy, music and more. As a result, I feel I have a shallow, superficial level of knowledge in a wide variety of areas. I love to argue about things and see what counterarguments others can offer, just to help me refine my own views.
My 14-year-old son will share some piece of knowledge and gloat when he finds out that I didnât have that piece of information. Or, he sometimes will tell me about an interaction with a friend where he was oh-so surprised that his friend "didnât even know that..." For some reason this irritates me a great deal and I remind him not to be so judgmental. "I can bet there are a bunch of things your friend knows that he can tell you that would make you sound clueless," I tell him.
I also recall the numerous times that I have told him something to the effect, "Donât be so sure youâre right and you know all these things. There are a ton of things you donât know, just as there are millions of things I donât know. Nothing wrong with not knowing everything (few people do), but I canât stand people who donât know something, but donât know they donât know it. Ignorance of ignorance is a lot worse than knowledge of ignorance. I respect people who know they donât know much more than people who donât know they donât know."
Yes, Iâm saying the same thing over and over again, but I get so irritated when he comes across as cocksure of himself that I try to hammer home the point that he ought to have a lot more humility about the scope of his knowledge.
I have begun wondering whether Iâm doing the right thing by him. Increasingly, I find that true leaders tend to be very sure of themselves. In fact, when I think back to people who I considered exemplary leaders, they were not the people who expressed doubts about what they knew in the larger scheme of things. The people I wanted to follow were inspirational mainly because they were able to articulate a very clear vision of the future and convince me that they were sure that this was the correct view of the future.
I wonder, do you need to be sure about uncertain outcomes in order to be a good leader? Am I actually hindering the development of my sonâs leadership abilities by constantly reminding him of all the things that he doesnât know?
Here I go again â Iâm just not sure that Iâm doing the right thing by trying to convince my son that he knows very little and that he will always know very little no matter how much he learns. My intentions are honorable. My noble goal in telling him this is to turn him into someone who is always questioning and always learning. One of my favorite quotes when I was a young kid was frequently repeated by my great-grandfather:
He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool - shun him.
He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a child - teach him.
He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep - wake him.
He who knows, and knows that he knows, is a wise man - follow him.
I remember growing up and coming to truly believe this quote (that has variously been attributed to Confucius or an Arabic, Persian, or Sanskrit proverb). The problem is that the more I learn, the more I become convinced I can never reach the last stage of becoming a âwise man.â Thatâs not a problem, in itself. But Iâm wondering whether anyone can ever take that coveted spot.
I guess I am now struggling to reconcile this quote with the Bertrand Russell quote that started this post. I believe both. But whatâs a father to do when trying to do the right thing with his kids? Is the wise man one who knows he knows or one who is full of doubts?
Permalink posted by Idaho Dad at 1:57 AM
6 Comments:
My take on leadership is this: A good leader has doubts, but he can't afford to display them once he makes a decision. That's because people (or at least Americans), for right or wrong, won't follow someone who displays "weakness."
Contrast Bush and Obama. Both come across as extremely confident. Bush, by his own earlier admission, rarely questions that his decision was not only a good decision, but the only decision.
Obama, on the other hand, seems to question himself at every turn. He actually challenges his own thought processes by soliciting the advice of others.
Both men come across as confident on the surface. Both are quite different in how they approach hubris, confidence and self-righteousness.
It's that last word, I think that you are most concerned with. There is a fine line between confidence and self-righteousness. When I was younger and even today, I've had to fight drifting into the latter.
Translating this all to parenting: When dealing with my own son, I praise my son's good work, but always become cautionary when he gets cocky. (He's too young to be self-righteous yet.) Cockiness engenders carelessness.
I remind my son, "Don't be impressed with your own genius. There is always someone out there who knows more than you." Or something to that effect.
Am I doing the right thing? Who knows? I'm not at all confident when it comes to the world of parenting. ;-)
perhaps this is where a dash of humility might come in to play?
to be aware of your own knowledge and the positives it can bring you, but at the same time have the respect to know that every one of us are experts in certain areas and we should all be reaching to each other to expand that knowledge.
my kids are still too small to have reached such a modicum of self-righeousness, but i would hope that is what i can teach them.
very thoughtful, thank you for this.
There's an important difference between confidence and arrogance.
Confidence gives you the strength to be challenged and listen to differing opinions and facts.
Arrogance goes past that and blinds a person to anything they don't believe to be true.
It's important for us to let our kids be confident, but help them guard against arrogance.
I haven't been blogging at all, and I just noticed your blog is listed again. It's about time, as you were greatly missed. Good to have you back, stop by sometime this Spring with the kids and we can catch up. The Stickman
If I may offer my opinions, a few things are at work here.
1. Your son is at an age where mental development wrt. seeing/taking in all the information that is available is still taking place. As a result, his approximations of modeling people can be worse than yours. Experience is key. The most important thing to keep in mind is that he will still change depending on what input you give him, albeit, at an attenuating rate. If he has had the same environment of growing up like yours, he will be open to change.
2.In my own experience, the best way to do that is to lead by example. My dad used to do that. It also helped that he had the least number of degrees behind his name compared to his brothers ( and they used to think him wiser and ask him for advice). He always admitted upfront when he didn't know something. If you explore a problem as a peer with your son , he will probably compete with you. It depends on how you both approach a problem. It also helps if you don't bring attention to it when your son gloats about knowing something you didn't know.
3. Let us face it, you probably "knew" facts and other stuff about the world, more than your dad at some point in your life growing up. and you "perceived" it too. Your son is going to do that too. I did that with my father. There was a point where I felt I knew more than him, but then the point became, why am I comparing myself with him. That was brought about by my parents encouraging me to compare ( for the sake of progress) only with myself and not with others.
It might seem like the outside world is set on comparisons with others, who wins the race, who get admission into a university/school etc... but parents must try to encourage more of self comparison and also, of course, when to stop comparing.
Even now, my dad tries to tell me something he read in a local paper related to my research and more than once I have had to suppress the urge to scoff at him or just say he is late/wrong for saying something that I already know, or think is worthless. I realized that it was because I was treating him like a peer, comparing him with myself, my peers. My point here is "dad" is just one category among many that I will encounter in my life that will not lend themselves to comparison/ evaluation. Even in an evaluation of my peers what am I doing? I am looking at whether they make sense with my narrow model of a scientific method of observing, hypothesising and learning. A child is doing that too, albeit somewhat crudely. because the objective is to learn to deal with the world. A child does it out of necessity ( I guess ) while scientists do it more out of passion.
A question is, do facts, concepts, technology constitute wisdom ? Knowledge is different from wisdom. The other question is, does it make sense to compare ourselves with others? While competition is important for progress it should not be with others alone. It should be more with oneself. With others, there is always a handicap that you are not accounting for ( initial conditions) and hence it is not fair. The world may not be "fair" but I must try to be "fair". Because, if I am not fair, I lose my right to call out somebody's unfairness and correct it and it is downhill from there.
4.My final point is about leaders and wise men. Do you want your son to be a leader or a wise man? It is not a binary choice, rather it is figuring out the choices that you will have to make to become a leader that will prevent you from being a wise man and vice versa. Not all leaders are wise men, and the same can be said of wise men too. IMO a "wise man" is a superset of a "leader". Leading doesn't come by itself. People follow you and then you become a leader. If you can make your son wise, he will lead if he has to. From the viewpoint of the follower it seems like the leader knows things that he doesn't and hence he is a leader. There cannot be a "leader" in a vacuum. A wise man knows when to don a leader's hat and when to place it down.
"He who knows, and knows that he knows, is a wise man - follow him."
That is a "leader", one of the many dimensions of a wise man.
Besides, this verse and many others like this were written for the common man, and you can see the decisiveness/mutual exclusivity of one's actions. It seems to convey a sense of confidence which a person needs if they are unsure of what to do . ( because they don't know what to do, not because they are aware of what would be the best to do and have a dilemma). IMO, a wise man thinks the other way, he is unsure because he can see far reaching implications of his actions and in the long run he is not sure of any "success" . I am pretty sure that you can find somebody who will satisfy all four qualifications mentioned in the verse simultaneously. What do we do then? a dilemma!
You sacrifice correctness for the sake of simplicity if your receiver(R) does not have the experience to extrapolate the message to their situation. Once R becomes more experienced, you can be sure that he will look at the message and recognize the approximation ( removal of some context) that was done in order to convey the most important points alone.
I apologise for writing an almost-a-blog entry. I hope any of this made sense. I didn't try to put things across elegantly ( not that I would have much success with it)
Good luck! I know I will come across these problems when I become a dad someday and I hope my experience will help me then. Finally I think that there is no "right thing", all one can do is act conscientiously and hope that things will turn out alright.
oh. I just realized after reading your other articles that you had mentioned many of the points that I had brought up. I apologise for that. Please take those only that are new and make sense.
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