Turning Knowledge into Wisdom

Written by: Zijun Liu

The 21st century is filled with advancements across every field of study. We live in a digital age, where technology has weaseled its way into every aspect of life. While it brings many benefits, it has also put the average day-to-day life on fast forward mode. Transportation has gotten more efficient, quickening the time to get from one place to another, medicine has advanced, healing us faster than ever, and digital tools make communication across the globe possible in seconds. This has also indirectly caused our attention span to be more feverish. We are quick to disregard information we deem unworthy of our time as we jump from one thing to another. One example of this is our consumption of short-form media with the invention of Tik Tok, shorts, and reels. When we consume short-form media back-to-back, we are vulnerable to misinformation and committing wrong information to memory. We are susceptible to disregarding useful information.

I encourage us as a collective to slow down our pace at times and ponder the information that we acquire. The act of turning knowledge into wisdom takes time and care, it is not something we can rush.

Defining Knowledge and Wisdom

In order to begin this conversation on turning knowledge into wisdom, we have to define these terms and figure out what they really mean. For the purpose of this article, I define knowledge as information. It is the things we learn from reading, from listening to others, and viewing social media clips. I define wisdom as the application of information. This would mean putting acquired knowledge into action or performing a skill. Wisdom comes from digesting the things we learn and applying it in our life. 

The main difference between the two is that knowledge is required for wisdom. Wisdom cannot exist without knowledge. When we learn a skill, say shooting a basketball, we have the knowledge of generating force with our full body, the motion of our arms, the concept of arcing, and the concept of rebound. The action of combining all that knowledge and putting it into an action, turns shooting a basketball into a skill which can be categorized as wisdom. With all that being said, how do we start to turn knowledge into wisdom? The first step is to slow down.

What does it mean to slow down?

Slowing down is not only applicable to the physical world, but also the world inside our heads. It is easy to understand the action of slowing down when velocity is involved. But what does it mean to slow down figuratively? When we are flooded with information, we need to take time to organize and sort it. How do we expect to turn knowledge into wisdom when we are constantly bombarded with new information?

Slowing down is a phase we initiate to digest newly acquired information, which involves asking questions, pondering its use and finding ways to practice it. Asking questions slows down our thinking and halts further information from replacing what we just learned. This is important because this allows us to form our curiosity around the subject and actively engage with it. Not all knowledge is apparent in its use to us immediately; at times we question whether a piece of information is useful to us. Slowing down helps us make more informed decisions; we take a deeper look at the details and we become more confident in our answers.

To ponder its use, an important step is to slow down. Pondering knowledge stops us from rushing to a conclusion, for example, thinking that a piece of knowledge has no use. Finally, practice makes perfect, but we cannot expect to get good quality practice if we are so focused on so many things. Hence, proper practice of the knowledge is what turns it into wisdom that we can always count on.

Turning Zeroes into Ones

Let's take the skill of shooting a basketball, once you know how to do it, it becomes second nature to pull off. But as previously mentioned, there are actually a lot of small pieces that go into performing the skill. The small pieces are what I call “ones.” It takes many connections of “ones” to create something bigger and more practical in use. Budgeting, taxes, and driving are a few examples of skills that consist of multiple pieces of knowledge. However, sometimes we encounter knowledge that feels useless.

One great example of this is the subjects we learn in school. Throughout our careers we may find ourselves wondering “why are we learning about X when we could be learning something more useful in life like Y?” When we feel that a piece of knowledge is useless, or pointless, we often disregard learning it. These I call “zeros,” or knowledge with little value to us in the moment, knowledge we refuse to learn.

The quadratic equation is a common zero as it feels very lackluster when compared to learning how to do taxes or learning how to budget spending, but that is because we are comparing knowledge to wisdom. The quadratic equation is knowledge, like a piece of a puzzle, and budgeting is like a complete picture. For example, the quadratic formula can be used to help calculate profits/loss and at what point do we achieve maximum return or at what point does diminishing return happen. So if I were you, I wouldn't be so quick to disregard the quadratic equation, and this is but one small example of the many pieces of knowledge we disregard on a daily basis. Not to pick on big brother math, but using the quadratic formula or PEMDAS as examples, I do agree the use of that piece of knowledge is very lackluster. But it is important to not discard it or give up on learning them.

Zeroes are never beneficial because the knowledge has been disregarded, it doesn’t exist, like a real zero; it adds and multiplies into nothing. This is not to be confused with knowledge we forget. Another example would be the scientific method, someone who didn’t try to learn the scientific method would see the scientific method as a zero. Compared to someone who did try to learn it, used it in school, but forgotten about it later in life, can still say the scientific method is a one. The reason being is that, the latter person is more likely to have developed a more concrete problem-solution method based loosely off the scientific method, because they went through the motions of learning it. I argue that the very act of going through the motions of learning something is useful compared to not trying.

Learning builds foundation and concepts, because we are going through the motions and practicing it. So I encourage you to learn what is taught, by your peers, by your teachers, by the world even if it may seem useless at the moment. Practice it, turn them into ones no matter how useless it may seem. You would be surprised that one thing you heard or learned years back fits perfectly into a problem you're currently facing.

Everything is more connected than we think

Math is everywhere. If we stop and take a closer look at nature, we will find that there are patterns that go into its formation. Take the hexagons of a honeycomb, the formation of branches and leaves on a tree, the Fibonacci sequence, or fractals. Math is also in art, two subjects that are widely different on paper. Math twists and turns silly little numbers into letters and letters into numbers, while art is mixtures of lines and colors to create a picture. One is nice to look at and the other just gives you a headache. But a closer inspection we can see that geometry, symmetry, tessellations, and patterns exist in art. In algebra, we learned that multiple quadratic equations create pictures. Don’t lie, we all have been there, drawing on Desmos, using the quadratic equation graphing tool to make hypnotizing number spirals, funny cardioids, and interesting polar curves. “Wait a minute, polar curves kind of look like petals of a flower, don't they?” The purpose of these examples is to illustrate that there are connections in everything that we learn.

We talked about the concepts of turning zeros into ones. Understanding that everything is more connected than we think, we can start to string these ones together and create more eureka moments. There are times that we want to try a new hobby and find that we have an easier time picking it up. In those moments, could it be that we are naturally gifted? Maybe. But a more plausible explanation is that the knowledge that goes into that particular skill might relate to things you already know, whether you're conscious of it or not. People who are basketball players may have an easier time picking up football. The rules are different, but some knowledge is shared between the two, like team play, passing, running, spatial awareness, and hand-eye coordination. Or take group projects and team work in the work environment. People who participate in team sports are naturally more drawn to the importance of teamwork and focus on the people aspect when approaching group work. This causes them to naturally be better at working on group projects than their peers. It is important to acknowledge these moments, to visualize and draw the connections on what is working. When we see the repetition of things that work, we get better at replicating them. Being more conscious of our application of knowledge in different aspects of wisdom helps us draw even more connections and get more uses out of our pool of knowledge. To sum up, we turn zeros into ones, and we start to add them up to create wisdom (skills that have practical use), and we further this by multiplying this wisdom in making learning easier and more impactful. Quality knowledge is by far more important than quantity of knowledge.

I encourage us all in this fast and hectic world to find the joy of learning. We need to take more care and be more conscious of the information we receive and how we apply them. Slowing down to ponder the knowledge we receive, putting effort into the things we learn, and not disregarding knowledge that isn't immediately useful will help us find the links that work and be more deliberate about shaping the wisdom that we are so accustomed to possessing without a second thought. Let's make learning fun again, like satisfyingly collecting puzzle pieces that just click together.