Wednesday; September 16

In all honesty, I haven’t read much of what Malcolm Gladwell has written; however, I recently came across a couple of quotes from his book “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”.

The first quote is, “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”. In this simple observation, Gladwell captures a definition for the concept of wisdom. Facts are everywhere. Data is easily obtained. Yet, the key to being successful is synthesizing the raw data into useful ideas. Interestingly, this isn’t accurate in just the applied sciences, it is especially true in the social sciences as well. We need information, but people who are true leaders are those who can translate it into applicable truth.

Gladwell’s second observation is, “We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.” (Now if you need to go back and reread that one, that’s understandable.) At the risk of becoming one of “those types” of people, as I read this quote I thought about how often I offer superficial answers based on a casual investigation. We think too shallowly because we feel compelled to speak too quickly. We are too excited about being the one with the first answer that we actually sacrifice the correct answer.

Let’s dedicate ourselves to gathering credible information, then processing it through wisdom. When we do, we will be able to make statements that are accurate and insightful.

Think About It!

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