Practical Wisdom
The Right Way to Do the Right Thing
Editorial Review
Practical wisdom is the essential human quality that combines the fruits of our individual experiences with our empathy and intellect-an aim that Aristotle identified millennia ago. It's learning the right way to do the right thing in a particular circumstance, with a particular person, at a particular time. But we have forgotten how to do this. In Practical Wisdom, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe illuminate how to get back in touch with our wisdom: how to identify it, cultivate it, and enact it, and how to make ourselves healthier, wealthier, and wiser.
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Wisdom to Share
Cultivating wisdom in ourselves enables us to sustain close and satisfying relations with others and to do work that is effective and significant.
The motivation to develop practical wisdom can be quite powerful. As Aristotle thought, practical wisdom may be the key to happiness.
Detailed rules and procedures, however well intentioned, are undermining the skill that wisdom requires.
The alliance between reason and emotion that makes practical wisdom possible develops as we try to discern what is going on in others, or in ourselves, sometimes get it wrong, and then have our judgments refined by our experience.
Much medical training is designed to teach doctors to approach their patients’ problems “objectively,” with the cool eye of reason, and not to give in uncritically to the desperate wishes of people who are afraid and in pain.
We learn how to categorize and frame-and re-categorize and reframe; through our own experiences and by being around mentors who provide models and correct our mistakes.
There is evidence from psychology that human beings are born with the capacity to be wise. The raw materials are there, waiting to be developed.
There is evidence from psychology that human beings are born with the capacity to be wise. The raw materials are there, waiting to be developed.
Without practical wisdom , the missing ingredient, neither rules nor incentives will be enough to solve the problems we face.
Without practical wisdom , the missing ingredient, neither rules nor incentives will be enough to solve the problems we face.
If you’re trying to improve the quality of medical care while simultaneously reducing its costs, it’s crazy to reward doctors for doing more procedures.
There is no doubt that better rules and smarter incentives have an important role to play in improving the way our institutions perform.
Most teachers want to teach kids the basics and at the same time excite them with the prospects of educating themselves.
We are growing increasingly disenchanted with the institutions on which we depend. We can’t trust them. They disappoint us. They fail to give us what we need.
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