The Way of Wisdom #1: Wisdom Cannot Be Microwaved
I’m totally ok being categorized as an old man shouting into the void. But, it’s about time we talked about wisdom, learning, and how older generations can serve our younger sisters and brothers.
In multiple meetings over the last year, I have found myself leaning in to listen and learn from young staff members. My wife, Rochelle, has advised that everyone over 45 needs to have a good friend under 35, and listen to them. Rochelle and I have also shared with many parents that there comes a time when, in certain areas, you have to embrace your children to become your teachers.
That said, there is a certain rhythm in modern culture that we need to pay attention to. What? Well, to be blunt, and though nothing is 100%, it’s this: Young people hardly every know what they’re talking about in some very critical areas of life.
A Brief Story
When our youngest daughter was learning to walk, Rochelle and I talked to all our friends, other parents of young children, about how they were helping their kids. We tried all the things they tried.
One weekend, my mom came to visit. She saw us working with Malia on her walking. My mom said, “If you put those shoes (the kind with the hard wooded sole) on her, she’ll walk.” We did. Malia walked.
It was at that moment that I learned a vital lesson: All my friends were first time parents too. They didn’t know any more than I did. What’s more, I had ready access to my mother and other older women and men who had raised children, through all the joys and mistakes, and knew what they were talking about, because they had already done what I was attempting to do.
Reflection, Imitation, Experience
Confucius said wisdom comes through three pathways: reflection, imitation, and experience—the noblest, the easiest, and the bitterest, respectively. What often goes unnoticed in our hurried modern interpretation of this ancient insight is that none of these methods are readily available to those who have not yet lived. We exist in a culture obsessed with acceleration, where we believe everything—including wisdom—can be microwaved, downloaded, or hacked. We mistake information for understanding, credentials for depth, and intelligence for the hard-won discernment that only time can forge. This confusion has created generations — mine included, even at our grown ages — that knows much but understands little, that can access endless data but lacks the seasoned judgment to navigate life’s most consequential decisions.
Confucius lists reflection as the noblest path to wisdom, but reflection requires something substantial to reflect upon. A mirror held up to emptiness reveals nothing. Young people can certainly be reflective—they can think deeply, question assumptions, and engage in philosophical inquiry. But reflection that yields wisdom demands a reservoir of lived experience to draw from. It requires having faced moral dilemmas with real stakes, having watched decisions unfold into consequences over years rather than days or months, having witnessed the gap between intention and outcome enough times to develop humility. The twenty-year-old can reflect brilliantly on theories of justice; the fifty-year-old reflects on the time they chose career over relationship, or honesty over expedience, and lived with the reverberations for decades. These are fundamentally different kinds of reflection. One is intellectual exercise; the other is the mining of life for meaning.
TED Talks, Podcasts, and False Wisdom
Imitation, which Confucius calls the easiest path, similarly requires time to bear fruit. Young people can and do imitate—they observe parents, teachers, mentors, and cultural figures. But imitation that produces wisdom requires discernment about whom to imitate, and that discernment itself comes only through experience. The young person imitates what appears successful; the wise person has lived long enough to see that surface success often conceals private misery, that charisma can mask cruelty, that impressive credentials don’t guarantee character. More importantly, meaningful imitation requires sustained observation over time. To truly learn from a mentor’s example, one must watch them not just in moments of triumph but in seasons of adversity. One must see how they handle failure, betrayal, illness, and loss—the trials that reveal who someone actually is rather than who they appear to be. This kind of extended observation cannot be compressed into a weekend seminar or a TED talk.
Experience, the bitterest teacher, makes the most obvious case for why wisdom cannot be rushed. You cannot experience what has not yet happened to you. You cannot know the weight of sustained responsibility until you have carried it. You cannot understand the complexity of human relationships until you have watched them evolve across years and decades. You cannot grasp the consequences of major life choices until enough time has passed to see them fully unfold. The brain can simulate scenarios, but it cannot replicate the visceral, transformative impact of actually living through difficulty—of sitting with your own failures, of facing your limitations, of watching your predictions about life prove catastrophically wrong. This is why people who survive serious illness, economic collapse, or profound loss often describe themselves as fundamentally changed. They have been tutored by experience in ways that no amount of reading or intellectualizing could achieve.
Be Patient With Your Heart
Our contemporary culture aggressively resists this truth. We celebrate the young founder, the prodigy, the disruptor who reinvents industries before their prefrontal cortex has fully developed. We create platforms that amplify voices based on engagement metrics rather than depth of understanding. We package “wisdom” into bite-sized content, seven-step frameworks, and life hacks, as if the accumulated understanding of decades could be condensed into an Instagram carousel. We are impatient with the old, dismissive of traditional paths, and convinced that youth plus intelligence plus information equals wisdom. It does not.
This is not to diminish young people, who can be extraordinarily smart, creative, learned, and insightful. Intelligence is not age-dependent. A twenty-five-year-old can be brilliant, well-read, and intellectually sophisticated. But brilliance is not wisdom. Wisdom requires what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke called “living the questions”—dwelling in uncertainty long enough to develop genuine understanding rather than premature answers. It requires the humility that comes from being repeatedly wrong, the compassion that emerges from one’s own suffering, and the perspective that only temporal distance provides.
The problem with our microwave approach to wisdom is not just that it fails—though it does—but that it creates a culture of false confidence. We produce leaders who have knowledge without judgment, influence without experience, and certainty without the earned right to it. We lose the generational transfer of understanding that happens when societies honor the hard-won insights of those who have actually lived.
Confucius understood what we have forgotten: wisdom is grown, not manufactured. It requires the patient accumulation of reflection, imitation, and experience—none of which can be rushed, outsourced, or digitized. In our haste to accelerate everything, we must remember that some things, like redwood trees and human wisdom, simply take time.