Sam Bankman-Fried is an incredibly brilliant man. He has the kind of lofty intelligence that gets you into MIT. When the recruiters at Jane Street Capital, the finance firm, were thinking of hiring Sam, they confronted him with all sorts of probability puzzles: “If you roll two six-sided dice, what are the odds that you will get at least one three?” Or: “What are the odds that I have a relative who is a professional baseball player?” For that one you have to calculate how many humans there are, how many professional baseball players there are, how many relatives people have, and how likely it is that the recruiter only thought of the question in the first place because he does have a baseball-playing relative. 

Bankman-Fried whizzed through these questions like a kid going through M&Ms. He was so phenomenal at games, puzzles, and problems that after he was hired, his colleagues would try to invent tricks to stump him. One day, a fellow trader came up to him and said, “Perfume in the mail.” Bankman-Fried thought for a second and replied, “Sent scent.” Then she said, “Britney Spears is no longer working.” Bankman-Fried responded, “Idle idol.” Impressive. 

But after he left Jane Street, started his crypto firm, and had to lead himself and his own team, Bankman-Fried started behaving like a moron. He still had that calculating brain, which made him billions, but he also did all sorts of idiotic things. 

When he had trouble transferring funds to Korea, he tried to buy a 747 and stuff it with suitcases, each filled with $10,000 in cash. He spent $55 million to get an endorsement from quarterback Tom Brady. He was such a terrible manager that one day his entire executive team quit, along with half of his company’s employees. He ran a crypto exchange and mixed investor funds with his personal accounts in ways that are patently illegal. 

I read about Bankman-Fried’s exploits in Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite, and I continually wanted to scream at him through the pages, “Don’t do that! That’s not how the world works!” He’s now serving twenty-five years in prison for fraud. 

His crimes weren’t malicious or even especially greedy, just insanely stupid. The best definition of stupidity is not having a low IQ. It’s having a tendency to take actions that cause damage to yourself and others. Bankman-Fried is an extreme example of a truth that should be obvious: Being intelligent is not the same as possessing good judgment. It’s not the same as the ability to make good decisions. Being intelligent is not the same as being wise. Imagine if a president gave Sam Bankman-Fried the keys to our nuclear codes. That would be ridiculous. It would be like a president giving Elon Musk the power to revamp the entire federal government. No sensible president would ever do that! The whole idea is ridiculous! 

The Intelligence Trap 

We live in a culture that overrates intelligence, but the academic research urges otherwise. Cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich of the University of Toronto has found that there is a low correlation between being intelligent and behaving rationally—behaving in ways that display common sense. Political psychologist Philip Tetlock has found that if you take extremely smart people who have spent their lives mastering a specific field and then you ask them to forecast the future within their field of expertise, they are terrible at it. The more celebrated the expert, the worse they are at forecasting. Locked into their one view of the world, they struggle to consider other viewpoints. 

Being a great intellectual does not mean you can anticipate what will come next. Being very intelligent does not mean you know how to proceed in the presence of incomplete knowledge. It does not mean you understand what aspects of a situation really matter. It does not mean you have a superior awareness of what you don’t know. It does not mean you are better than other people at detecting the flaws in your thought processes. Do you want to know what highly intelligent people are really good at? They are really good at persuading themselves that their own false beliefs are true. 

So, if intelligence is not the key ingredient of wisdom and good sense, what is? Let me offer a couple of observations. First, our society has completely–screwed-up notions about what ability is. Ever since the French Enlightenment, we’ve lived in an overly rationalistic culture. We assume that the highest and defining human faculty is reason and that the most important human trait is intelligence, which we measure in academic settings via the ability to earn good grades and do well on standardized tests. We’ve built our meritocracy around this rationalistic view of the world. 

But this vast cultural system is based on a bunch of assumptions. The first is that the reasoning brain can be separated from the body and the desiring will, and that you can test the brain’s processing speed to get a measure of a person’s ability. The second assumption is that life is mostly about solving problems, and so we should prioritize the traits that allowed Bankman-Fried to solve all those puzzles. 

These assumptions are false. It makes no sense to try to separate the brain from the body and the will. We are massively integrated systems, with brain, body, emotions, metabolism, perceptions, and desires all in conversation with one another as we go through life. Knowing, feeling, seeing, and acting are all part of one, whole–person experience. Rationalists, with their reductionist view of the world, have divided our unified thought process into these arbitrary categories in order to dissect a person. But if you try to detach one of these processes—like intelligence—from the others, you will end up with a mutilated image of what a person is and a complete misunderstanding of that person’s potential. Pascal understood this centuries ago, writing that the failure of rationalism is “not its recognition of technical knowledge, but its failure to recognize any other.” 

Second, life is not fundamentally about solving problems. We didn’t evolve to take standardized tests or to solve puzzles involving relatives and baseball players. We evolved to move. Our ancestors spent eons moving across a physical landscape in search of food while avoiding threats. Today we move across a historical landscape, the ever-changing parade of events. When you enter a party or go into a meeting, you are confronted with a social landscape. You have to deftly move through it, with all the diverse personalities and their shifting interests. When you conduct a research project, you have to move through an information space, intuiting which avenues to explore and which to avoid. 

Problem solving is not the hardest thing we do. We’ve built AI bots that can reason like Sam Bankman-Fried. Movement, on the other hand, is incredibly demanding. Try asking an AI-guided robot to play baseball or dance ballet or even gracefully tie its shoe. 

John Coates was a financial trader before he became a neuroscientist. Wiser than Bankman-Fried, he realized that stock trading is more like moving across a landscape than like solving puzzles. There are bull markets, when opportunities seem plentiful, testosterone starts flowing, and overconfident people make ridiculously risky bets. Then there are bear markets, when fear rules and people panic and make bad decisions. Coates found that good traders are not only good odds calculators. They also excel at monitoring the feedback from their bodies—the surges of hormones, the racing pulse of overexcitement, the narrow vision caused by fear. They can understand the ways their bodily reactions are wisely guiding them or leading them astray. 

In his book The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Coates offers us an alternative to the thinking-is-for-problem-solving paradigm. He writes, “The point is this, and I cannot emphasize it enough: when faced with situations of novelty, uncertainty, opportunity or threat, you feel the things you do because of changes taking place in your body as it prepares for movement.” He continues, “If, however, you view your brain and body and behavior with a robust appreciation of the fact that you are built to move, and if you let that simple fact sink in, then I am willing to bet you will never see yourself in quite the same way again.” 

If we see ourselves as creatures built to move, we can begin to get a clearer vision of what wisdom looks like. Wisdom is a fusion of intellectual, emotional, moral, physical, spiritual, and practical abilities that enable us to move gracefully through the landscapes of life. People are born with intelligence but acquire wisdom. Wise people are better at learning from experience than other people and have accumulated a repertoire of beliefs, emotions, intuitions, and perceptions that help them navigate through complex situations. As Aldous Huxley puts it, “Experience is not what happens to you. It’s what you do with what happens to you.” 

Navigation Tools 

If wisdom is the ability to move gracefully through the landscape of life, then what qualities does a wise person possess? To answer this question, I find it helps to be concrete—and nautical. If you were about to voyage across a vast and treacherous ocean, what kind of things would you need on your ship? 

First, you’d need an observation deck, a place where you could survey the world before you. A wise person looks at the landscape and understands what is going on there. As Victorian social critic John Ruskin put it, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.” 

Seeing well is not innate; it is learned over time. It is a very subtle skill. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes that wise political leaders possess “a sense of reality.” This is more of an aesthetic sense than a rational one. It’s the ability to perceive the unique flavours of each situation. It involves understanding the intricate connections between what is going on at the surface and what is going on in the more remote layers of social and psychological life. 

Perceptual wisdom, Berlin writes, “is not scientific knowledge but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot be either altered, or even fully described and calculated; an ability to be guided by rules of thumb.” 

The wise person knows how to pay attention—knows which features of the landscape to focus on, which is a great art, and which features to ignore, which is a greater one. During the Iraq War, certain perceptive soldiers could look down a street and get a feel for whether a bomb was planted there. But if you asked them how they knew, they couldn’t quite tell you. As Sergeant First Class Edward Tierney told the New York Times, “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling.” People who are overly intellectual and detached from their bodies are unable to develop and sense this form of personal knowledge. 

The second thing you would need if you were to cross the vast ocean is an engine room, a source of propulsion, a source of energy that would push you in one direction or another. The name we give to that energy source is “desire.” 

Some people suffer from akrasia, which is weakness of the will. Some people suffer from apathy, which is absence of desire. Some people suffer from depression, the emotional crisis that occurs within people who desire to have desires but cannot summon them. 

The more fortunate of us are propelled across the landscape of life by our wants, needs, and desires, whether it is a desire for achievement, respect, or belonging or a longing for God. 

In physical terms, desires emerge not from the prefrontal cortex, where conscious reasoning occurs, but from the midbrain, the deeper and less conscious area where the reward centres are found—dopamine processing and all that. Desires are mysterious. They bubble up from somewhere deep inside; they seem to control us more than we control them. My whole adult life I have worked harder than I should, driven by some remorseless desire to create and achieve. Why? I don’t know. I like shrimp but not scallops. Why? I don’t know. I can decide what I want to order off life’s menu, but I can’t seem to decide what I like. 

We do not so much create our desires as discern them. Some people go years unable to figure out what they truly want. Counselling and coaching are often about helping people discern their desires and clarify their goals. A mature person is able to discern the inner landscape of their deepest desires. 

If desire propels us through life, then what we want really matters. Some people settle for low desires. There’s nothing wrong with desiring sex, good food, a good figure, money, and lifestyle, but if those are your ultimate desires, you’ve turned yourself into Hugh Hefner or a Kardashian: something shallow, a little seedy, a commodity to be marketed and hawked in the marketplace or on reality TV. 

Other people pursue magnificent obsessions instead of trivial pursuits. They want the things that are worth wanting—to care for the ill or teach the young, to create beautiful things, pursue justice, or explore the world. Maturity is the process by which we gradually move from lower to higher desires. 

People’s lives often reflect the quality of their desires. Some look back on their lives with bitter regret because they didn’t desire enough. Others mess up their lives because of unrealistic or vague desires. The fulfilled people pursue lofty but approachable desires that can never be fully achieved: I want to combat cancer and disease; I want to create a world where suicide is no longer a temptation; I want to serve my church community. 

If desires propel us through life, then how you desire also matters. C.S. Lewis famously made a distinction between what he called “Need-love” and “Gift-love.” Need-love proceeds from a void. It is a terrified child rushing to his mother in need of safety or a greedy man amassing money. There is often a sense of desperation and joylessness about Need-love. 

Gift-love, on the other hand, flows from a place of fullness. One of my favourite lessons from attachment theory is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. People who are capable of Gift-love have been given a secure base by their family, community, and society and so feel existentially safe. They are attracted by delicious experiences more than they seek to avoid unpleasant experiences. Gift-love says, “I love plants; I’ll become a gardener” or “I feel most alive when playing the sax; I’ll do that.” 

Need-love, Lewis writes, cries out from poverty; Gift-love longs to serve. “Need-love says of a woman ‘I cannot live without her’; Gift-love longs to give her happiness comfort, protection—if possible, wealth.” 

Lewis describes a character he calls Mrs. Fidget. She seems at first like the very model of Gift-love. Everyone in the neighbourhood knows she lives for her family. Day and night, she does all the washing and cooking and serving. But when you look at her more closely, you see that there’s a lot of self in her love of family. She uses parenting in order to see herself playing this heroic role, so that she can admire herself. She laments that her family members don’t deserve and appreciate her pure and sacrificial love. Her love has a controlling aspect; she has very clear ideas of how her family members should behave and blows hot or cold, depending on whether they follow her designs. As Lewis puts it, a love like Mrs. Fidget’s “contains a good deal of hatred.” 

Finally, if desire propels people through life, then it is important to integrate your desires. Most of us have conflicting desires: the desire for autonomy but also belonging; the short-term desire to eat that donut but the long-term desire to be thin. The wise person wills one or two important things. She has brought her life to a point and journeys in one direction, wholeheartedly, clear about her motives. 

Such a person can say no to distractions and unhealthy impulses. It’s hard to repress an impulse through the rational process we call willpower or self-control (if we could, diets would work and New Year’s resolutions would be fulfilled). We usually can suppress a lower desire only because we are possessed by a loftier and integrated desire: I love my baby, so I will quit smoking; I love my country, so I will submit to Marine Corps boot camp. 

Self-control is often the art of using a large desire to conquer a smaller desire. Once you commit to some vast possibility—loving country or Christ or the bottomless eyes of the human being in front of you—some of the lower, more selfish and short-term desires seem less compelling. 

In short, to be a wise sea captain, you must be good at desire. Desiring well means pointing your life in the right direction, proceeding with generosity and poise, and persisting in times of hardship. It’s not possible to lead a wise life if you have unwise desires. 

Agility and Equipoise 

This brings us to the third thing you would need for an ocean crossing: a tiller. Maybe your desires have set your course due west, but life has a tendency to put icebergs in the way. It’s important to know how to sail around them. Plus, life tends to involve what management consultants call “permanent whitewater.” The waves are choppy, the tides are volatile, everything’s confusing. You must adjust, dodge, and feint if you want to stay on course. Agility is the ability to make constant wise adjustments in response to the changing circumstances of life’s journey. It requires phenomenal decision-making skills. 

Rationalists have screwed-up notions about decision-making. They describe decision-making as this cooly rational exercise. You list the pros and cons on a legal pad. You conduct a cost-benefit analysis. Rationalists tend to focus on what they can count and measure, ignoring any feature of a situation not amenable to quantification. 

But most of life is not like that. Often you sail on stormy seas. The information in front of you is wildly imperfect. There’s no way to neatly calculate the consequences of a particular course of action; there’s no ability to compare randomly controlled experiments, because you only get one life. Moreover, life comes at you fast. If you’re arguing with a colleague or trying to control your child, you have to make imperfect decisions in real time. If you’re running a company, you have to constantly initiate action, make one high-velocity decision after another. You have to know when to go on the attack and when to withdraw. 

What philosopher Michael Oakeshott said of political life is true for life in general: “Men sail on a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.” People who can do this with agility are not whiz-kid calculators; they are hunch athletes. They constantly adjust the tiller with swift, subtle motions. They are better able than others to make use of their unconscious knowledge. Like great chess masters, they can relax their conscious thoughts to allow their unconscious thoughts to flow unhindered. 

The people who can do this possess equipoise. Equipoise is a paradoxical trait. People with equipoise are not unfeeling. On the contrary, they are acutely sensitive to passing emotions. But they observe, label, and process their emotions calmly, with a spirit of moderation. 

That’s because they understand what emotions are. Many Greek philosophers, with Plato, argued that emotions are unruly, passionate steeds that need to be guided by the wise charioteer—reason. Now we understand that emotions assign value to things, and they are wise most of the time. After the desires have selected a goal, our emotions tell us whether we are moving toward it (happiness) or are being blocked from it (frustration). As the neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs told Leonard Mlodinow for his book Emotional, “An emotion is a functional state of mind that puts your brain in a particular mode of operation, that adjusts your goals, directs your attention, and modifies the weights you assign to various factors as you do mental calculations.” Emotions are an essential component of the reasoning process, not an obstacle to it. 

People with equipoise can calmly appraise their emotions. They possess emotional granularity and can distinguish between adjacent emotions: stress, anxiety, fear, excitement, frustration. Most importantly, they make their emotions their advisers and not their masters. They can label and articulate what they are feeling. They have the capacities of a trimmer. When their emotions are pushing too hard over to port, they can shift their weight to starboard, and when their emotions shift and go the other way, they can adjust to that too. They can be calm in times of war and aggressive in times of torpor. They intuitively know when to push forward and when to hold back, what tasks they should spend their time on and what tasks they should neglect. As Warren Buffett once observed, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble.” 

Former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi may not strike you immediately as a brilliant individual. She doesn’t toss off stunning ideas. But she was the most effective legislator of my lifetime. She could walk into a meeting armed with an awareness of what all the parties wanted. More than that, she possessed outstanding initiative. She was relentlessly proactive. Her philosophy was that every moment you are not acting is a moment you are closing off options. So she always pushed forward, forcing others to react to her moves. 

In his book Sources of Power, Gary Klein describes a fire commander who led his team into a burning house. In the kitchen, something was not right. The fire was hotter than it should be and also quieter. On instinct he ordered his men to flee the home. A few seconds later, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. It turned out the real fire was not the one on the first floor. It was the one they were unaware of, burning in the basement below. 

This kind of agility comes from experience, not from reading books. If you were on a ship entering a tricky harbour, who would you want to steer it—a physicist who understood the elemental forces at play or a harbour master who did this task five times a day? 

Receptivity to the Other 

The final thing I’ll mention that you would need on your ship for an ocean crossing is the dining area, the social centre of the ship. The journeys we take in life are seldom solo journeys. We take them with family members, colleagues, teammates, clients, and customers. We wouldn’t say a person was wise unless they understood other people, unless they could cooperate well. 

Very often the talents we possess don’t inhere in individuals; they inhere in teams. Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg looked at star stock pickers after they were recruited by one bank away from their original bank. Their performance plummeted. It turned out that their earlier, stellar performance was produced in collaboration with their team at the old bank, not by them alone. The same phenomenon occurs when you take surgeons away from the nurses they’re used to working with and put them with a new group. The surgeons’ performance plummets. 

It’s not really possible to be wise unless you are other-centred. Wisdom is not only an intellectual, emotional, and perceptual trait; it’s also a social and moral trait, which requires the spirit of generosity. Wisdom requires possessing what the rationalists denigrate as “soft skills”—the ones that enable you to collaborate well with others, manage conflict, comfort people who are in pain, and understand other points of view. These skills also correlate poorly with IQ. 

Some people seek pleasure and some seek happiness, but wise people seek psychological complexity. They work on relationships, have significant conversations, and read novels so they can experience other people’s minds. They possess social range, the ability to be in relationship with all sorts of people. They are capable of a depth of feeling and openness to new experiences. They see individuals, not stereotypes. Social scientists can use data to make generalizations across populations of people, but wise people can grasp the perspective of the unique individual right in front of them. 

Wise people have the ability to organize a travelling party, to pull people into their worldview, and to be present with them through the ups and downs of the journey. In the movies, the wise people are like Dumbledore and Yoda, dropping great maxims onto young minds. But in real life wise people usually don’t tell us what to do. They accompany us on our journey for a ways. They take the rationalizations and stories we tell about our lives and see us in a noble struggle. They see us navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty. They see our journey not from the inside, as we experience it, but from the outside, as we cannot. 

People change only when they feel understood. Wise people are more like coaches than philosopher–kings. They prod you to consider the story you tell about your life so that you might have a healthier relationship to your own past, so that you can understand the people who wounded you and how you might tell a redemptive story that leads to a better future. They ask you to probe what’s really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem underneath the convenient superficial problem you’ve come to them for help about. Wise people don’t give orders; they enter into your own process of meaning making and help you sort out your thoughts and emotions. 

Their essential gift is not pontification; it’s receptivity—the capacity to embrace what you offer them. They create an atmosphere of hospitality, a place where you can feel at peace and free to be yourself. 

The knowledge that results from this sort of accompaniment is contextual and personal. It applies to this specific human facing this specific situation. It is not generalizable in a way that would allow it to be distilled into a cliché in a book of quotations or on a Pinterest page. The wise person is able to see others at great depth and offer them the privilege of being seen. Being seen in this way tends to turn down the pressure and impart hope. 

I can imagine a few other parts of a ship needed for an ocean crossing, but I’ll conclude by returning to the main point. We have built a society that overemphasizes the traits that are easiest to test for and quantify—IQ. But a person is not to be inventoried. A person is a unified whole. Roughly 99 percent of our thought processes are unconscious, and these parts can’t be dissected, only discerned. The wise person is attentive to the submerged properties of herself, the submerged properties of others, and the submerged properties of the situations she travels through. She discerns these properties not with pure reason but with all the resources I’ve described—perception, desire, emotion, empathy. Wisdom could be defined as the trait possessed by those whose cognition, emotion, and motivation are all singing the same tune. The wise person is in communication with all the characters and modules within herself. 

You can recognize a wise person not by cerebral brilliance but by personal grace. When they encounter a new situation, they realize, This is a melody I have heard before. They realize that knowledge is not the accumulation of facts; knowledge is what naval people call the ability to reckon—the capacity to assess your location, to register the conditions, to appreciate the ramifications of this action versus that one, to be gripped by an ultimate good and intuit a way toward it. 

Wisdom is the ability to understand that things never fit together neatly. Our longing for autonomy is in tension with our longing for community; our longing for freedom is in tension with our longing for equality. Wisdom is the ability to understand the difference between a good compromise and a bad compromise. Psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg writes, “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is all about—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.” 

Sorry, young ones, this is a trait that accumulates with age—not in all older people, Lord knows, but in some. As cognitive researchers have persuasively demonstrated, older people tend to experience fewer negative emotions than younger ones. Someone criticizes them, and they take it in stride. They are more aware of their shortcomings and more likely to see that the critic has a point. “Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing,” Richard Rohr writes, “and full seeing seems to take most of our lifetime, with a huge leap in the final years, months, weeks, and days of life, as any hospice volunteer will tell you.” 

Life doesn’t have to slow down as the years go by. On the contrary, the wisdom of experience allows people to take on more stress, not less. We are happiest not when we achieve our goals but when we are lost in the pursuit of them. The name Christians give to this happy state is “the fruit of the Spirit,” which I define as cheerful tranquility amid arduous pursuits. 

A person who possesses this fruit has laid down what Tim Keller once called “the melancholy burden of assumed omniscience.” She possesses an inner moderation and knows what she doesn’t know. She is liberated from the sort of obsessive self-focus that is the young person’s chief source of misery and inhibition. She is serious about others but not about herself. When you are young, it’s possible to live with the illusion that you’re in charge of your life. But later on you become more aware of how much was given to you, aware that you are not in charge of your life but the beneficiary of your life. 

At this later stage you will think back to your mentors and teachers, the institutions that formed you. You’ll be struck by the astonishing importance of luck. You’ll realize that your journey across the ocean is part of a longer human journey: many legs were undertaken before you were born, and many will be undertaken after you die. I have painted this portrait of wisdom not because most of us will get there. We won’t. I offer this portrait so we can appreciate the many gifts, abilities, and potentials that lie within us right now, waiting to be used and cultivated.