wisdom is missing

Growing up in Athens, I was brought up on the classics and the Greek myths. They were taught to me not as ancient history, as my children learned them in their American classrooms, but as my personal roots and the source of my identity. Athena was the goddess of wisdom, and, for me, the idea of wisdom is forever identified with her — weaving together strength and vulnerability, creativity and nurturing, passion and discipline, pragmatism and intuition, intellect and imagination, claiming them all, the masculine and the feminine, as part of our essence and expression.

Today we need Athena’s wisdom more than ever. She breathes soul and compassion — exactly what has been missing — into the traditionally masculine world of work and success. Her emergence, fully armed and independent, from Zeus’s head, and her total ease in the practical world of men, whether on the battlefield or in the affairs of the city; her inventive creativity; her passion for law, justice, and politics — they all serve as a reminder that creation and action are as inherently natural to women as they are to men. Women don’t need to leave behind the deeper parts of themselves in order to thrive in a male- dominated world. In fact, women — and men, too — need to reclaim these instinctual strengths if they are to tap into their inner wisdom and redefine success.

Wisdom is precisely what is missing when — like rats in the famous experiment conducted by B. F. Skinner more than fifty years ago — we press the same levers again and again even though there is no longer any real reward. By bringing deeper awareness into our everyday lives, wisdom frees us from the narrow reality we’re trapped in — a reality consumed by the first two metrics of success, money and power, long after they have ceased to fulfill us. Indeed, we continue to pull the levers not only after their diminishing returns have been exhausted, but even after it’s clear they’re actually causing us harm in terms of our health, our peace of mind, and our relationships. Wisdom is about recognizing what we’re really seeking: connection and love. But in order to find them, we need to drop our relentless pursuit of success as society defines it for something more genuine, more meaningful, and more fulfilling.

Arianna Huffington

"Why We Need Wisdom More Than Ever," by Arianna Huffington. Thrive Global. November 30, 2016. Excerpt from Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder pp. 116–130. As found in 2022 Great Quotes From Great Leaders Boxed Calendar: 365 Inspirational Quotes From Leaders Who Shaped the World.

don't be a slave to focus groups

When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”

Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of relying on market research, he honed his version of empathy—an intimate intuition about the desires of his customers. He developed his appreciation for intuition—feelings that are based on accumulated experiential wisdom—while he was studying Buddhism in India as a college dropout. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead,” he recalled. “Intuition is a very powerful thing—more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”

Sometimes that meant that Jobs used a one-person focus group: himself. He made products that he and his friends wanted. For example, there were many portable music players around in 2000, but Jobs felt they were all lame, and as a music fanatic he wanted a simple device that would allow him to carry a thousand songs in his pocket. “We made the iPod for ourselves,” he said, “and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out.”

Walter Isaacson

"The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs." Harvard Business Review the Magazine. April 2012.

intuition: realize that the things they sense

There are things we know to be true and things we feel to be true. Thanks to our education, most of us tend to lean on our existing knowledge base to solve problems and make decisions. But the best leaders are those who realize that the things they sense—those possibilities that lie just beyond the realm of the known—hold a special value, too. Listening to them is how real breakthroughs happen.

Most of us have problems balancing logic with intuition. But the truth is that those faculties aren't opposed to one another. In fact, you need to figure out how to get them working together if you're to become a truly creative leader. Intellect without intuition makes for a smart person without impact. Intuition without intellect makes a spontaneous person without direction.

Erik Wahl

"5 Traits of Creative Leaders (and how to become one)." Fast Company. 8/17/2015