How to Gain Wisdom: A Simple Framework for Everyday Life

Where does wisdom come from? How do you gain it?

Simply put, I believe it's gained through living life with your eyes open, listening to and learning from others, and spending time where wisdom is dispensed. I think this is true regardless of your background or beliefs. I've spent most of my life seeking wisdom by figuring people out.

As a senior at the University of Michigan, a business professor told me to find someone in their sixties whose life I admired and ask them how they got there. Then do it.

I literally did that as a 22-year-old. I found an older businessman in the church I attended whom I greatly respected, and asked him that question. I eventually bought our first house from him, and that couple had an early, profound impact on the trajectory of my marriage and life.

A Framework for Wisdom

Proverbs 24:32 (NIV) states: "I applied my heart to what I observed and learned a lesson from what I saw."

This verse expresses what wisdom looks like in this season of my life. Let me break it down.

Applying my heart means engaging everything about me, all my senses, to what's happening in the moment. It's being fully present in a conversation or discussion. It's listening to what the person is saying without prejudice and without the pretense of responding with knowledge. It's being fully present in their life at that moment. For much of my life, this wasn’t true for me.

This posture requires humility and curiosity. A wise person realizes that unvarnished truth is often insufficient and therefore holds their beliefs humbly. When you acknowledge you don't know all you need to know, you create space to actually learn something.

What I observed means looking for everything they're saying with their eyes, their lips, their body position, their tone, their words, their feet, and their hands. I look for incongruities between these forms of communication. I look for congruities and what they're communicating beyond just words.

Learned a lesson means I look for what I can learn from fully applying my heart and observing all I can about the person. I process all this information with everything I've learned in the past. I run it through not only my cognitive knowledge base but also my intuitive knowledge base. I learn in the moment without fearing silence.

Here's where divine insight intersects with experience. Paul prays that followers be filled with the knowledge of God's will through "all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives." This tells me wisdom isn't merely accumulated experience; it's divinely provided through God's Spirit guiding our minds. It involves special insight into how God is working in the world.

Then I confirm what I'm observing and learning in their presence. The goal is to enable others on their journey. It isn't to simply take them where I want them to go, but rather to discover what we can learn on the journey and find our way there together.

Wisdom in the Everyday

This approach to all of life continues to propagate wisdom for living. I don't care if it's a family reunion, shopping, eating at a restaurant, watching kids play sports, doing dishes, or just about anything. If we approach all of life from this perspective, we gain wisdom.

Because wisdom isn't just about knowing truth, it's about applying truth. You can possess knowledge, but wisdom comes through the application of that knowledge to specific needs, including applying biblical truths to everyday situations. The scriptures are the repository of ultimate wisdom, but they must be lived and experienced to be comprehended.

And ironically, it's like money, the more you have, the more you get. As you gain more wisdom, it gives you the desire and knowledge to reflect upon as you see things in your current context. You have a deeper well to draw from. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle. When you live wisely and reflectively, you grow in the knowledge of God, which in turn leads to wiser living and decision-making consistent with God's intentions.

The wisdom you accumulate becomes the lens through which you interpret new experiences, and those new experiences deepen your existing wisdom. It's a beautiful, compounding process.