History, Stories, and Wisdom
For a long period of my life I found history to be completely useless. I didn’t understand why I should care learning about these situations that are outside of my life. I thought that for the most part they were irrelevant. However, over tue last ~5 years I’ve started to see how important history is. History serves as a factual conveyor of not only information about what has happened in the past, but wisdom about how to handle situations in present, as well as in the future.
Over the past few months, this realization has expanded, with me realizing that stories serve much the same purpose, and can sometimes be a more effective conveyor of wisdom than history. Stories are the lessons that have been learned over generations, compressed with the goal of us being able to learn the lessons without facing the hardships.
For this wisdom to sink in though, I believe the story needs to be related to something going on in your life at the current moment. Otherwise the knowledge will come and go. So something that I think I should work on is ingesting more stories, whether it be through a book, history, academic paper, or just going and doing something dumb that you know you’ll learn from.
I feel the same way, Nathan! For the longest time, I have also been ignorant of history and do not see the importance of it. But also in the last few years, I have come to see that the fruits of studying history, or at least having a shallow grasp of it, can have good merits. I think the saying is true that “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Yes! I think that people who are high up in companies should probably have a really good understanding of the history relevant to their industry, because I feel like a lot of companies just make the same mistakes repeatedly.
You know how a lot of engineering problems start with the Givens / assumptions?
If you’re trying to solve a problem in the real world, history is the Givens. You have to know it to solve the right problem and meet users’ needs.
I only figured this out about 5 years ago, though.
Interesting, I’m definitely going to have to ask you to elaborate on what you mean tomorrow.