“For to be wise is only one thing — to fix our attention on our intelligence, which guides all things everywhere.”
HERACLITUS, QUOTED IN DIOGENES LAERTIUS, LIVES OF THE EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS, 9.1
Want to be wise? Use the power of your brain. That’s the meaning of today’s quote in The Daily Stoic.
But wait — there’s more to it than that (of course).
We spend a lot of time talking about wisdom. We often like to draw a line between wisdom and intelligence. We say that intelligence is just knowing facts, ‘book smarts’, having a lot of information at our disposal. That gets denigrated in favor of wisdom, which is the more important of the two (so we say) — because wisdom comes with age, and it helps us understand nuance and how to read between the lines, and gives us judgment.
Well, Heraclitus is saying in his quote above that actually wisdom is intelligence. Wisdom means knowing when to enlist your brain to the task at hand, and it means tapping into the power of your mind and your reasoned choice to help guide your decisions. Your mind is the seat of your rational thought, and it’s where you exercise your daily stoic practice, so intelligence is key.
It’s easy to make decisions based on your gut feelings, your emotions. But it takes wisdom to know that your intelligence should rule the day, instead. As the author Ryan Holiday puts it, intelligence means “making sure that your mind is in charge, not your emotions, not your immediate physical sensations, not your surging hormones.”
So, how to make sure that you use your intelligence to guide you? As we discussed yesterday, the first step is to just pause for a moment. Take a second to breathe and observe where you’re at. Then ensure that you’ve enlisted your brain to take the next step, rather than your feelings.
