Doing is Everything

Do you have to learn Spanish in order to speak it? If you speak Spanish now, then at some point you had to learn it, otherwise you can’t speak or understand Spanish and have no idea what millions of people are talking about.”This is really a semantic point about separating wisdom, knowledge, and understanding but I think it’s a really important point.

My understanding (which may be dead wrong) is that wisdom, but is usually the result of a brain-database of events which query out into certain patterns and can thus be absorbed and accumulated from related experience without any actual hands on knowledge. But knowledge is knowing because you’ve done it, or gone to the trouble of having looked it up from a credible source. But even looking things up doesn’t build a meaningful understanding, merely knowledge of a narrow concept. Doing is knowing. Doing builds understanding. Wisdom comes from the interconnection of knowing and understanding across enough varying contexts.


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