Acquiring wisdom - What no one told me about
When we were kids, if someone had told us the path to acquire wisdom (either worldly or not), it would have been easy to choose the right path to follow in our lives. From all of the noise out there, it is really easy to get lost between the knowledge sources that really matter and the others that simply don't.
What if we had a wisdom matrix that could help us to achieve any goal we had in life? A guide which took us to uncover and release our untapped potential, dreams, goals and purpose.
In the last decades, there has been a lot of interest in open source software. Nowadays, we have open source alternatives for almost any major software company in the market. However, we don't have one aimed to offer open and free world class education for the masses. If such a platform existed, it would allow us to have a similar high-degree education level like some of the best universities in the world such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT (Sloan) or UPenn (Wharton).
What if all world-class education was opened to the public for free? Could open source education be a proper term to call it? I stumbled upon a few books where a few graduates of some Ivy League universities tried to pull this off: The 12-Week MBA, The Visual Mba and The Personal MBA. Although they weren't able to completely solve this puzzle, this is a very valuable effort and contribution to this purpose.
What they all tried to do was uncover all of the subjects, methodologies and tools that normally one can learn from any of these institutions based on their curriculums. Then, they laid them out in a very easy to follow way, allowing people to grasp as much as possible the same level of education that is taught there.
However, I do think they fell short on seeing the bigger picture here, because they didn't expand further into how to go beyond the limitations of the MBA’s curriculums. Other than finishing all of the subjects included in these syllabuses, they didn’t include any guide to go beyond the learned concepts of these topics, mention how to supplement the out-dated content, nor did they show how to get around the data’s problem that cannot be easily compared with other institutions to avoid biases. Nevertheless, they paved the way allowing others to take it from there and further developing the concept of a world-class open education.
What would happen if the concepts of these books could merge together and include other modular knowledge dimensions like economics, physics, or engineering? [1] This could allow you to keep acquiring wisdom, finding patterns and correlations between these dimensions, compounding what you've already learned so far.
Ultimately, this could allow you to create a personal knowledge framework to rely on, helping you to learn, store, retrieve, and compound knowledge. As stated by Paul Graham in his Super-linear Returns, “The more you know about a subject the easier it gets to become better at it”. Meaning, this could give you an edge on acquiring knowledge faster and compounding it.
If this wisdom matrix existed, it might look like this: you’d have multiple knowledge dimensions stacked one on top of the other over the x axis. [1] This way, you could easily spot patterns between them and you could keep adding more knowledge dimensions to the stack, further expanding the scope and depth of the matrix. For example, creating new branches of knowledge in specialized subjects or developing others you might already have. Ultimately, creating your own path to acquire wisdom.
The good news? Most of these knowledge dimensions are public and free, and for the ones which aren't, you can always fill these missing gaps through a myriad of free resources (e.g. online videos/courses, books, articles, research papers, etc). Ironically, some of which are used in these same schools. In the end, you could acquire knowledge with the same depth and level as those institutions that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
For me, the final part of this puzzle would be an ever-growing personal knowledge management system to gather everything under one umbrella. As a first good baseline, this might be like this: 1) taking all of the learnings and best practices from a Zettelkasten, 2) setting up a personal database to create, keep, organize and efficiently retrieve any kind of information in any given format, something like Obsidian and 3) a pondered rating system to filter out the ever-growing knowledge available to humanity, something in the lines of what 50thinkers is using. [2]
I'm just wondering if wisdom matrix framework could be an appropriate term.
[1] knowledge dimensions: any knowledge area of speciality grouped as a theme, type or group. (e.g. an entire degree’s curriculum or as isolated as books, articles and courses).
[2] Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activities.