We Know How You Got Wise.
Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile together, not alone. He was surrounded by pace runners. But it wasn’t a competition, it was a mastermind. Wisdom doesn’t come from a blog post or a book. It only comes from one place: experience.
And it’s not the experience of doing it right, it’s the experience of doing it wrong. Not because we are so dumb that we only learn from trial and error, mindlessly experimenting until we find the answer. We become wise as the result of developing a muscle.
The muscle of, “this might not work.”
Chip paced me on my four minute mile. He helped create a situation where I realized that the only way forward was through. Through the resistance, the inertia and the naysayers. Through my own self-doubt in the face of, “what if this doesn’t work?”
And the rest of our mastermind challenged Chip to create the largest independent hotel chain of its kind. And our classmates at Stanford, without realizing it, challenged each of us to prove that we weren’t going to blow the privilege we’d been handed.
The way you became the wisest one in the room is by caring enough to leap. And that never ends. What a privilege! A chance to show up and show up and show up and never cease doing things that might not work…all so we can make things better by making better things.
Go make a ruckus.
Thanks, Chip.
This is the 6th post in our week-long series of Chip Conley and Seth Godin sharing lessons on how to harvest and cultivate wisdom. Here are the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th posts from the series.
