Practical Wisdom by Barry Schwartz

I finished this book in March 2025. I recommend this book 4/10.

Why you should read this book:

The book tries to explain practical wisdom by using examples from banking, medical, and education. There are examples on how rules and regulations limits our capabilities to do the moral "right" thing, and how some organizations has figured out how to change that.

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🚀 The book in three sentences

1. Practical wisdom is hard to explain, but you know it when you see it.

2. Practical wisdom often happens when we slow down and are willing to bend the rules.

3. When letting external validation go and letting the work carry you forward with joy.

   
   

📝 My notes and thoughts

• P25. Luke and Judge Forer help us understand some of the key characteristics of practical wisdom. To summarize:

  • A wise person knows the proper aims of the activity she is engaged in. She wants to do the right thing to achieve these aims—wants to meet the needs of the people she is serving.

  • A wise person knows how to improvise, balancing conflicting aims and interpreting rules and principles in light of the particularities of each context.

  • A wise person is perceptive, knows how to read a social context, and knows how to move beyonds the black-and-white of rules and see the gray in a situation.

  • A wise person knows how to take on the perspective of another—to see the situation as the other person does and thus understand how the other person feels. This perspective-taking is what enables a wise person to feel empathy for others and to make decisions that serve the client's (student's, patient's, friend's) needs.

  • A wise person knows how to make emotion an ally of reason, to rely on emotion to signal what a situation calls for and to inform judgment without distorting it. He can feel, intuit, or "just know" what the right thing to do is, enabling him to act quickly when timing matters. His emotions and intuitions are well-educated.

  • A wise person is an experienced person. Practical wisdom is a craft, and craftsmen are trained by having the right experiences. People learn how to be brave, said Aristotle, by doing brave things. So, too, with honesty, justice, loyalty, caring, listening, and counseling.

• P43. Practical wisdom is a kind of moral jazz. It sometimes depends on rules and principles—like the notes on the page and the basic melodies in jazz. But rules by themselves can't do the job. Moral improvisation is the interpretative tune we play around these notes and melodies in order to do the right thing.

• P100. How children learn to tell the truth. One thing that is clear is that we do not teach children that they should tell the truth whenever they know it—nor do we want to. Rather, children need to learn what truth-telling is (why jokes and fairy tales, though "untrue," aren't lies), which situations call for truth-telling, and how to tell the truth. Beyond this, children need to learn which situations call for straightforward truth-telling ("Did you throw the ball through Ms. Baker's window?" asks Dad), which call for tact ("Do you want more of these yummy lima beans?" asks Aunt Betty), which call for white lies ("Doesn't Grandma look young in those capri pants?" asks Mom), and which call for outright misinformation ("Where do you live?" asks the menacing-looking stranger). How the developing child will respond to a particular situation depends on which network(s) the situation activates. Kids will make mistakes, much to the chagrin and embarrassment of their parents. There will also be ambiguity, and then room for disagreement, about what kind of situation this particular situation is. Nonetheless, with time and, experience, and feedback, the child will build up a network of pattern recognizers that will come to work more and more like the adult's. In confronting a new situation, the child will identify a pattern and recognize what is relevantly similar to or different from past patterns, and there will be patterns of past actions (precedents, if you will) that will suggest what choice is appropriate now. Years ago, when Aunt Betty asked if you wanted any more of those yummy lima beans, you avoided the white lie ("yes") and said instead, "I saw dessert in the oven, and I simply must save room." This works. No lie. No hurt feelings. Laughter all around. And a second helping of dessert. Now, when your friend comes into the room and wants to know how she looks in her dress, instead of saying "Great!" (a white lie) or "Honestly, not so good" (hurtful), you quickly respond, "You know, I was really hoping you'd wear your lovely blue silk dress tonight. You look so good in that."

• P185. Children with performance goals are primarily interested in gaining favorable judgment of their competence. They want to do well on tests. They want social approval. They want awards. Children with mastery goals are primarily interested in increasing their competence rather in demonstrating it. They want to encounter things that they can't do and to learn from their failures. As Dweck puts it, performance-oriented children want to prove their ability, while mastery-oriented children want to improve their ability. Children with performance goals avoid challenges. They prefer tasks that are well within the range of their ability. Children with mastery goals seek challenges. They prefer tasks that strain the limits of their ability. Children with performance goals respond to failure by giving up. Children with mastery goals respond to failure by working harder. Children with performance goals take failure as a sign of their inadequacy and come to view the tasks at which they fail with a mixture of anxiety, boredom, and anger. Children with mastery goals take failure with a sign that their efforts and not they, are inadequate, and they often come to view the tasks at which they fail with the kind of relish that comes when you encounter a worthy challenge.

• P186. A mastery orientation that encourages people to continue to seek new challenges is likely to keep people intellectually engaged throughout their lives—to keep them involved and learning—because they find things of intrinsic interest and value, and not because of possible payoffs and punishments. It is this kind of mastery orientation that enables people to develop practical wisdom. Such wisdom, we have seen, can only be learned through trial and error. That means having the motivation and courage to take on difficult tasks and experience failure, and to see failure as a challenge to try again and learn more. The more we rely on incentives that only encourage performance goals, the more likely we are to discourage the mastery goals that practical wisdom demands.

• P226. The goal of medical science is to discover generalizations that describe and explain human physiology and pathology and identify tools for diagnosis and treatment. A medical scientist who is a practitioner is pursuing these goals. But not all people who do what looks like medical science are engaged in the "practice" of medical science. People who do research to achieve impressive publication records are not engaged in the practice. The goals these scientists seek—fame, fortune, status, promotion—are not specific to medical science. They are not embedded in it. They are not, in MacIntyre's words, "internal" or "intrinsic" to the practice. Fame and fortune are goals that are "external" to the practice, and research is just the means these scientists use to achieve that fame and fortune. It is certainly true that people who are pursuing such external goals may do good science, but they are not themselves practitioners. The real danger to a practice like medical science is that more and more researchers will aim primarily at wealth and status and not at understanding human physiology or the tools for treatment and diagnosis. Sometimes the external "payoffs" for doing good science will yield good research, just like the payoffs for making bank loans will sometimes yield good bank loans. But the more we depend on the external payoffs, the great the danger of getting bad results when bad loans and bad science "pay."

• P278. We needed to learn to judge our success not in the moment but in the arc of the whole of child-rearing. It was there that we found happiness and the pleasure, which is probably what Aristotle meant when he said: "For one swallow does not make spring, nor one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy."