Author

I’m a blissfully married man, father of three, business advisor, author, frequent swinger of hammers, occasional drinker of good whisky, and one who is forever agitated by people who won’t think for themselves long enough to see the obvious.

How does that, in any way, qualify me to write about wisdom? Obviously, I’m not the arbiter of eternal wisdom, I’m merely a consumer of it. But, like many, life’s experiences have pointed to a particular way of thinking about wisdom. Losing my father at a young age drove home the concept of necessity and its constant companion, pragmatism, in early life. My long career in business as an executive and later as an advisor taught the same core lesson though in differently tangible terms. Then too, the various hard knocks of life do a wonderful job of punctuating this notion for us all.

My takeaway is that necessity may be the most powerful agent for distilling the essential truths that govern things. Spend enough time focused on pragmatic necessity and the difference between things that are wise and those that are not becomes plain. That is- if you pay attention and think long term.

Then too, living in a place not far from Dorothy’s Kansas, that pragmatic mindset is a kind of cultural standard and was bound to highlight the abundance of unwise thinking churning its way through the rest of the country and the world. The perspective is different here in the heartland of America and I suspect that wisdom is sustained more easily here than in some of its extremities. It is a centering kind of place.

In any case, I’m not one who binges on social media, nor advocates in politics, nor prescribes to causes du jour. None of that seems very wise to me. Anyway, wisdom is a journey, not an argument. So, my goal for When Monkeys Fly was not so much to express wisdom as it was to highlight the brand of thinking that can keep you on the road to wisdom and to question the synthetic notions that will lead you astray.

At least for those willing to think for themselves long enough to see what seems obvious to we necessity-based pragmatists.