“Wise” is when you know a little about a lot, and “smart” is when you know a lot about a little. If you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person would have high peaks.

We may have to choose between wisdom and intelligence. You don’t have time to learn “a lot about a lot”. You have to choose “a lot about a little” or “a little about a lot”, or somewhere in between.

Society seems to have voted for intelligence. We no longer admire the sage—not the way people did two thousand years ago. Now we admire the genius.

For thousands of years, people thought that successful people should be happy. But this can’t be true. It’s like saying that good runners shouldn’t get tired. They get tired, just at higher speeds.

Many years ago when the composition of human knowledge was smaller, you may have been able to be smart and wise (because there isn’t that much to know). However, that’s impossible today. Todays world demands intelligence more than wisdom because specialization is what’s valuable.

While wisdom yields calmness, intelligence often leads to discontentment. This is important to remember. Don’t feel bad about being discontent. If you feel exhausted, it's not necessarily because there's something wrong with you. Maybe you're just running fast.