On Finding Wisdom

and reflections upon wealth and riches at Blenheim

On Finding Wisdom: Self-Help, Stoicism, and Christianity

When I was a bit younger, I used to think that “self-help” was a lame section in a bookshop for weak people who were looking for faddish answer to non-questions. I have now revised that opinion. It began for me when I was in my early twenties and I read a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. You’ve probably heard of it. I found this book very interesting and I began to learn things from it. One of the things I learned, for example, was the importance of remembering people’s names and intentionally using them in front of those people. This demonstrates respect for, and interest, in other people.

I see now that what I was attracted to in this book was the fact that the author was sharing wisdom.

Wisdom is the ability to have insight into situations and to make good and beneficial choices based on those insights. “Self-help”, at its highest, is just a form of wisdom literature.

The Bible too has sections devoted to wisdom literature: Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs are usual classified as such. The Epistle of James also comes close to constituting this type of genre.

In recent years, I have discovered Stoic literature. This happened for me about five years ago when I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. In more recent times, I also found Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Sceptic and I often listen to his podcast and visit his website.

My view of Stoicism is like my view of many other philosophies: it contains wisdom and truth at many points but there are points at which I do not agree based upon my Christian perspective.