“Judgment is knowing the long-term effects of your decisions, or being able to predict the long-term effects of your decisions,” says entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant. As he himself admits, his definition of judgment is close to wisdom. The only difference, he says, is that judgment focuses on external problems, while wisdom focuses on personal ones.
A subtle distinction, isn’t it? Everyone has probably met people who were extremely successful professionally, while their personal lives were hell. But we can also remember those who seemed to be in perfect harmony with themselves and acted sensibly exactly until they had to take responsibility for others and solve difficult problems in an extreme situation. Maybe there wasn’t judgment and wisdom there to begin with, or maybe these are two close but separate skills — unraveling external and internal problems.
As I have been working with entrepreneurs for the past twenty-five years, I cannot help but notice one phenomenon. A business can grow dynamically for a while, but in the end it always ends up resting against the personality of the founder. Then there is slowing down, plateauing, fussing, going to extremes, frequent mistakes, fading, and/or collapse. In other words, the ability to solve external problems reaches a local maximum. The bottleneck becomes the inability to look inward to notice the knots of false beliefs holding the business back.
But if the founder is able to reinvent himself, there is a quantum leap to a new level of personality and then the company. New customers come in, the team matures, profitability grows, and investors knock on the door. This renaissance happens right up to the next systemic dilemma. Perhaps true wisdom lies in knowing when it’s time to solve external problems and when it’s time to solve internal ones.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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