“The Crown” and the Importance of Wisdom
Recently, my wife and I have been enjoying the miniseries “The Crown.” We try to sneak in an episode after the kids go to sleep. I am sure that it is not meant as a true-to-life documentary, but there certainly appears to be a lot of themes and situations that are part of history.
In one episode, early on in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, there’s a storyline about her being disappointed regarding her education and how she felt as if she was unprepared for the rigors of being the monarch. In fact, one scene shows her complaining to her mother about the lack of formal education in areas like business, law, current events, and politics. The show also shows the emotional toll of that realization.
If you could get the amazing queen of England to be forthright, I’m sure there are many times that she felt unprepared for the responsibilities of her job. I’m sure we all would feel that way. However, she realizes soon after that there’s another kind of education, even intelligence, that comes to be important in the process. That’s the idea of wisdom--street smarts. And using that, she’s able to affect a solution out of a challenging situation.
As I watched it, it was an affirmation of the importance of wisdom. In many ways, I’m over-educated. I have decades’ worth of formal education. My mentors, the people who shaped my professional career, the people I look up to, while incredibly well-educated, affected my professional life from the perspective of wisdom more than anything. They taught me that being politically savvy is understanding people’s motivations, reading people’s verbal/ nonverbal cues, finding the “backstory”, which is not always evident, and trying to predict a little bit of what people will do next. The ability to see through the “mist of the not obvious” is many times even more important than formal education in organizational theory or psychology.
Elizabeth II has survived 70+ years of one of the most political positions in the world. And while intelligence and book education might or might not be important, street smarts and wisdom have served her well. And are an inspiration to all of us.