The Price of Wisdom: What Growth Really Costs You

Wisdom is a great gift, and it almost always comes at a great price. Nothing is free, which is something I have talked about before. But the price of wisdom is a particular kind of expensive, because what it usually costs is a piece of yourself.

Start with a story most people know. Solomon is offered anything he wants. Money, power, health, strength, whatever he can name. He asks for wisdom, and the response is so well received that he gets the wisdom and everything else on top of it. Wealth, power, more of everything than he could count. Read it quickly and it sounds like he got a gift for free.

He did not. He got trials. The famous one is the two women arguing over a baby, each insisting the living child is hers. No DNA test, no evidence, just two people telling him opposite things. So he proposes cutting the baby in half and giving them each a piece. One of them agrees to it. The other one says no, stop, she can have the child, just let it live. And that is how he knows. A mother will protect the life over the claim. That is not a gift being handed over. That is wisdom being demanded of him, one impossible problem at a time.

Now the story most people do not know. If you have not guessed by now, I am a nerd about mythology, and I run another show called The Sleeping Almanac built entirely around it. Odin is the king of the Norse gods, and the irony of his whole story is that he did not have to do any of it. He was already all powerful. He went after wisdom anyway.

To drink from Mimir's Well he had to give an eye. Not lend it. Give it. He pulls it out himself, drops it in, and gets one sip. One. For an entire eye that does not grow back. The reading I keep landing on is that in order to truly see, he had to give up his sight. He had to lose the ordinary version of seeing to get the deeper one.

Then he hangs from Yggdrasil, the tree that holds the nine worlds, for nine days. Nobody asked him to. He is a god, so he cannot die from it, he just hangs there in pain by choice. What he says afterward is that for nine days he was offered no food, no drink, and no help. He comes down knowing how to use magic and read runes, able to work the world in ways nobody had before him.

Here is the detail that gets me about both of them, and the reason I wanted to talk about this at all. Neither one complains. Odin never tries to haggle. He never says come on, does it have to be the eye, I have gold, I have soldiers, take something else. Mimir names the price, and he reaches in and pays it. I complain constantly when I have to pay for something, even if only to myself. These two just pay and move on.

The thing worth remembering is that he had to restart his life missing an eye, and every trial after that one was easier, because he no longer needed the eye to handle it. Wisdom can feel like a curse while you are paying for it. Look back honestly at what you have learned and what it cost, and it usually turns out you started over from a stronger place than you left.

Try This Tomorrow: Name the hardest thing you have been through and write down one thing it taught you that you could not have learned any easier way. That is what you bought. Decide whether you are going to keep complaining about the price or start using what you paid for.

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