"So, young Grasshopper......"

We need to make a point to listen to our elders. They have some pretty valuable insight into what we go through from day to day. It’s called wisdom.

The best definition of wisdom that I can come up with is, “the lessons learned from screwing up really bad and living to tell the tale.”

Being a b-movie fan, I was always impressed with the stereotypical old kung-fu teacher. You know the character: the old Chinese guy with the snow white beard who lives atop the mountain, and can still beat the crap out of the hero, despite the fact the old man is blind and has a harelip or something.

Here’s the funny thing: that old man wasn’t born with all that knowledge. Somebody spent the first reel of his movie life beating the snot out of HIM. He started out with the same blank slate the rest of us did. He had to learn from somebody. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that.

One of the most important things that I have learned since practicing law is that all mistakes have happened before. I learned this from doing divorce work. Every divorce case fits into similar, recognizable patterns. The spouses all react in about the same way, and they all reached the divorce threshold in about the same way. There are no new stories out there. There are just variations on a theme.

One other thing I have noticed about counseling people: some of them will not listen. Despite your holding yourself out as an expert, seeing the situation the client is in clearly, and knowing exactly how the thing is going to play out, some clients just will not take your advice. Invariably, they pay a heavy price for having not listened.

Such is life. It's all been done before, and we can save ourselves a whole lot of headaches if we listen to those who messed up before us.

As I get older, I realize that my parents are much smarter than I ever gave them credit for when I was in high school. I can think of at least three instances in my life where I refused to listen to their counsel, and came out on the short end of the stick because of it. These were not minor mistakes, either. I’m still suffering the effects of them. Had I done as suggested, I would have spared myself years of grief.

The problem with most of us is that we have to figure things out for ourselves. We don’t have much faith in anything. Or when we do have faith, it is faith in things or people that really don’t deserve it. As a result, we go and do things the hard way. If we are lucky, we actually survive it. Worse for wear, we go on with our lives, thinking, “I’ll never do that again.”

Yeah, but it’s really too late, isn’t it? Now we have to deal with the stupid, ill-advised decision.

I wrote last week about how one moment in time can define an entire lifetime. One wrong step can send someone plummeting down the wrong path in life. One good way to avoid making that bad decision is to listen to those who have been there. We can learn much from the mistakes of others. We just have to be smart enough to take advantage of what they can offer us.

And to think it’s only taken 30 or so years for me to figure all this out.