The Closer You Are to the Truth, the More Silent You Become Inside

One of the tweets that I put out a while back was: "The closer you get to the truth, the more silent you are inside." We intuitively know this. When someone is blabbing too much, that person talks too much at the party—the court jester. You know they're not at peace inside. You know Robin Williams was not peaceful inside.

Whereas for the wise person, if we expect to meet a lousy Socrates, we expect them to be quiet. That is an indication that they are wise—not quiet because they're trying to look wise, but quiet because they're internally quiet. We understand that peace and wisdom sort of go together. Kapil Gupta, who's written far more on this topic than I have, said: "Wisdom begets stoicism; stoicism does not beget wisdom."

I thought that was very insightful. His basic point is that as you become wise, you naturally become stoic. It's not by practicing being stoic that you become wise; that's cart and horse getting reversed.

As a Messiah, I had a tweet the other day that got incredibly misinterpreted. So many people feel that IQ test—they basically said, "The smarter you get, the slower you read." All these people got triggered about it. Of course, this whole speed reading crowd— a lot of people said, "Well, Bill Gates reads 150 books per year."

Then a bunch of people said, "Oh, well, I read really slowly, so I must be smart." Actually, no. I said if A, then B. That does not mean if B, then A.