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THe self-growth fraction

written by SAI

filed under MINDSET

published FEBRUARY 13, 2024

TLDR

Integration is the most important skill for Wisdom
Open-mindedness, Creativity, and Consolidation are the 3 most important factors for integration
When viewing Self-Growth and Wisdom as fractions, focus on decreasing the denominator and simplifying them to be more wise, not on simply adding to the numerator

What You're Saying To Yourself Now

“I want to be more wise, not just smarter.”
“There’s so much content on social media to make you feel more wise but nothing’s really changed. How do I change that?”
“I’ve heard of the word ‘integration’ before, but I don’t really know what it means and how I do it.”
“I’m really into self-growth.”

integration equations

Have you ever wondered what self-growth actually means? Is it a feeling? Do you do something different as a result of having self-grown? Can it be quantified somehow?

Let’s go back to some ancient wisdom to start our journey.

Lao Tzu once said “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”

What does that actually mean though?

Let’s drop some knowledge (or is it wisdom? 🤔) here.

What is knowledge? There are 2 key factors of knowledge.

Information
Integration

Information + Integration = Knowledge

Information is a pretty generic word for anything that we perceive through our 5 senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Those perceptions then make their way into our brain and / or body. It is external.

Integration then, in this case, is the internalization of that knowledge into our memory. There are various types of memory that others are way more qualified to speak on. But if we can’t recall or remember that information in some way, then I wouldn’t categorize it as knowledge. Integration means it’s a part of you.

So together, that external information + the internalization of that information as a part of you signifies it as knowledge.

Now how do we get from knowledge to wisdom? To do that, we’re going to have to expand our formulas from above and deconstruct Integration into several components.

A key thing to understand here though is that knowledge is something you have. This ‘having’ property though is one that is ethereal. It doesn’t actually exist in the physical world. You can of course share that knowledge in various ways or apply that knowledge in the physical world, which we’ll get to in a bit. But that knowledge doesn’t actually exist anywhere outside of your head.

With this in mind, let’s update the above formula to

Information + Have Integration = Knowledge

But there are other types of things you can have in this world, and those are physical items. Just like how information is external, so too are items. Until when? Until they are integrated as a part of you. At that point, they become your assets. Put that together in a formula and you get…

Items + Have Integration = Assets

For example, let’s say you buy a new pair of headphones. Those headphones were just an item out there that didn’t belong to you before you purchased them. Now they are yours. If you created a very detailed Balance Sheet with Assets and Liabilities, then those pair of headphones would be part of your assets.

Just like how external information existed on its own and only became knowledge when you integrated it intellectually, so too do items exist on their own and only become your assets when you’ve integrated them physically.

The latter example is one of physical property; the former example is one of intellectual property. In both cases though, they are property. Property because they’ve been integrated into you in some way.

Having that knowledge or having those assets isn’t necessarily useful in and of itself. You have to apply both types of property to make use of them. This is where the next type of integration comes in - Do Integration.

(Assets or Knowledge) + Do Integration = Action

You use what you have, either mentally or physically, to change what you do in life. Think of Do Integration like this: if you wrote out every process you did in life step-by-step, and you changed one of them, then that’s Do Integration.

Let’s go back to the headphones example. I’ve bought them, now what. The question is do I change any existing process or create a new process because of those headphones. Let’s say I didn’t have great headphones or earbuds before for taking calls in coffee shops because of background noise removal or battery life. My process would be to plan to be home during those calls so I can just use speaker on my laptop. Which isn’t really an option when I’m out and about. But these new headphones meet that requirement. So my adjusted process is to be okay being out and about and not have to plan my schedule around being home at a certain time to take the call. I can take the call at the coffee shop. That’s an example of Do Integration.

My actions have changed as a result of what I have, in this case an item (not knowledge).

You can apply the same principle for knowledge. Simply ask yourself “does having this knowledge change my action?” If it does, then you’ve Do Integrated. If you haven’t, then you haven’t Do Integrated it.

In my Escaping Fear’s Gravity newsletter, I mention that there are (at least) a couple of different factors of an experience that are beyond just an action. One of them is the Context of the Action you’re doing. Those together create an experience.

Action + Context = Experience

The reason I bring this up is that is the final bridge to connect us to Wisdom.

Experience + Be Integration = Wisdom

We are having an experience at literally every moment of our lives. We can’t change that even if we wanted to. Those experiences have the ability to change who we are. That is what Be Integration is: your identity.

The question to ask here is “How do the experiences you have shape who you are?”

Let’s go back to the headphones example. Seems like a menial example but the headphones have the potential to change who I am. Think that’s too far? For most yes, but I personally don’t think so. Let’s say I’m taking calls in coffee shops instead of being forced to take them from home. The experience itself is already different. But how do I Be Integrate it? I could become less self-conscious about taking calls in public. I could make myself more relatable to the person I’m virtually meeting by being in public. I could become more personable to the people I meet in person there as I’m engaged in small talk, and who knows what that turns into.

The point being that there is a part of my identity that has changed as a result of the action that I’ve taken, which itself is a result of me integrating an item into a physical asset.

Now how does the combination of an experience and be integration result in wisdom?

Wisdom is the lesson you learn or insight you gain when you integrate an experience into your identity.

It’s said that “Wisdom is the leftovers after all the details are gone.” I resonate with that.

However, what must not be forgotten are those details. I’ve broken down all the steps, aka details, to get to wisdom. If you skip these steps though and try to go straight to wisdom, it may not serve you as often.

When you see ‘wisdom’ shared on social media these days, it most definitely can be wisdom. But my point is that is wisdom for the creator. They had to Have Integrate information into knowledge or items into assets. They had to then Do Integrate those assets or knowledge into Actions, which done in various contexts create Experiences.

The crucial last step is to not just have all these experiences, as just having lots of experiences doesn’t make them more wise. They had to reflect on some level to Be Integrate them into their identity. To change the quality or nature of their self in some way. That’s when they shared their wisdom with others. Only after they’ve taken those necessary steps along the way.

That’s why wisdom for others is simply information for you. And vice versa.

Moreover, ‘having wisdom’ is inaccurately phrasing it. You have knowledge. You don’t have wisdom. Wisdom is a state of being. You are wise. You practice wisdom.

Wisdom is the lesson you learn or insight you gain when you integrate an experience into your identity.

And it’s actually context-dependent. Someone may be wise in business because of a wealth of experiences and Be Integration in that space. However, they may not be wise in medicine because of a lack of those experiences or knowledge. So before you say someone is wise as a general statement, be specific with that compliment.

I’ve semi-inadvertently made the case here that integration is the most crucial factor of wisdom. Now it’s time to examine what the factors of integration are and how you can improve your integration skills.

3 factors of integration

I believe that the three most important factors of integration are

Open mindedness
Creativity
Consolidation

First, let’s talk about open-mindedness. This is critically first. I hear from others “be more open-minded”, but what does that actually mean?

Open-mindedness is the ability to perceive without judgment. To experience without attachment.

Aristotle said, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” This is a great perspective on open-mindedness.

In a word, open-mindedness is neutrality.

Why is open-mindedness important to integration? It’s at the core of how you view the world. Let’s break this down.

For example, let’s say you believe that the device you’re reading this on is a phone. “Well Sai, obviously this is a phone. That’s a fact, not just a belief.” Yes, I agree with you. However, the fact that we just all accept that it’s a phone is an implicit belief underneath that initial belief. It’s the definition of that belief. Like what does “phone” mean? For something as ubiquitous and generally agreed upon as a phone, it goes from a subjective truth to an objective truth. It even sounds silly to question whether something is a phone.

But with deeper topics like “love” or “work”, there is lots of room for interpretation. “Love” could have a different meaning for you and for your partner. Is it an action? Is it showed through gifts? Is it through words? Is it through service? Or something else? Everyone gets to define these words differently for themselves. And that’s beautiful. AND that means there are infinite number of ways to interpret something. Which means more ways for miscommunication.

Those different interpretations however aren’t a problem in and of themselves when communicating. It’s when there is a resolution required that using terms that have similar connotations is useful. This touches on the even more foundational aspect of the elasticity of our beliefs. How open are we to change our definitions of the words we use? Or the interpretation of anything else we perceive? This is the level that open-mindedness is on.

Are you willing to change the definition or connotation of a belief? (Elasticity / Open-Mindedness) → What is the definition or connotation of a belief? (Definition / Connotation) → What is your belief? (Subjective Truth)

If you’re willing to at least entertain a different perspective on something new, then you definitely have some level of open-mindedness. You have that elasticity.

The reason this is important for integration is that its core, integration is change. There is an existing thought, let’s say, and you have a new thought that makes you wrestle with that existing thought. If you’re shutting out that thought, then there’s not even a chance for you to integrate anything into your identity.

What are some ways to practice being more open-minded?

One way is to make note of an experience and write down the positive and negative possibilities from that situation.

For example, an experience you may have in your life is “Coffee spilled on my clothes because someone bumped into me.” A negative possibility there is “Great! (sarcastically) Now I have to go home and change, which is going to make me late for my meeting.” A positive possibility is thinking ‘that’s okay, they didn’t mean to do that. Let me genuinely ask them for their name and how they’re doing. If it leads to anything else, great. If not, then at least the interaction wasn’t fully defined by an accident that the other person also feels bad about. Let me also just let my manager know that I’ll be dialing into the meeting via phone before making the meeting in person because of this situation.’

Of course, it may seem far-fetched to have that sort of interaction. But it’s more than doable. As you go throughout your day, note 3 instances and a positive and negative take on it. If you can see multiple sides of an experience, then you’re more than on your way to being open-minded.

A byproduct of this exercise is you’ll find yourself automatically being more positive without trying. That’s because you’ll think of both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ thoughts at the same time. Over time, for me, I’ve tended towards the ‘positive’ ones, so people see me as an optimistic person. But what my truth is is I just use that as an opportunity to practice open-mindedness. ‘Maybe there’s something I haven’t considered that is a subjective truth to someone else.’

The next ability is creativity. I actually won’t go into too much depth here because I did in this Creativity newsletter. I define creativity as ideas generated per unit of input. The main factors of creativity that I identify are awareness and experiences.

Why is creativity important to integration?

If you perceive more things, you have more things from which to be more open-minded. Whether you experience more things in life or extract more out of each experience with heightened awareness, you’ll have more things to potentially integrate into your identity.

The final overarching factor of integration is consolidation. Consolidation itself consists of two sub-factors of convergence and pruning.

Let’s go through both of these. Convergence is the art of resolution. Let’s say you are pretty open-minded and highly creative. Those skills themselves don’t necessarily mean you’re good at integrating. It sets you up well, but doesn’t necessitate it.

Convergence is having all these dots at your disposal to connect and connecting them into a specific outcome. You have a goal; you have all this information; how do you get from all that information into something that can achieve that goal?

For example, my newsletters displays convergence on multiple levels. First, I present these various ideas at the beginning and throughout the essay. Seemingly disconnected thoughts. I then converge to a main or several main points that I want to share with you. You can think of this as the thesis of this article.

Second, I double down on my convergence through summarization. I have my TLDR section that contains 5 or fewer bullet points about the entire 2000+ word essay. 2000 words converges to 50 words. I believe it is one mark of an educated person when you can explain something in very high detail (10 pages) and very high level (1-3 sentences).

This act of summarization is related to the second sub-factor within consolidation: pruning. The reduction of unnecessary parts. Inherent within the TLDR example is the main idea being explained somehow in 1950 fewer words. That must mean that there is a process of pruning taking place.

It doesn’t mean it’s entirely unnecessary. It just means it’s unnecessary in that context of convergence and pruning.

What about pruning in a non-text context? Let’s say you’ve experienced a very emotionally heavy week. You then have an hour with a therapist to process those emotions. My guess is you can’t possibly discuss everything about every topic that made it a heavy week. You have to pick and choose what were the heaviest topics, then next heaviest, etc. What you’re doing there is you’re pruning all the details that aren’t necessary to discuss those heavy topics. And by the end of the call, you and the therapist might have converged on a key insight or action from those experiences. That’s consolidation in action!

So why is consolidation important for integration?

There are too many external stimuli in this world for you to possibly internalize all of them. That’s why you have to pare them down from all the possibilities into a single or few possibilities that you can comprehend and take action on.

It’s an indirect act of prioritization when you summarize them as well. You put at the top the things that you feel the most strongly about, occur most often, or are the most urgent.

What are ways you can improve your consolidation skills?

When you’re talking with someone, practice summarizing what the other persona said into one or two sentences. “If I’m understanding you correctly,…”. Or “Can I try summarizing what you said?…” Or “Let me know if this encapsulates what you said well…” Then go into a one to two sentence recap.

In addition to you practicing your consolidation skills, two additional byproducts of this are 1) you show your active listening skills, and 2) they hear what they said in a shortened and different perspective.

You can do something similar when you’re talking as well. If you feel like you have a tendency to go on and on, summarizing what you’ve said is a good tool to 1) end your statements strongly 2) enable your listeners to easily follow your main point.

Another way of improving your consolidation skills is to decrease the time available for you to share your point. For example, in a YouTube video you virtually have an endless amount of time to make a point. But let’s say you want to share the gist of that long form video in a short form video, like a TikTok or YouTube Short. In that case, you have only 1-2 minutes to make the same point. You have to communicate your point in a fraction of the time. That forces you to converge your points and prune anything extra.

Let me follow my own advice here and recap the three most important factors of integration:

Open mindedness - belief → meaning → elasticity
Creativity - awareness and experiences
Consolidation - convergence and pruning

Self-Growth as a Fraction

Let’s bring this back to Lao Tzu’s quote that I shared at the beginning. “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”

I was a math major so you know I love mathematical representations of things. Let’s talk about fractions here to make the connection between my ideas and Lao Tzu’s ideas.

In a fraction, we have the numerator (on top) and the denominator (below). The numerator represents knowledge and the denominator represents wisdom.

Let’s say we have the fraction 5/10 to begin. Then let’s keep adding 1 to the numerator. So it goes to 6/10, 7/10, 8/10, 9/10, and 10/10. In 5 steps, it gets to something equaling 1 (after 10/10 is reduced).

Now let’s say we again begin with the fraction 5/10. Then let’s remove 1 from the numerator. It goes to 5/9, 5/8, 5/7, 5/6, 5/5. This also, in 5 steps, gets to something equaling 1 (after 5/5 is reduced).

Ready for the a-ha?!

Let’s say you keep adding things to the numerator from the 10/10 step. You go to 11/10, 12/10, 13/10. After those 3 steps, for instance, you get to a value of 1.3.

Now let’s do 3 steps from 5/5 by continuing to subtract from the denominator. You get 5/4, 5/3, 5/2. That has a value of 2.5! That’s almost twice as large with an equal amount of steps.

This holds for large numbers also. Let’s say you have 500/1000, which is 0.5. It takes 500 steps for each side to get to 1 (1000/1000 or 500/500). But if you keep adding to the numerator from 1000/1000. 400 steps later, adding to the numerator gets it to 1400/1000 or 1.4. 400 steps of subtracting from the denominator however gets it to 500/100, which is 5!

If the goal in life in this analogy is to maximize the value of the fraction, then it’s much easier to maximize it with the same number of steps by subtracting from the denominator (wisdom) than adding to the numerator (knowledge).

In this analogy, if knowledge is the numerator and wisdom is the denominator, then integration is the act of simplifying and reducing the fractions.

Conceptually, it also makes sense. I said integration involves consolidating and pruning. That’s exactly what simplifying and reducing fractions is!

We’ve been focused on adding things to the numerator in life (knowledge), when we should be focused on subtracting things from the denominator (wisdom) and reducing the fractions (integration).

So in this ‘new-age’ of self-growth, what does that actually mean? It’s the growth of the fraction value. We want to keep increasing, growing what the fraction’s value is to the highest possible numbers. As we just saw, the quickest way to do that is to subtract things from the denominator.

what can i do?

“Sai, this is kind of a cool concept, I guess. But how do I change my daily life as a result of this crazy idea?”

One thing you can do is become aware of what information you are consuming (knowledge, i.e. adding to the numerator)

Are you consuming information that is designed to get your attention but not necessarily concerned about your mental health?
What information (which becomes your knowledge at some point) are you prioritizing?

Then you can ask what you are unlearning (wisdom, i.e. subtracting from the denominator)

What limiting beliefs would you like to get rid of?
What past experiences are holding you down?

Then ask yourself how you would Do and Be integrate your knowledge into your actions and wisdom (integration, i.e. simplifying and reducing fractions)

How are you going to apply the things that you’re explicitly or implicitly learning about in your life?
What are the ideas you can take from an experience to make you wiser in the future?

Some of the wisest people talk about unlearning as a key to their growth. This is what wisdom really is. It’s a process of unlearning. Of ‘removing things every day’ a la Lao Tzu.

Let’s bring this to a close. If I had just shared the quote and left it as that. It would have been wisdom for me, but just information for you. After reading this, my hope is you’ve Have Integrated that information to become knowledge. But I wouldn’t say this information is your wisdom until you’ve Do and Be Integrated it into your actions and identity.

My challenge to you is to transform this information into wisdom and feel the self-growth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sai is a Life Coach for Young Adults seeking to Live their Quarter Life on Easy Mode!

LEARN MORE ABOUT SAI