🙉 TREE 379: Get your wisdom from old folks and your knowledge from kids

One.

Get your wisdom from old folks and your knowledge from kids is not a rule or a principle. Old folks have oceans of knowledge for you to absorb and the kids are sometimes wise. It’s a statement to get you to notice something:

The way things are is always changing.
What humanity knows is always changing. (Mostly our knowledge is growing, but we lose lots too.)

As soon as you finish high school, your general knowledge starts going out of date. As soon as you finish university, your subject knowledge starts going out of date. The obvious exceptions are the areas where you put effort into ongoing learning.

Your knowledge is incomplete and outdated. People in their late teens and early 20s know more than you do about a lot of stuff.

Spend time with young people.
Ask them questions.
Learn from them.

Two.

Dave knew it all back in 2000. He still knows exactly the same things now.

Three.

Yes.

Last week, I learned from my 18 year-old daughter that living things are not made entirely of cells. Your cells live in a scaffold-ish structure called an extracellular matrix. You can take the cells out of the matrix and put different cells in. You can, for instance, decellularise an apple, carve it into an ear shape and grow human cells into the ear-shaped matrix.

Grow slowly
Jeff