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

Naval: I put out this tweet a while back: “The closer you are to the truth, the more silent you become inside.”

We intuitively know this. When someone is blabbing too much or being the court jester, you know they’re not at peace. You know Robin Williams was not peaceful inside.

Wisdom begets stoicism

We expect a wise person like a Lao Tzu or Socrates to be quiet—not because they’re trying to look wise, but because they’re internally quiet. We understand that peace and wisdom go together.

Kapil Gupta, who’s written far more on this topic than I have, said, “Wisdom begets stoicism. Stoicism does not beget wisdom.” As you become wise, you naturally become stoic. You don’t become wise by being stoic. That’s reversing the cart and horse.

As an aside, one of my tweets the other day got incredibly misinterpreted. So many people failed that IQ test. I wrote, “The smarter you get, the slower you read.” The speed reading crowd got triggered, and people said, “Well, Bill Gates reads 150 books per year.” Others said, “I read really slowly, so I must be smart.” They got it wrong. I said, “If A, then B.” That doesn’t mean, “If B, then A.”