Beginning of a Life Journey

• What do you want?
• When do you want it?
• How will your life be different once you have it?
• What will have to happen for you to get it?
• How will you know when you have it?

These were the reflection questions posed to me when I was 24 years old and on a retreat in the Rocky Mountains. We were provided with large sheets of paper and assorted colored markers that we used to draw out our answers. I still have the collage almost forty years later. Some of my answers have already been realized, such as desiring children and then raising three remarkable people from babies to adults. Other intentions need to be renewed each year since I asked for the ability to conquer fear and courage to act on my values. I was able to illustrate a lifetime of goals and hopes in a single sitting.  Even though I didn’t look at the collage for decades, it became a foundation for building my life with a fluid sense of purpose around it.

Recently I noticed that the letter “I” was at the center of the collage and within it just below my name was the word “Wisdom.” A shiver of recognition coursed through me as I realized that wisdom had become an unspoken motivation since I was a young adult seeking to make a difference in the world. My budding idealism was strongly rooted in spirituality and a sense that something larger than myself guided the universe. No one ever asked me to define wisdom and I didn’t even realize that I wanted it to become my GPS for moving through difficult life experiences. However, after examining the years of journal writing pieces I had in my possession, a connecting thread of wisdom began to reveal itself within the pages describing my journey. It was an intriguing revelation-one that I was excited to share with the world since I presumed that everyone would be motivated by the desire to learn something valuable from their life experiences.

A Wisdom Survey

I boldly started attending networking meetings to promote my new business Wisdom Writing, workshops in personal expressive writing. However, through many conversations I learned that it was not easy to actuate an interest in wisdom based on an elevator speech. I needed to more deeply understand what people thought, so I developed a survey to gather feedback.  I composed questions that I hoped would reveal patterns, particularly across different generations as respondents freely expressed their thoughts.

When I spoke with a colleague about my hope to write a book about the subject, she inquired about my “target audience.” Even though, the 520 survey responses I received were mainly from people over the age of 36, I still expressed interest in learning what the 18-35 year olds had to say. She replied, “Oh they don’t care about wisdom yet.”  At first I agreed with her even though almost 10% of the respondents to my survey fell into this age group. Still I really, really wanted to hear more from my Millennial and Gen Z friends. After all, I was only 24 years old when the cultivation of wisdom unknowingly became my guiding star.

They do care

I just knew that there had to be young adults “out there” who would care to provide their perspective.  My initial outreach to them yielded fifty respondents who provided sincere, intelligent and discerning answers to five questions about personal wisdom.  These were different questions than the ones posed to me when I was 24, but somehow they revealed a depth of character that is easy to assume is missing in a generation that is "glued to their smart phones." I came to appreciate those wondrous little devices that delivered their answers to me in an instant.

As I begin to reveal their collective responses, my hope is that you will be interested in what your own Millennial and Gen Z friends have to say because their thoughts, opinions and beliefs are worth hearing.

Who would you say are the wisest people in the world, according to a group of 18-35 year olds?

To find out their answers click here