Global perspectives, and Steve Jobs' definition of "smart"

 Steve Jobs once defined "smart" this way:

A lot of [what it means to be smart] is the ability to zoom out, like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from the 80th floor down at the city. And while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps, you could just see it in front of you. You can see the whole thing.

Oftentimes you will find that local insights can be put into context if you have knowledge about global trends. It's good to remember that everything you do is part of a larger future, and that you yourself are a cog in the machine. 

Additionally, this perspective also helps you get out of focusing on stupid shit and keeps you reminded of other important lessons. Like:

• Focus on what you CAN do, not the results (Stoicism, Focus, and The Process). Learn to "localize" properly. 
• Understand your local goals in the context of your life, your life goals
• Understand your life goals in context of how you fit into this world
• Understand others, and others' actions and how they appear in context of their own lives, their own feelings as actual human beings (dovetails with emotional intelligence) 
• Understand your life goals, yourself, and others in context of the world
• Understand the world in context of long-term, large-scale, global effects -- e.g. the market, economy, historical patterns leading to rich insights (typically coded in few words but hard to understand unless you know them already) 

Keeping a global perspective prevents you from tunnel visioning, since it's easy to "drill down" into local effects but it's hard to "dig out" to see the big picture. Example: You start having troubles with your old car. You think it's really important that you to purchase a new car soon, but upon taking a global perspective, you start questioning yourself. What do you actually need it for? Frequency of use?  Is it going to increase your life satisfaction? Does it align with your values (e.g. considering environmental impact, economic waste)? 

I think what Steve Jobs defined can also be applied to "wisdom". Wisdom is making sense of everything but in a more elegant mental model. The way society is, all that. In short: Knowledge is local, wisdom is global. 

Related:

"We call the local cue knowledge and its accumulation wisdom, and the canine (and we humans) need both kinds of information to succeed." - L. Mahadevan, https://www.quantamagazine.org/l-mahadevan-finds-math-inspiration-in-the-mundane-20201026/