What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

Very little of what you know began with you. The judgments you reach for came down through people you will never meet, tested and revised and handed along until they felt like plain sense. What stands now stands on what fell. Even the newest arrangement has roots in something already crumbled.

Before you discard an old practice, spend a moment on what it was solving. Some of it is dead weight and some of it is holding the roof up, and the difference is rarely obvious from outside. This week, ask one person who was there before you why a thing is done the way it is.