I was on my way home from Pilates this morning, thinking about an ‘The Trenches’ post I’d drafted before class. It wasn’t quite hitting the mark for what I wanted to say. I realized I was trying to make it universal – here’s what everyone should learn about education. But that’s not the story I need to tell.

This is about the lessons I’ve learned. About how information sitting in your head waiting for context becomes wisdom the moment you know how to apply it.

The Difference Between Knowledge and Wisdom

My mom had this recurring theme throughout our entire childhood: “I’m teaching you these things because while you may not need them now, or even understand how they’re going to impact your life, you’re going to need them one day.“

She wasn’t just talking about practical skills – how to sew, how to cook, how to manage a household on almost nothing. She was talking about principles. Ways of thinking. Patterns that repeat across situations. The goal wasn’t to fill our heads with facts. It was to give us information ready to be turned into wisdom, which is the application of that information when the moment demands it.

That’s how she did discipline. Not through spanking, though that happened sometimes. Mostly through talking to us constantly about lessons she’d learned, about how we were supposed to live our lives, about the principles that made things work. And here’s the thing about being a child, a teenager, a young adult: you think you know everything. You get a little bit of formal education or what others might view as real-world experience, and suddenly you’re convinced you’ve got it figured out.

Then life teaches you otherwise…

The Station Wagon Incident

I was seventeen. Bright, shiny, newly licensed. I’d taken my six-hour behind-the-wheel course. I knew what I was doing.

We were on a family trip to Magic Mountain, driving through LA traffic. My mom was in the passenger seat, and she told me: “Michelle, be careful. LA traffic stops on a dime. It’s bumper-to-bumper out here.”

I couldn’t roll my eyes – that was absolutely not allowed – but in my head? I was rolling them. Mama, I got this. Can you please just hush.

It feels like it wasn’t even ten minutes later when traffic did exactly what she said. Stopped on a dime. And I hit the back of a station wagon.

If there’s ever been a moment that felt like a bad sitcom – where someone tries to teach you something, you dismiss it with visible attitude, and then the exact thing they warned about happens immediately – this was it. Comical timing in the worst possible way.

My mom is a calm lake. She doesn’t yell. She doesn’t panic. She always seems to say the right thing at the right time. To us, she was a superwoman – making the impossible look easy year after year without ever breaking in front of us.

She’d finally gotten out from under that debt. Inch by painstaking inch. We didn’t always know the details, but we knew we didn’t have new cars. We knew my older siblings remembered a different life – before Dad left versus after. I was only three when it happened, so I only knew us being poor. Asking or not asking for a quarter for the ice cream man. Making our own clothes. All of us living in one house with one working bathroom.

We always had food. We always had each other. We had fun because that’s how my mom does everything. But this was by no means a lush life.

And she’d finally been able to buy a new car – a Ford Aerostar. She’d gone in not even thinking they’d approve her after all those years of paying things back little by little. And here I was, because I didn’t listen, hitting someone when she’d literally just warned me.

They don’t make cars like they used to. The Aerostar must’ve been mostly fiberglass because the whole front just crumpled. The lady was in an old-school station wagon with barely a mark on her metal bumper. I don’t think we even did insurance – the damage to her car was so negligible. But our car? Totaled front end.

We were caravanning with family, and I have a whole photo album from that day. Me sitting at a picnic table outside some little fast-food place, head in my hands, mortified. My thirteen-year-old brother – already working on cars by then – under the hood after our radiator hose blew. We’d gotten off the freeway, gone to a Kragen Auto (I don’t even know if they exist anymore), and he fixed it right there in the parking lot.

I thought we were going home. I thought the trip was ruined because of me.

My mom said no. He fixed it. We’re going to Magic Mountain. That was the plan, and we’re still going to do it.

Then she told me she wanted me to get behind the wheel.

I absolutely did not want to drive. Everything had just crashed down on me – literally. And if there’s one thing I’ve always been, it’s someone who takes it to heart when I’m wrong. I didn’t need spankings because all you had to do was talk to me, explain it, and once I understood, I was crushed. Words weigh heavy on me.

This weighed heavy. I’d messed up my mom’s car. The car she’d worked over a decade to be able to afford. Because I didn’t listen.

She didn’t yell. She never yelled. She said: “You have to get back on the horse. This is going to make you more careful because now you really understand.”

I got behind the wheel. We went to Magic Mountain. We had a great day. Came back home late that night.

Over the following weeks, she dealt with insurance – which I now understand as an adult meant her rates went up. They’d already gone up because I was a teenage driver. We were always ‘insurance-poor’. She had the extra coverage for me, but insurance works like this: it’s there for the accident, but then it goes up. That one moment in time cost her for years.

But it changed me.

Later, I was so glad it happened when I was seventeen because it made me a more careful driver than I ever could have been otherwise. You can’t know what you haven’t experienced. People can tell you – my mom literally told me – but you can’t truly know until you experience it.

Suddenly all those lessons she’d been teaching me, especially the ones where I thought “she’s old, things have changed,” made sense. Nothing had actually changed. Human nature doesn’t change. Physics doesn’t change. Consequences don’t change.

That was a pivotal moment. I think about time as a series of these pivotal moments that change the direction of your life. And this one fundamentally changed my relationship to information.

Information Waiting to Become Wisdom

I’m telling you these things because you’re going to need them one day.

Mary Jean Deshotels

I read constantly – 2-3 books a day by high school, on top of all my other studying. Not because anyone made me, but because that’s what learning looked like in our house. Everything always referenced something else. My mom didn’t let us just read what was assigned. We had concordances, reference guides. We’d go deep, find other texts that layered on more understanding.

I learned to take complex information and distill it into everyday speech that anyone could understand. I loved finding illustrations – identifying a pattern in something complicated and matching it to something from daily life that everyone gets. Suddenly what seemed impossibly abstract becomes “oh, it’s like when you do this thing we all do every day.”

But here’s the key: I was just collecting information. Building this massive library in my head. Some of it I could use immediately. Some of it sat there with no context, no place to apply it yet. Just waiting.

That’s what my mom meant. The information isn’t for nothing. It’s for you to use. It’s there so that when the moment comes – when traffic stops on a dime, when you need to solve a problem you’ve never faced before, when someone needs you to explain something complex in a way they can actually understand – you have what you need.

The information becomes wisdom the moment you can apply it.

Learning From Everything

I started working in corporate America and learned there too. At Chase, I took every class they offered – business writing, timeline management, supervisor development. When I became a supervisor, I went through their year-long management training cohort. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey planners. Time management. This incredible bound book with everything we covered – I got rid of it years after I left Chase and wish I’d kept it. It would’ve been an amazing source for creating programs for someone else.

But the real education? It happened everywhere.

I remember when we were doing mission statements at Chase. They were trying to explain how to create something meaningful with your team – not just fancy words, but something that actually evoked what you promise to yourselves, your team, the people who interact with you.

I was in the Navy hospital emergency room with my mom, waiting, and I looked at the wall. There was a framed mission statement. I either wrote it down or took a picture – I don’t remember if camera phones existed yet – and I started seeing them everywhere. Reading them. Comparing them. Taking examples back to my team: “Look, this is what the Navy hospital’s mission statement is.”

That’s my thing. Everywhere I go, I try to find information. I love hearing the same concepts explained different ways because my mom always told us: everything you’re doing has already been done. It might look different – the mechanism changes – but in general, people do the same things over and over. Once you start to see that pattern, you can’t unsee it.

I took a finance class once where the instructor talked about cyclical markets – bear, bull, the pattern repeating. How if you have time with your 401(k), you can be aggressive because you’ll lose but you’ll gain it back. Just the cyclical nature of everything.

That pattern shows up everywhere. In history. In organizations. In social movements. In how TV shows structure episodes. There are a million things running in the back of my mind when I watch television, and when I hear or see something that connects to what I’m working on – that verbal lightbulb moment – I grab it.

Sometimes I read or hear something with no immediate application. No context yet. I put it in the back of my head, waiting for an opportunity to use it. And it always comes.

The Application Makes It Real

I’ve spent my entire career learning. Taking certifications every year. When I moved into training, I got my CTT+. When a fellow supervisor started doing e-learning, I wanted to learn that too. I taught myself first – got it working – but then I took formal certification in instructional design.

That’s when I discovered I’d been doing everything the hard way. The principles I’d figured out through trial and error? They had names. The workarounds I’d created? There were built-in features I hadn’t known existed.

That’s the value of foundational training even when you’re already proficient. It shows you the efficient path after you’ve proven you can hack through the jungle. You gain vocabulary to teach others what you know. You understand the “why” behind techniques you’ve been using instinctively.

But the real learning – the part where information becomes wisdom – happens when you can apply it. When you can take something you learned in one context and recognize the same pattern in a completely different situation. When you can grab that thing you read two years ago that had no place then and suddenly realize it’s exactly what you need now.

That’s what my mom was teaching us. Not just the specific skills, but how to learn. How to see patterns. How to build a foundation of principles that work regardless of context. How to take information and turn it into wisdom through application.

This isn’t a universal lesson about what everyone should do.
This is what I’ve learned about how I learn.

All of that information sits in my head, waiting. Some of it I can use immediately. Some of it takes years to find its context. But it’s there when I need it, ready to become wisdom the moment the application appears.

My mom was right. She was teaching us things we didn’t understand we’d need. She said it over and over – this consistency of information, the same principles explained slightly differently each time until they became part of how we think.

And that seventeen-year-old who hit a station wagon ten minutes after being warned? She learned that knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing. That you can have all the information in the world, but until you can apply it – until you’ve lived through the moment that makes it real – it’s just facts waiting to matter.

The goal isn’t just to collect information. It’s to have it ready. To recognize when the moment has come. To turn what you know into what you do.

That’s education. That’s wisdom. That’s what my mom spent our entire childhood teaching us, whether we understood it at the time or not.

I understand it (better) now.

❤️If you made it this far, thank you for reading.
This is how I think, how I learn, and how I show up in my work and my life.