Time & Perspective Quote by Olin Miller

Wisdom, Miller suggests, starts the moment your ego takes a hit and survives it. The line is built like a neat little logical trap: you arrive expecting a comforting aphorism about self-improvement and instead get a paradox that rewards self-doubt. The first clause is a gentle humiliation - an admission that yesterday's confidence was inflated. The second clause flips that embarrassment into a credential. If you can see your own overestimation, you have already moved up a rung.

The intent is practical, almost behavioral: Miller is arguing for a kind of everyday intellectual hygiene. Not "be smart", but "update your self-assessment". It's an early, folksy version of what we'd now call metacognition: the skill of noticing how often you're wrong, and adjusting without melodrama.

The subtext is a critique of certainty as performance. "Wise" here isn't a trophy you win and keep; it's a moving target that recedes the moment you start posing for the photo. The quote also smuggles in a moral preference: humility isn't just pleasant, it's efficient. It turns the sting of revision into momentum.

Context matters. Writing in a 20th-century America enamored of self-made authority - gurus, pundits, bosses, patriots - Miller offers a quieter metric of growth. Wisdom isn't the ability to sound right; it's the willingness to discover you weren't. That feels especially modern in an attention economy that pays confidence bonuses. Miller's punchline insists the real upgrade is learning to live without them.