The Difference between Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom

Wisdom is the principal thing;
Therefore get wisdom.
And in all your getting, get understanding.

– Proverbs 4:7 (New King James Version)

During my childhood, I understood wisdom to mean being an elder. As long as you looked much older than me, which to my young eyes meant being at least 5 years older than me, I believed that you carried wisdom. Given the countless renditions of wise people in popular culture further normalized this expectation in me. I lacked the understanding that things — including people — did not always reflect what I had learned to associate with their image. Most of my understanding was based on watching television, but as I started to read more books, my mindset started to shift. Series like the Magic Treehouse taught me that wisdom was having knowledge about how culture worked to navigate it well, and I began to understand that there was power in camouflaging myself according to the cultural lens

Growing into my teens, I started to understand wisdom as an application of knowledge, because my peers in school knew a lot of knowledge about topics that I had never even heard about, but somehow they lacked common sense in other areas. At first, I understood the divide in information more as “street smart” versus “book smart.” Having knowledge of both types of “smarts” and being able to navigate both worlds using it became my more detailed understanding of what true wisdom was.