Ancient Wisdom

In the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, between the 12th and 18th centuries, Berber agricultural communities practiced something that would horrify modern management consultants: they deliberately rotated their technical experts out of their roles...

In the bustling textile markets of 6th century Pāṭaliputra, Jain merchants followed a practice that seemed designed to lose them business: after completing a sale, they would not immediately pursue the next customer. Instead, they observed what...

In the grasslands of Kenya and Tanzania, a Maasai enkiguena—a junior elder managing community cattle herds—must remember not just which cow belongs to which family, but also each animal's lineage, health history, trading agreements, and...

In 1582, John Dee—mathematician to Queen Elizabeth I, cartographer, and England's most celebrated scholar—built a table in his Mortlake library with twelve chairs. He called it his "Table of Practice" for angelic conversations,...

In 1976, a Hawaiian double-hulled canoe named Hōkūle'a sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti using no modern instruments. The navigator, Mau Piailug from the tiny Micronesian island of Satawal, spent most of the voyage staring not at the sky but at...

In the mountains of Kurdistan, before courts and contracts, before notaries and deeds, a traveling singer named a dengbêj would arrive at a village dispute over land boundaries or inheritance divisions. Both parties would state their claims. The...

In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, young Martu men traditionally undertook walkabouts that lasted not days but seasons—sometimes six months of traversing the same ancestral country their great-grandfathers had walked. To European...

In third-century Persia, Zoroastrian priests practiced a ritual that modern productivity experts would find bizarre: before sleeping, they performed a mental accounting called the "chinvat calculation"—literally weighing their day's...

In the upper Amazon basin of Ecuador, the Shuar people practiced something that seems absurd to our productivity-obsessed culture: before a young person could learn a new skill—whether hunting, healing, or negotiation—they first had to spend...

In 1586, Sen no Rikyū, tea master to the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, commissioned a set of tea bowls from the potter Chōjirō. When the artisan delivered them, Rikyū inspected each one carefully, then deliberately dropped several of the most...