Every Proverb Is a Purchase

In 2007 there were 954 farms in America growing kale, and almost nobody ate it. By 2012 there were about 2,500. Between 2011 and 2014 the number of people searching for it quadrupled, and by 2014 Whole Foods was selling 22,000 bunches a day. A market had been made for a vegetable that had spent decades as a garnish. The same thing was done for wisdom 3,000 years ago, by the book of Proverbs, and the same writers set down the part nobody tells about kale: folly gets sold in the same words, from the same spot, to the same buyer.

You're the buyer. Every quarter you pay for something sold as wisdom: a book, a conference, an operating system, an advisor, a thesis. Buy the wrong one and you pay for it and still don't have what you were trying to buy, and by the time that's clear the next pitch is already in your inbox.

In February 2014 a New York publicist named Oberon Sinclair, whose clients were fashion houses, launched a website for the American Kale Association. There was no such association. She invented it, and later said so: "It's my proudest campaign ever." For a few years the press called her the queen of kale. Then a reporter went to Vermont and talked to the farmers who grew the stuff. None of them had heard of her. The man who co-founded the real National Kale Day said she "was taking credit for a movement." There was a website and a good story.

Two things got sold in those years. Kale, and the story of who sold kale. The second one sold better, and it cost nothing to make.

How a market gets made

Brussels sprouts made the same trip, and their story is the better one, because somebody did the work.

The bitter sprout was bred that way. In the 1960s seed companies wanted a plant that ripened all at once so a machine could harvest it, and they got one: uniform, green, high-yielding and bitter. In the early 1990s a Dutch scientist named Hans van Doorn, working with the seed company Bejo Zaden, found the two compounds responsible, sinigrin and progoitrin, and found that old varieties sitting in a Dutch gene bank had far less of them. His team published in 1999 and then spent years crossing the old seed into the new plants until a sprout came out that a child would eat. It reached American stores in the 2000s without a press release.

Then the cooks finished the job. Brown sugar, honey, salt, bacon fat. Roasted till the outside leaves burn. Between July 2018 and July 2019 brussels sprout sales rose 47 percent, the third fastest-growing organic vegetable in the country, and the menus never said the vegetable had changed. The growth held: in The Packer's Fresh Trends survey for 2024, 23 percent of shoppers had bought sprouts in the past year, up from 17 percent the year before.

So there are two ways to make a market for a thing nobody wants. Change what it comes with. Or spend the years on the thing itself and then change what it comes with. Kale got the first. Sprouts got both. And a publicist got the credit for one of them.

The market for wisdom

Wisdom has the same problem the sprout had in 1990. You gotta make the market and create demand for something nobody really cares about.

American companies spent $98 billion on training in 2024. Of that, $12.4 billion went to outside products and services, up 23 percent in a year, and the biggest single line was management training. Count your share of it. Two books on the nightstand with a promise on the cover. A conference in a warm city. An operating system a consultant installed in your company for a six-figure fee. A podcast on every drive in. Nobody really wants wisdom or to be wise. We do want answers and solutions.

The leadership self-help industry is in the business of marketing and selling "wisdom." It's a good business, because the buyer is anxious and the product is relief. Edwin Friedman, a rabbi and family therapist, put the mechanism in one sentence in A Failure of Nerve: "the chronic anxiety in American society has made the imbibing of data and technique addictive precisely because it enables leaders not to have to face their selves." Data and technique sell because they're the bacon fat. You can buy a framework this quarter and have it running by next. Wisdom takes the 10 years the sprout took, and nobody's selling that at a conference.

Everybody at the table agrees it's good for us. We still order the fries.

How Proverbs sells wisdom

The people who wrote Proverbs knew this 3,000 years ago and built the book around it. Proverbs is the first leadership self-help book of the ancient world. Written for young leaders. It's addressed to a son who's about to be handed things: a household, money, a position, a table of his own. It assumes he wants money and standing, and it starts there.

Proverbs is a sales pitch for wisdom. Today we'd call it a go-to-market strategy, and chapter 9 lays it out in full.

Product first. Wisdom builds a house, slaughters the animals, mixes the wine, and sets the table (Proverbs 9:1-2). The work is done before a word is said. Placement next: she sends her people to the highest places of the town, which in a walled town is the spot everyone passes. Today it's the front table at the airport bookstore, the keynote slot, the top of the feed, the first page of results. A sales force: her servants, sent out to call. And the message, one sentence, aimed at the man who doesn't know he needs her.

How folly gets sold

Then look at Folly's go-to-market, because it's the more instructive one. She doesn't build anything. She sits at the door of her house. She has no servants; she does the calling herself, from a chair, at the same spot, the same front table and the same feed, to the same men walking the same road. Folly doesn't have to do much to sell, because we're already sold. She's street level. She tells us what we already want to hear, and everything she offers is cheap, easy, and without consequence. Wisdom needs a decade and a sales force, because wanting wisdom takes a process: you have to be brought to see it before you can want it. Folly needs no process. She needs a chair and easy access at street level.

Wisdom's servants, from the busiest spot in town:

Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!

Folly, from her doorstep, 12 verses later:

Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!

Word for word. Proverbs makes clear that true wisdom and faux wisdom are actively marketed and sold to us. The two books on your nightstand came from the same table at the same airport store, and you can't tell which is which by the cover.

What the second sentence says

The pitches part at the second sentence, and that's where the two women give themselves away.

Wisdom's second sentence names a price. Her bread, her wine, and a condition: leave your simple ways, and live (9:5-6). What she promises is life, and she says it will cost you something you have now. Folly's second sentence names no price. Stolen water, she says, is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant (9:17). Somebody else's water, somebody else's bread, and the two adjectives are the whole offer. What she leaves out is the next verse, where the dead are. The same two sentences sit in the pitch for a book, a fund, a hire or a strategy, and the second one is the one to read.

What was built before the pitch

Then look behind the door. Behind Wisdom's door is 10 years of work. What she puts on the table was made before you arrived. Behind Folly's door is the chair, and the whole appeal is that she didn't have to make anything and you don't have to pay.

The second check is what was built before the call, and it works on the same list. The operating system that has been run through three companies over 10 years and the one drawn on a whiteboard last spring make the same promise in the same deck. The fund that has returned capital through two cycles and the fund with a thesis and a first close promise the same return to the same investor. Only one of each has a house behind it, and the pitch won't tell you which.

Nassim Taleb's book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes, has a line for why Wisdom's pitch is the weaker one. "The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement." Folly sells the one thing Wisdom can't: that this time it won't cost you anything. Stolen water is sweet because it's stolen. Nobody's a fool for wanting the sweeter offer. We're buyers.

Who gets the credit

If a market can be made for wisdom, a market can be made for folly, faster, because Folly's product is cheaper to ship. And once you've bought, the story of who sold it to you gets written by whoever wants the credit. Taleb again, in the same book, on how readers work: "people look for books that support their mental program." We buy the book that agrees with us, call it wisdom, and somebody with a website takes the credit for our judgment. The buyer who was sold folly rarely finds out. When he does, he blames the seller, buys again from the next one, and still calls the book he agreed with wisdom.

What can we learn from how true wisdom markets itself vs faux wisdom?

What a leader buys

Proverbs treats a leader's life as a series of purchases. The question of Proverbs is a buying decision of sorts. A story about a deal arrives, and you buy it or you check it. A line gets a laugh at the all-hands, and you buy the applause. A play that worked at 40 customers comes back around at 400, and you buy it again. A team that agrees with you offers to keep agreeing. Every one arrives as a pitch, from the front table or the feed, in the words Wisdom would use. Whose call to action will we respond to?

Somebody made a market for kale. Somebody spent 10 years making a sprout worth eating, and then somebody else put bacon on it. Proverbs made a market for wisdom 3,000 years earlier, from the same spot Folly works, with the same sentence. You don't find out which house you've walked into from the call. You find out from what's on the table when you sit down.