How do you draw the wisdom out of every person? By learning to ask smart questions.

As I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve asked questions of taxi cab drivers and prime ministers, and they’ve each taught me something. You can learn from anybody if you know the right questions to ask!

One of the things I’ve learned is that I have never learned anything while I’m talking. If my mouth is moving, I’m not learning. You don’t learn when you’re talking. You learn when you’re listening. So you’ve got to learn to listen.

I’ve done an awful lot of interviews over the years, and I’ve noticed that the interview shows have changed. They’re no longer about the guest. They’re about the interviewer. The whole goal of the interviewer is to draw attention to himself.

You can learn from anybody, but you’ve got to be willing to ask questions and then listen. That’s the mark of a wise person.

You don’t need a lot of friends in life. You don’t need to be popular. You just need a few good friends who build you up, not tear you down—people who are wise, not fools. If you hang around with fools, that’s what you become.

We always grow in community. You cannot grow to spiritual maturity by yourself. You could become a hermit and move to the top of a mountain and spend your life sitting in silence and reading books. You would grow in knowledge, but you wouldn’t grow in wisdom.

Why? Because wisdom is all about love. Wisdom shows up primarily in relationships. That’s why some people have educational degrees, but their marriages are falling apart. They’re educated, but they’re not wise.

The Bible says in Proverbs 13:20, “Spend time with the wise and you will become wise, but the friends of fools will suffer” (NCV).

If I stand on the edge of a stage, and I’m trying to pull you up while you’re trying to pull me down, which is easier to do? It’s always easier for somebody to pull you down than pull you up. People who pull you down are not your friends. Friends pull you up. Friends encourage you in your pursuit of godly wisdom by offering their own.

Is anybody in your life giving you input for good on a regular basis? You need that kind of encouragement if you want to be a wise person.

You don’t get it from television. You don’t get it from the internet. You don’t get it from magazines. Wisdom comes from God.

The Bible says in Proverbs 15:14, “A wise person is hungry for knowledge, while the fool feeds on trash” (NLT). You can either feed on truth or feed on trash. Whatever you fill your mind with is what’s going to come out—garbage in, garbage out. If you want to be wise, you’ve got to feed every day on truth, not trash.

There are three kinds of things you can fill your mind with: You can fill your mind with poison, you can fill your mind with junk food, or you can fill your mind with health food.

Poison is stuff that destroys your system. It’s bad for you. It takes you down. Pornography is poison. For instance, they may say, “I can watch that stuff. It doesn’t bother me anymore.” That’s the problem! When you can watch and read stuff that is profane, blasphemous, evil, vile, and abusive and it doesn’t bother you, you have a problem. You have become a fool.

Wise people protect their mind. They put on the helmet of salvation. They don’t just allow anything into their mind. They keep the poison out.

Junk food is neither good nor bad. It just has no nutritional value to it. Most of the stuff you see on tv is not evil. It’s just junk food. It’s what I call stuffing. But the problem with stuffing is that when you stuff yourself with stuffing, you have no hunger for truth. If you watch TV for four hours, your mind is full of empty calories that don’t help your body or your mind.

Health food is nutritional food. It helps you grow and maintain your health. It is truth, and the wise person feeds on truth. It makes you wiser—in your relationships, your time, your money, your business, your parenting, your marriage, and every other area of your life.

The first place you need to go to fill your mind with truth is God’s Word. The more you develop the habit of spending time each day reading and studying the Bible, the wiser you will become.