Wisdom, like diamonds, can be found in different places.

Some nuggets come to you highly polished, presented in pretty packaging and costing a lot of money. Other times, you spy it in the dirt, rough and dull, easy to miss; but when you pick it up and polish it just right, you have a gem.

I appreciate the first kind like, you know, a good university degree. However, I love the second kind. Those gems of wisdom that come at you when you least expect it, and the brilliance of it knocks you down when you’re done polishing. That’s why I love talking to “mad” people.

My father was the head psychiatric nurse at the mental hospital and so I grew up around “mad” people. In those days before the worldwide web and a resident experts on every corner, psychiatric disorders weren’t so clearly defined as they are now, at least to the average person. Bipolar, schizophrenia, chronic depression, and so on were lumped into one category—mad people.

There were a number of World War II veterans at the mental hospital who were just labeled “mad” because the term post traumatic stress disorder hadn’t been invented yet. The closest we had back then was shell shock.

The hospital had various facilities depending on the level of functionality of the patient and the residents of the low security wards were allowed a lot of freedom for rehabilitation. As it was a government facility, these low-risk patients had to help earn their keep by working on the hospital grounds or for the hospital community to get extra money for their personal needs.

Many of them were skilled tradesmen, especially the older ones who were sailors during the war. As I had mentioned, my father worked at the mental hospital and every so often he would bring patients home to do repairs, and I loved talking with them.

There was one particular veteran, a plumber, with whom I talked a lot. His thing, and they all had a thing, was he would run and hide whenever he heard a car horn, then he would come back and continue talking as if nothing had happened. Also, there was always a third person in our conversations, only he was the only one to see this person. Once you got used to that, everything was okay.

Anyway, once I asked him what his friend was saying and he explained that his friend turned the pages for him so he wouldn’t dirty up the book. (Just stick with me here.) The friend would read aloud to him so he would know what to do when he was fixing things.

It turned out that the man couldn’t read but, as an apprentice, he had to learn the plumbing manuals on the ships. So he memorized the manuals, diagrams and all, and then studied how the other mechanics did things.

Then, somewhere in his brain, he put the two together and gave meaning to the words he couldn’t read. When faced with a problem, he told his “friend” where in the manual the answer was and the friend would read it out to him.

I tried his technique and it worked, and I’ve been using it ever since.

Study or imagine a diagram or illustration, then apply actions to the picture in your mind, pausing every so often to make a landmark before moving on. Anyone giving you directions or instructions, put a picture of the starting point in your head, then follow along on the picture in your mind, noting the landmarks along the way.

You will pick up on procedural or logical inconsistencies from the start; be able to “read” back the process to yourself, almost like a story; and remember complex sequences from any point at a later date because of the landmarks you established. Just don’t read it aloud in front of people though, they might not understand.

So, no matter how stupid or mad a person or incident may appear to be, it pays to be open-minded as there may just be an opportunity for you to learn something valuable or life-changing, like finding a diamond in the dirt.