Humility

Humility gives another way to become skillful

You are an experienced runner trying badminton with friends. Your feet arrive impressively early; the shuttle goes impressively elsewhere. For several minutes you try to solve the problem by arriving even earlier. A friend offers to show you the grip. You let them. Being fit has brought you to the shuttle; it has not yet negotiated what happens on arrival.

Finding the balance in Humility

A capable athlete trying a different sport accepts a beginner’s correction instead of relying on general confidence.

A precise admission of ignorance leaves more of your ability intact than a grand verdict about yourself.

What Humility makes possible

Humility can make coaching a conversation. You can describe what you tried, hear what another person saw and test the difference. It also changes victory: a strong performance becomes something to understand, including favorable conditions and other people’s contributions, rather than a certificate of general superiority. Confidence in a skill and openness about its limits can grow together.

Humility in ordinary life

After a win

Your match went brilliantly. At supper, a teammate disagrees with your view on an unrelated question. The score supplies no extra evidence for your opinion; listen to what they actually know.

A substitute’s observation

Consider the thing someone saw from the sidelines without dismissing it because they played fewer minutes.

Nearby virtues, different work

Gratitude

Gratitude appreciates help received; Humility makes it easier to notice that help was needed.

Magnanimity

Magnanimity concerns the rival whose merit troubles your pride; Humility concerns the limits of your own knowledge and importance.

Humility and its counterfeits

The rehearsed modesty

Calling yourself terrible can be a way of recruiting other people to praise you.

Obedience disguised as learning

An instructor’s experience does not make every request sound or every disagreement arrogant.

How to cultivate Humility

1. Describe one limitation at the scale at which you can work on it.

2. Ask a willing person for a specific observation rather than a verdict on your talent.

3. Notice when useful advice arrives from someone outside your usual hierarchy.

Try it today

Choose an ordinary skill you are learning. Name one question you genuinely cannot yet answer and look for a suitable explanation or willing person.

Questions worth returning to

• Am I protecting my understanding or my image of competence?
• What can I test rather than merely defend?

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. I will not say, be modest in the hour of victory, but rather be modest after it. It is after the victory, as we listen to outside praise, that conceit and its enervating influence steal in.

   W. G. Grace · Cricket · Chapter IX · How to Score

   Grace locates a temptation after the applause: success becomes an inflated account of oneself. Receiving a win well includes keeping its meaning within the contest.

2. Whether he will or not he must first creep, then walk, then run; and the wisest guide he can have is the one who most studiously helps him to help himself.

   Frances E. Willard · A Wheel within a Wheel · My Teachers

   Learning to cycle makes Willard feel the limits of accomplishments earned elsewhere. Her image of gradual learning gives guidance a purpose: helping the learner acquire a skill they can exercise for themselves.

3. I forget all the team, but I know we started with Andy Stuart and myself and I also think I know that neither of us had any idea we were going to be beaten by anything that Cambridge would bring against us.

   Horace G. Hutchinson · Fifty Years of Golf · The Start Of The Oxford And Cambridge Golf Matches

   Hutchinson remembers assuming that Oxford’s leading players would beat Cambridge’s. The later defeat gives his confidence a comic edge: a strong reputation does not settle the next encounter.

4. I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.

   William James · Talks to Teachers and to Students · On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

   James recognizes that he has misunderstood the value of a rural life from outside it. His reversal asks us to leave room for forms of competence and satisfaction our own experience does not reveal.

5. We see that a carpenter becomes a carpenter by learning certain things: that a pilot, by learning certain things, becomes a pilot. Possibly also in the present case the mere desire to be wise and good is not enough. It is necessary to learn certain things.

   Epictetus · The Golden Sayings of Epictetus · Saying LXVI · Hastings Crossley translation

   The carpenter and pilot acquire knowledge suited to their work. Epictetus uses them to challenge the idea that wanting wisdom supplies it; confidence in one sport likewise does not teach another.

6. But the Vain are foolish and self-ignorant, and that palpably: because they attempt honourable things, as though they were worthy, and then they are detected.

   Aristotle · Nicomachean Ethics · Book IV · Great-mindedness · D. P. Chase translation

   Aristotle locates vanity in a mistaken estimate of what one can do. An honest assessment can remain hopeful; pretending to possess an unlearned skill makes correction unnecessarily embarrassing.

7. Watch carefully your own weak points. Any good player ought to be able to show them to you, and you should then try to improve your game where it is weak.

   James Dwight · Lawn-Tennis · How to Learn to Play

   Dwight gives the experienced observer a concrete role: identifying a weak point that practice can address. Receiving that observation need not turn one weakness into a verdict on the whole person.

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