Humility

There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Few have mastered the art of walking it, and fewer still have the wisdom to know when to step back. People with enough self awareness to recognize their infallibility are–in my experience–a rare breed.

I think a lot of the self-help advice about how we should love ourselves and be confident and yadda yadda tends to be correct on the surface, but in practice it gets deployed incorrectly. Confidence is great, but ignorance combined with too much confidence leads to arrogance.

When I look back on my life, I’ve made countless mistakes, some of which were more costly than others, but one general theme I’ve noticed about my own mistakes is that in my younger years (i.e., 20s and early 30s) I let my ego grow a little too large. This post–I suppose–could serve as a letter to my younger self, containing some thoughts I wish I had internalized then.

It’s easy to preach, but it’s hard to be congruent with whatever philosophies you espouse. Certainly there are plenty of people who do as they say they do, but I suspect the majority of those who (like myself) write blog posts on self-help themes don’t practice much of what they preach.

If there’s anything that annoys me about modern culture, it’s the pursuit and obsession with self. I suppose the classic modern day example of this is how everyone believes they’re an “influencer”, a term that is annoying on its own because most of those who call themselves influencers are likely not influencing anyone in any meaningful way, unless you count getting involved in an MLM or some advertising scheme as “influencing”.