Improve Your Life With Humility

Humility is a virtue, that requires us to recognize and respect, that we are not perfect and that we can improve. It also requires us to understand that we're not the only ones with the problem we're trying to solve and that we can learn from others, who have already improved their life. Humble pride is a positive, consequence-free mindset, that helps you find success in anything you do.

The Importance Of Humility

Humility is the willingness to acknowledge your own ignorance and the knowledge that you're not infallible. It's a subtle, but very important distinction. Because if you're not humble, then you're concealing a poison within your pride, that could very well destroy you. Think about it. How many people have you known to be humble and yet turn out to be arrogant? In how many situations have you found people concealing their arrogance and ended up as the fools?

Humility is the antidote to arrogance. It's important to remember, that pride is not the same thing as self-confidence. You can be confident in yourself and still have pride. You can be humble while still being confident. You have to carefully watch your pride, but at the same time, you have to develop a healthy self-confidence. To be prideful is to take too much upon yourself. To be overconfident is to underestimate yourself. Pride is a choice. Confidence is a state of being.

Humility Is Not Weakness Humility Is Strength

Humility is not a sign of weakness. Humility is a state of strength, that all great leaders have. Humility is knowing your limitations. Real humility is knowing your strengths and weaknesses and having the humility to realize, that you don't know everything. Stop looking at humility as a sign of a weak mind. The real sign of a weak mind is an unhealthy attachment to power, which is the exact opposite of humility.

Be Prideful And Humble

You can be prideful and humble at the same time. I believe, that it is important for everyone, even the most humble people, to have some pride. A pride that is constructive though. A pride that doesn't make you arrogant like the unhealthy kind, but helps you recognize your own abilities and mistakes.

I want you to think of pride as a muscle. It's a muscle that is strengthened through use and weakened through overexposure. If you think of pride as a muscle, then humility becomes the careful and deliberate practice of that muscle. It works the same way. Prolonged and unhealthy, it becomes a flabby, weak, and painful muscle. But like anything else, it can be developed.

The Difference Between Pride And Arrogance

The difference between pride and arrogance is that you can be proud of who you are and what you do, and yet still make mistakes. The arrogance of pride is the refusal to accept any form of imperfection in yourself or others. It's the refusal to recognize your own fallibility, and the fallibility of others. It's the belief that you're infallible; that no one could ever do anything to you that you couldn't do better.

Pride is like a healthy ego, it feels good to have pride. It feels even better to be the one with pride. To be the one with the arrogance, you have to continually bump up against people who are bigger, better and more confident than you. Healthy pride makes you feel good about yourself. It makes you feel like you're a worthwhile human being.

Unhealthy pride makes you feel like you're better, than other people. It makes you feel like you're always right. It doesn't matter how much experience and wisdom you have, if you let the poison of arrogance consume you, then your knowledge is of little use. The more pride you have, the more likely it is that your arrogance will consume you and the harder it is for you to become humble. Arrogance is like a weed in the garden of life; pull it up by the roots before it takes over everything.

The Importance Of Self-Confidence

While humility and pride are very different, they can actually go hand in hand. They're both important, because without pride and self-confidence, you're not going to have the drive to succeed. Without humility, your pride will blind you from mistakes and from learning from others. But without confidence, pride will be a hollow virtue and you'll have no inner worth.

Both are important, and to have neither can be just as bad as to have one. The more you have of one, the more you're likely to have the other. Healthy humility and pride are actually healthy attitudes. They're not unhealthy. They're necessary to a healthy ego. They're the grease, that makes the wheels of life go round. If you have too much pride, you'll have no humility and no self-confidence. If you have too much humility, you'll have no pride and no self-confidence.

But you also can't have too much of either. At some point, you have to be willing to face and acknowledge your mistakes, because otherwise you'll just be spinning your wheels. You have to be willing to let other people help you when you're in need, because you can't do everything yourself. You have to have some confidence, because without it, you'll never take risks and push yourself.

The Importance Of Accepting Help

If you want to succeed, you'll need others. You might not need others to do the hard work, but you certainly can't do it alone. You don't have the ability to do everything yourself. So you're going to have to learn to accept help. You'll never truly succeed in this world without help. No matter how much you might want to think that you can.

You might have a natural ability that others don't have. You might be able to succeed without much effort. But it's certainly not going to be easy and it's going to take quite a bit of luck, for you to succeed and when the going gets tough, you're going to need help. You might think you can pull it off yourself and you probably could, but remember, you have limits to your own power as well.

You might have all the talent in the world, but if you don't have the proper guidance, then you might not have the tenacity to get where you want to go. So you're going to have to learn to say "no" to the untalented and "yes" to the talented. You might not be good at everything, but you certainly don't want to be a failure at anything. So you'd better choose your allies with care.