Values / Humility

Humility

Holding an accurate picture of what you know, what you owe, and how much of your success was circumstance.

What this value tries to protect

Your ability to learn from people who know better, and others from the costs of your certainty.

Healthy expressions

Changing your mind in public.
Naming the luck in your own story.
Asking a question you might look foolish for asking.

Possible overextensions

Refusing credit until it becomes its own performance.
Withholding a useful judgement to seem modest.
Deferring so thoroughly that nobody can rely on you.

Common tensions

Humility and Achievement
Humility and Respect

Questions worth sitting with

What do you believe most confidently on the least evidence?
Who has been right about something you dismissed?
Which part of what you have was given to you?

Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is holding a calibrated view. The person who cannot accept a compliment and the person who cannot accept a correction are making the same error in opposite directions.