Arrogance and Humility

Arrogance: a word with a negative connotation. Humility: the opposite of arrogance, ergo a positive thing. Or so they would have you believe.

I have never understood why people expect humility and make it sound like a good thing. Don’t get me wrong: I am not advocating arrogance. Rather, I am saying that sometimes the opposite of a bad thing is not necessarily a good thing either. After all, both are extremes (boastful and self-deprecation), so why don’t people advocate the middle ground instead?

Surely a guy who is very good at something or did something great does not need to go around belittling his own achievements. And yet society almost demands humility from its members. No wonder Arthur Schopenhauer asked:

“What is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with envy, a man seeks to obtain pardon for excellences and merits from those who have none?”

Schopenhauer then went further and attributed a reason for why this is the case:

“No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very advantageous thing for the fools; for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.”

Then there are those achievers who, like Muhammad Ali, feel “It’s hard to be humble when you are as great as I am”. Why impose or demand a feeling from others when they don’t really feel it?

Then there’s the Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) view on the matter, which as usual, is well thought out and brilliantly articulated:

“The interesting thing about arrogance is that it's hard to know when you're doing it. It's a challenge to be confident in your opinion without projecting an air of superiority. Objectively speaking, if you think you have the right answer for a given situation, it follows that anyone who disagrees is a little bit misguided, or ignorant, or just plain dumb.”

The best quote on this topic though is by Steve Jobs: most of us would love to change the world, but that wasn’t enough for Jobs. He wanted to “make a dent in the universe”! I found that phrase amusing since it is both ambitious as well as humble at the same time: ambitious because he was aiming to impact the universe; humble because he was only hoping to make a dent in it. Sort of like the middle ground, eh?