Confidently Humble

Which should you have, lots of confidence, or lots of humility? It's a trick question! Why not have both? Is that even possible? I think it is. As a matter of fact, this is an idea that goes all the way back to Socrates and Plato. (If I tricked you with that first question, I wonder if you even read the title of this post.)

Lately, I have been paying attention to a lot of the wisdom coming from a couple of Stanford professors. Their names are Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton. I wrote about them in this post: The Knowing-Doing Gap. And, today, I walk to talk about what Sutton calls, “The attitude of wisdom.”

According to Sutton, the attitude of wisdom is about being simultaneously confident and humble. It's about knowing what you know and having enough confidence to act. While, at the same time, being comfortable enough with doubt that you remain open to learning. The attitude of wisdom is about being confident and humble. Perhaps confidently humble.

Many times in life we need lots of confidence to get the job done. Confidence is a good thing. However, when that confidence goes too far, and turns into arrogance or hubris, things start to backfire. This is when we close our minds to feedback. We shut ourselves off to learning and improvement. I know I have made this mistake. Thinking I had it all figured out. Yikes! It's a recipe for disaster.

Being very confident and also very humble, is a paradox. It seems to be a contradiction. And, I think the main reason I like to write about paradoxes is because I'll never run out of material. When it comes to resolving paradoxes, the challenge will never end. I think striking the right tone, between confidence and humility, will take a lifetime of practice. This all relates to one of my very favorite paradoxes, “The more you know, the more you know you don't know.” So true. And so humbling. I think that sentence sort of sums up the attitude of wisdom.

There's a guy out there, named Al Pittampalli, who is talking about the idea of being persuadable. What he found is that there are lots of book written on how to become more persuasive. But, there exists a paucity of books on how to be persuadable. The attitude of wisdom would suggest that we need to be both persuasive and persuadable. However, like Pittampalli says, to be persuadable requires humility. And often times, in our culture, humility is conflated with weakness.

How about one last paradox? Whether you like him or not our President, Barack Obama, says some pretty interesting things. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama talks about some of the things he does when he feels his own hope fading. Being a public servant can be a thankless job and the president is not immune to doubt. To strengthen his resolve, Obama reflects on Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and the people, “who ultimately laid down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union.”

Those last four words are what got my attention, “perfecting an imperfect union.” It's kind of like a paradox. It's kind of like what Robert Browning said about how a man's reach should exceed his grasp. I hope, and I believe, that America has this attitude of wisdom. I think it takes a pretty high level of maturity to be confident in America's greatness and still understand that she has room from improvement. I think we should all strive to perfect an imperfect union. Be it the United States of America. Or, be it our very own marriage.

I think we are pretty familiar, and comfortable, with either/or decisions. That is why I asked the question at the beginning of this post. But, I also believe we are capable of operating at a higher level. A level where we recognize and solve paradoxes. It's something I wrote about in this post: Operate at a higher level.