Too little
Explain the tempo again, assuming that a struggling singer simply needs more enthusiasm.
Humility
Let someone affected by a decision correct your account of its consequences.
Openness to recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and importance.
Humility leaves room for the limits of your knowledge and importance. A shared proposal meets people whose experience can reveal what its designer missed. Receiving their correction lets the work improve without requiring you to defend the first draft forever.
Try a practice
What Humility means in shared life
Your volunteer choir is preparing a song for a community celebration. You have chosen a brisk tempo that sounds effortless when you tap it on the table. A singer asks where anyone is supposed to breathe. You try singing the phrase yourself, then slow the metronome. The tune gains a breath; your certainty loses one.
Humility gives…
The group can learn from experience that is not represented by the most fluent speaker. A draft becomes a way of discovering constraints together.
Finding the balance
A fitting response
Try the phrase with the singers, hear where it becomes awkward and choose a workable pace together.
Pursued too far
Abandon every suggestion because you cannot anticipate every difficulty.
Being correctable does not mean having nothing to offer. Bring a proposal with enough substance to examine and enough openness to improve.
In ordinary life
A public notice
Ask someone unfamiliar with the project what the instructions seem to mean.
A community event
Listen to the people who clear up before declaring that the arrangement worked perfectly.
Nearby virtues, different work
Open-Mindedness
Open-Mindedness admits an alternative account for consideration; Humility recognizes why your own account may be limited.
Diligence
Diligence follows the correction into the details of the revised plan.
Recognizing a counterfeit
A counterfeit of Humility: The ceremonial disclaimer “I could be wrong” does little when every correction is refused. Give new information a chance to alter the answer.
How to cultivate Humility
- Ask about an experience you did not have.
- Repeat a correction accurately before defending the proposal.
- Name what improved because you accepted the correction.
Try it today
Show a small plan to someone willing to comment on a part they know. Ask what you have missed, then make or explain one concrete revision. They need not disclose personal circumstances to earn a hearing.
Questions worth returning to
- Whose experience has my plan yet to encounter?
- What changed after I said I was willing to learn?
Choose your practice
The situations on these pages are illustrative. These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.
About these practicesQuotations and further reading
Read these passages in their original settings through the source links.
it is only by observing others that I can so far correct my self-ignorance as to arrive at the certainty that I am liable to commit myself unawares
Theophrastus (fictional narrator), in George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such
I. Looking Inward.The fictional observer learns his limits through other people, including faults he could not notice alone.
A chief misfortune of high birth is that it usually shuts a man out from the large sympathetic knowledge of human experience which comes from contact with various classes on their own level, and in my father's time that entail of social ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now.
Theophrastus (fictional narrator), in George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such
II. Looking Backward.Social insulation can deprive someone of practical knowledge acquired through contact on equal terms.
much humility that is not easily cast down by failure, that seeks to be taught, and is ready to learn.
William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art
The Lesser ArtsMorris joins patient work with a humility willing to learn; an unsuccessful attempt need not end either.
But practically one's conviction that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more subjective opinion added to the lot.
William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
The Will to Believe, section VIA feeling of certainty about evidence is itself a judgment. James’s argument invites scrutiny of the confidence we bring to a shared decision.
By weighing we know what things are light, and what heavy. By measuring we know what things are long, and what short. All things are so dealt with, and the mind requires specially to be so.
Mencius, The Sayings of Mencius
Book I, Part I;
Chinese; English translation by James LeggeMencius asks a king to examine his own motives as carefully as he measures things. Confidence in a plan also needs testing against the people who must carry it out.
The reaction of disillusionment is just as unreal as the first shock of illusion.
Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism
Nationalism in JapanTagore warns against exchanging uncritical admiration for wholesale suspicion. Learning that the first account was wrong need not make the opposite account infallible.
None the less, the advice to discriminate what is observed from what is inferred is sound practical advice.
John Dewey, How We Think
CHAPTER SEVEN; SYSTEMATIC INFERENCE: INDUCTION AND DEDUCTIONDewey separates observation from inference, a useful discipline when a confident planner has yet to try the plan in practice.
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Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.