Competitive humility: the new reality sport

Hating yourself isn't humility. For the longest time, I thought it was. My mental image of a humble man was this: a man who spoke softly, downplayed his every achievement, and fawned over the achievements of others. In other words, my idea of a humble man was a doormat with a disingenuous smile.

My past attempts at humility (I attempted it because I was told by important people that humility is good) were largely self destructive. The first was this: I thoroughly hated myself. I was a sinner, couldn’t stop sinning, and would tell myself that over and over in order to keep myself humble. Because, obviously, I was in danger of my ego enlarging to a planetary scale.

The second seemed better at the time, but really wasn’t. In this version, I practiced humility because I was a righteous man. I was the kind of guy who let people cut in line just so they could bask in the golden rays of my humility. Bask, you inconsiderate hordes, bask I say.

Here’s an interesting phenomenon: I actually bounced back and forth between the two views reasonably regularly. Neither felt right, but I just knew that one of them was going to do the trick. Eventually.

C.S. Lewis and a few of my friends helped me to develope a better view of humility. According to Mr. Lewis, a humble man is a man who simply thinks more about you than he thinks about himself. You could have hours of conversation with a man like that and the word “humble” would probably never come to mind. What you might notice, if you were really paying attention, was that he seemed genuinely interested in your views and, more importantly, in you. His selflessness allows him the luxury of actually getting to know people, the real people, not the masks that everyone wears. It's amazing what you have time to do when you're not distracted by yourself.

A truly humble man isn’t perfect, but he deals with life much better than most. When he sins, he asks forgiveness, looks for ways to avoid making the same mistake, and promptly moves on. When he accomplishes something great, he accepts whatever praise that's thrown his way, and then promptly moves on.

I want to meet someone like that someday. Heck, I’d even like to be like that someday… when I grow up. Until then, I’m going to try to convince some people to bask in my awesomeness.