This is a post from my My 20-day Zappos + Buffer Values Challenge
“Be Humble”
This is really hard. Like, really hard.
It’s particularly hard to explain in a blog post how good you are at being humble! Err, yes. Ummm. Right.
Some people might point to candid blog posts like these and suggest they’re evidence of humbleness, I’m sort of uncomfortable talking about humbleness at all in the first person, because I think I’ve a long way to improve.
One of the ways you can instantly communicate humbleness is by trying to improve your communication. It’s incredibly easy to use words “I” and “me” a great deal in constructions like: “my thoughts are”, “I’ve found that”, “one things I’ve considered”.
There are times when this is only option, but often you can improve your relationships with people, by working out how to rethink and rephrase what you’re trying to communicate by removing yourself from the centre of the sentence. It’s surprisingly tough thing to try to do, but it can be surprisingly rewarding. My journey towards perfecting this is just beginning.
What I will say is that I think humbleness is really important. Many people who are widely disliked are the opposite of humble – arrogant, and many of the people we most enjoy looking up to are incredibly humble. In fact, the more humble, the more one directs attention away from oneself, the more is revered.
I recently watched this interview with Pharrell – the musician, and was impressed with how often he turned the interview away from himself.
If I was rewording this value, I’d be tempted to reword it as “be down-to-earth“, but I can see why “be humble” clearer in meaning and semantics.
Being unpretentiously friendly, modest yet generous is a great thing to work towards in a business or personal context.
I hope I can work further towards it over the next few years.
