Proverbs 18:12 – Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, and before honour is humility.
A couple of events over the last couple of days reminded me of the fact that humility is a marvelous thing. The first was a pair of comments (here and here) made on this blog. A young lady (rightly) castigated me for something I wrote about tuition costs, but she did it in such a humble, complimentary manner, there was no way I could do anything other than appreciate her kindness in giving me the correction. I responded to her and she responded back with an additional comment that just left me very impressed.
In this day and age, when the pride in self is the accepted, even expected, perspective for young people to embrace, she said, “Thank you. I know I’m not the smartest college student out there but I know a lot about the school systems.”
She then goes on to explain that, with hard work (she did not call that out, but that was the crux of the thing), she got a great educational start at a great price. She did all this with an endearing sense of humility leaving me to believe that she must be, at least on some very important levels, one of the smartest college students out there. Intelligence is not immutable, hard work helps and humility is a great quality in any context.
The second event was an engagement, a series of meetings, with a team of engineers working on a hard, very technical image processing problem. Everyone is wracking their brain to figure out a way to solve a problem for which there might be no good solution. The engineer who has worked longest on the problem spends all his time in the meetings explaining how his approach is the scientific approach and that if the other engineers do not cite articles from academia that describe how to do even the most mundane task, there is no reason to try them, well-known, well-tested algorithms in the field. His contribution mostly consists of aggrandizement of his own contributions that have yet to work after six months.
The sadness is that I often find myself adopting the second attitude. It will take humility to over come that.
Betty Blonde #295 – 09/03/2009
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Interesting comments, Ken. I was thinking about this from the other end on my way to work this morning. I am constantly hearing comments from managers and machinists about “Stupid Engineers!”. These comments are typically directed toward part features or tolerances they are irritated by or are more difficult than would seem necessary based on their understanding of the part.
I have spent a considerable amount of time on the design end with many engineers that have the documents but not the practical experience. Your comment about the importance of humility is spot on because I see how both the practical and theoretical are important but non-exclusive. Balance is critical if innovation is the goal.
Your collegue who is only willing to rely on what already exists will rarely experience innovation because he has ruled it out by default. Innovation comes only from new things or the new application of old things. That takes openness to input from others. The synergy from healthy collaboration is powerful. Too bad he can’t see that the very things he is citing came about because what existed before those things was not enough.
You are exactly right Gene. This has been one of my big frustrations over my entire career. With only a Masters degree, I am caught between the “regular engineers” and the PhD’s, both of whom think each other are fools. The funny deal is that it is often the techs with an associate degree and a ton of real experience who don’t know what is not possible who make the true innovations. Balance and humility. I like it. That is right on the money.
Natalie
Wow. Crazy how my comments inspired this post.
🙂