Hello and welcome to another edition of the Daily Bolt with your host, Dr. Jeff Tilly. Today's topic, Reflections on Humility from CM Christensen. Sit back at me, Max, and enjoy today's Daily Bolt.
So last night I promised you that there would be some expansion of the topics and there would be some days where I'd talk about either my own wisdom or wisdom from other people. Wouldn't necessarily be science focused and today is certainly one of those days. One thing that I will also mention at the end is one of a change that I'm going to make to this format. But for right now, let's move on and talk a little bit about humility.
And I'm talking about humility based on some comments in a book, actually it's a chapter of a book, that is put out by the Harvard Business Review. The title of the book is called Managing Yourself. And individual chapters are by individual people in the business world or instructors at the Harvard Business School. And this chapter is one of the ones from an instructor at the Harvard Business School, CM Christensen, who taught there for many years.
Unfortunately, he is no longer with us. He passed away about a year and a half ago. But he didn't leave us some interesting comments on humility. And this was something that wasn't just his point of view.
This was something that he developed over the years. This was something he would ask all of his students coming into his classes at the Harvard Business School, which is a graduate level program, graduate level school within Harvard University. One thing that he noticed is that humble people tend to have high levels of self-esteem. They regard others with esteem for who they are.
And they don't exhibit a false humility of putting themselves down. There's a lot of people out there that think, oh, well, if I'm self-deprecating, I'm putting myself down, I'm being humble. Well, actually, you're not. I've actually heard some discussion about self-deprecation from other authors and other speakers.
And they point out that it's really a way that you're actually trying to focus attention on yourself. And it's really kind of an ego thing rather than humility thing, because you're forcing people to pay attention to putting yourself down. So that's not real humility. That's what we call a false humility.
Real humility in regarding others with esteem for who they are and what their gifts are, it means to integrity in every way that you deal with that person or those people. Because if you regard them with high esteem, you're not going to want to cheat them. You're not going to want to stab them in the back behind their back. You're not going to want to steal from them or lie to them.
You're going to deal with them modestly and straightforward and upfront. A second characteristic that the Harvard Business School students and Christians and basically came to consensus on is the fact that humility, involves an attitude that you can learn from just about anybody. In fact, completely everybody is what they came up with. You just learn from people that you think are smarter than you.
You can learn from everybody that you ever encounter, something. Might not be the same things, but you can learn something from everybody. And that's a wonderful attitude to have. It's something that I've tried to embody at various times in my life.
I haven't been perfect at it. There have been times where I've been actually pretty poor at it, to be perfectly honest. They also went and talked a bit about people who weren't humble. And one of the things they pointed out, besides the self-deprecation and false humility thing that I've just talked about, is that people who aren't humble tend to treat other people abusively.
They tend to be arrogant. They tend to demean them and put them down deliberately. And they have to elevate themselves and make themselves feel like they're more virtuous in order to feel good about themselves at all. They have no in-a-self esteem of their own.
The only way they can have any esteem at all in themselves is if they're putting somebody else down. Now, a lot of what I've just said should sound really familiar because this talks about things we've gotten away from. In our current culture and things we've been rushing headlong into in our current culture. Virtu-se-signaling is totally about elevating yourself and trying to make yourself out to be the moral high person.
And you're doing that most likely just to feel good about yourself because you don't feel good about yourself innately. And a lot of the other things in terms of treating people abusively, arrogantly, cancel culture. That's really an indication of people who aren't humble. We need more people who are humble in this world because, as mentioned earlier, in the podcast, humble people are secure enough in who they are and like who they are as person enough that they elevate everybody else around them.
And they can appreciate them. And we need more people elevating each other right now and a lot less people tearing each other down. Of course, probably someone will listen to this and immediately try to tear it down. And I'll just go ahead and realize that those people don't have any real self-esteem of their own.
And I'll feel sorry for them. I think that's all I'm going to say today on this subject for today's day with Bolt. One other change in the format. Even though this is the quote daily Bolt, sometimes it hasn't been very daily.
I'm going to try to be doing this Monday through Saturday, even if the Saturday posts come late in the evening Pacific time, as is being the case this time. But Sunday I will not record any new podcasts on the 7th day, God rested, and so can I. On that note, I hope you have a great evening or morning or afternoon depending on when you're listening to this. This is Dr.
Jeff Tilly for the Daily Bolt. I hope you have a great rest of your weekend this weekend in July 2021. And we'll see you on Monday.