Stay Humble

Came in this morning to a shotgun blast of Morning Mojo from my man Gerry McGovern and his post Humility in the Age of Complexity. A few choice nuggets:

“The other strategy is to be humble—humble about ourselves and our leaders. To constantly question the answers and challenge the beliefs we hold dearest. To learn how to digest and interpret evidence. We need to be prepared for the pain and anguish that comes when a fact we cherish is proven false. In the messy world of uncertainty and randomness, the ability to adapt, research, and interpret is a crucial skill.”

“Accepting that we are wrong is hard. Accepting that we don’t know the answers is hard. We will be up against boastful, arrogant, vain, bullying, liar-spouting certainties. Our humble arguments may not win most of the time. Yet, we must keep arguing. We must keep collaborating, reaching outside of our comfort zone, outside of our peer group, outside of our belief system.”

Told a False Story

“Everyone listening to this will know someone who works really hard, at a job they hate, to buy a load of shit they don’t need, that they display on social media to get people to go “OMG so jealous”, and then they feel a peculiar emptiness, because they’ve done what they’re meant to do. They’ve worked really hard, they’ve bought the shit they see in adverts, they’ve displayed it on social media, but they feel terrible. So what happens? … They work even harder, they buy even more shit that they display even more aggressively on social media. We’re in these cycles – we’ve been told a false story about what it is to be human, we’ve been told a false story about what it is to be happy.”

Johann Hari on the Making Sense Podcast #142