As you learn more and get smarter, are you gaining in arrogance or humility? You’re headed in one direction or the other.
Here’s an On-Purpose Proverb to ponder:
Humility is knowing self relative to God.
Knowledge is a good thing, but going all the way back to the original sin in the Garden of Eden, let’s not mistake our smarts with being a self-referenced deity.
As you learn and experience more of life do you ever find yourself asking, Has the world gone crazy or have I? No one of us knows everything. Be gracious toward yourself and others that the smarter you’re becoming the more you are realizing all that you don’t know.
Ignorance isn’t the absence of knowledge. Ignorance is knowing better but doing nothing with it.
Learning is the basis of personal and professional growth throughout life. There’s a downside to learning, however, called frustration. This sets in when we’re in a situation and can prophetically see what’s unfolding next, yet the crowd remains blind.
The elderly are often knocked with being grumpy. Maybe they have good reason. Imagine watching person after person repeating the same stupid mistake you made 50 or 60 years ago. Wouldn’t you want to help them too? Yet when you voice your insight you’re discounted as being too old and out of touch to have a worthwhile perspective. As events happen and a pattern repeats, the quieted elderly person watches and shakes their head knowing that life lessons are very hard to borrow.
We all have a measure of personal pride bordering on arrogance.
Humility, when partnered with curiosity, makes for an inquisitive mind and heart. Asking, rather than telling, opens up someone’s world and lessons to us. It expands our bubble of knowledge.
The truth is somewhere in between. Seniors in years can learn much from seniors in high school and vice versa. Rather than writing the kids off as moral vagrants, the older generation can benefit from the kids’ adaptability, pace, and technological prowess. Teens can benefit from the perspectives of lives lived long, mistakes made, lessons learned, and the humility found in frailty and from wearing Depends.
It can all resolve itself with one word: respect. Despite the riches of the internet, no one has a monopoly on information and knowledge. These advantages are relatively flattened in minutes or seconds thanks to an internet connection and a Google search. WiFi, however, will never replace wisdom.
This On-Purpose Minute provides answers and insights into why knowledge is power and why it can also be confusing and confounding.
Use your power respectfully. True humility is quiet confidence in action.
So the next time you experience a “grumpy” elder, invest a minute or two to learn what they see and understand it from their point of view. Ask questions. Borrow their wisdom. Learn their lessons. You might even bring a smile to their “grumpy” face. More importantly, you might walk away all the wiser.