I often marvel at how marvelously successful people can act so humble. People like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jayhawks men’s basketball coach Bill Self, and a Royals pitcher named Joakim Soria just don’t seem to have big heads. Like, at all.
I think that humility comes from four main sources: competitive perspective – there are other people just as good or better at what one does; cosmic/religious perspective – to the greatness of a deity/size of the universe, one’s individual greatness is as nothing; the understanding that there’s always room for improvement – no one is perfect; and frequency of failure – successful people often fail far more frequently than so-called “failures.”
I’ve felt for a while that I’ll be able to move forward faster in my life if I find humility, so I’ve been searching for it, and I think that I’ve finally found it thanks to the fourth cause of humility – frequency of failure. I’m now an academic coach - what most people call a tutor – and, boy, have I found humility. Most days, even if I understand perfectly the subject matter that I’m teaching, I leave my sessions wondering if I’ve done even the slightest bit of good and wondering if I’ve communicated effectively. Sure, I’ve had a moment of triumph - I found out that one of my students got a B on his Spelling test when he hadn’t passed a single one to that point. Even so, doubts like the following constantly run through my head: “I have six students, and it’s about to be seven. I surely can’t feel that one success with one student means that I’m succeeding with them all. How do I know if I’m doing them any real good? Can’t the rate of improvement always be a little bit higher? Am I moving too fast?
The frequency of failure truly hits home as I practice piano daily. I focus on playing all the notes at the right times, try to balance the volume in both hands, yet I still make hundreds of little mistakes in the hour or so that I practice. Coaching academics gives me so much opportunity to fail. I think, then, that the success is in learning. Success is understanding that failure never has to stop motion. My communications instructor during college says, “Just work to post quality content. Do nothing more. Just try to post quality content.” So, that’s what I try to do with my blog, tweets, with anything that I post on Facebook, with any comment that I make on the radio, and what I do when I try to write songs.
In my efforts to post quality content, I fail so much. I could always say something a little bit better or find a clearer or briefer way to express my thoughts, but I have to fail. I have to fail before I can succeed; and, no matter how much I succeed, more failures wait to creep up and bite me. I was teaching voice lessons to a group of wonderful ladies. Yet, one by one, they dropped out. It’s most likely that they really have just gotten too busy, but I still can’t help but feel that if I’d made the product attractive enough that they’d have found time to continue. It’s not like we didn’t have fun, and they certainly produced more quality sound as we went along, and it’s not like they stopped lessons right after starting. If I ever get to teach voice lessons again, though, I’ve certainly learned what I’ll do differently, even if I never get to work with those ladies again. The loss of the opportunity feels like a very humbling failure.
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