Humility Leads To True Greatness

David Shenk on overconfidence vs. humility:

A recent NYTimes article highlights the work of Cornell psychologist David Dunning and his grad student Justin Kruger on the critical relationship between self-assessment and skill level. Not surprisingly, they've shown that people with poor skills are also quite bad at assessing their own abilities. They tend to be grossly overconfident, demonstrating a notable deficiency in "self-monitoring skills." The opposite is also true: better performers have far more humble predictions, and subsequently more accurate assessments, of their performances. (Thanks to Sam Koritz for his recent post on this.)

That research connects nicely with a study by Dianne Horgan, from Memphis State University, showing that the success of child chess players correlates closely with their "calibration" skills -- the accuracy with which they can predict their own performance. Further, she showed that experienced child chess players can export their higher calibration skills to other, non-chess tasks.

None of this is shocking, but it strikes me as a central point in the aspiration for greatness. It certainly resonates with my own experience and observation: to get better and better at something, one needs to be one's own toughest critic -- fair, but always honest, humble and tough. You don't want to be demoralizing, needlessly tearing at the fabric of your self-esteem, but at every turn, you do want to be saying: "Well, that's not quite good enough -- I can do better." In fact, it seems to me that you want to attach self-esteem to the process of becoming better, instead of letting it become attached to any static result. That way, you can be critical of a performance and not become demoralized about what it says about you as a person. The self-criticism actually becomes a self-esteem booster because you feel good about doing the hard work to constantly improve.

Andre over at Every Square Inch looks at the same issue from a more theological standpoint. Also see CJ Mahaney's book on this topic.