A simple way to be a life-long learner and better human.
Bob Saget was a brilliant man.
Many people, including myself, didn’t realize this until they saw the man who was so well-known for the bubblegum aspects of his career, namely Full House and America’s Funniest Home Videos, do stand-up. Particularly when he was involved in a celebrity roast.
In these kinds of atmospheres, Mr. Saget was an absolute savage. A merciless, brilliant, filthy wit that everyone on stage realized was coming for them; and who had the presence to make them want it in a way only TV-dad-mixed-with-ruthless-comic could.
To be the kind of person, comic, celebrity and entertainer who could occupy both eco-systems — wholesome family entertainment, and the kind of comedy that could make a trucker blush — so whole-heartedly and authentically, is a testament to a man who had a natural way about him. A guy who had a wisdom and understanding of the world in the way many great comics have.
I found this quote from Saget online a few days after his passing that sheds light on that wisdom.
In today’s world of constant argument and increasingly polarizing debate over things most people have literally no idea where to begin on — like geopolitics and epidemiology — it is very clear that we are more concerned with winning the debate, with being right, than we are with the truth. Of course, our very notions of truth have become manipulated around the narratives we’ve built to continue winning the argument as often and as emphatically as we can.
How many of us have gone home after an argument with someone and furiously researched material and spoken to peers supportive to our position and critical to theirs in order to reassure ourselves that we’re in fact right?
I have. Facebook lives on this food-source.
And why? Well, for no other reason of course than to satisfy and protect that sensitive little creature that lives inside of all of us: our ego.
Another way I’ve heard Saget’s line delivered was this way:
Ego is about who’s right. Truth is about what’s right.
— Mike Maples Jr., from Tim Ferriss’ Tribe of Mentors
How simple and true.
We are so caught up in satisfying our egos, in winning the debate, in feeling that we’re intellectually adequate in this world of constantly changing information that we could never possibly keep up with, overrun with a fetishization of data, evidence and studies that make us believe that
if I read it in a study then it must mean I’m right
… that we have completely abandoned the most lacking and needed trait in the human personality today. One that could bring us endless learning and fascination, along with a way to interact with others that wouldn’t always necessarily lead to conflict. The stuff that, in just the right amount, can turn a mistake into the kind of genuine admission of humanity that makes someone, trustworthy — even worth following.
Humility.
Think about it. When was the last time you had a conversation and were genuinely interested in what the other person had to say, and potentially had to teach you, as opposed to just waiting for your turn to speak?
When was the last time you admitted to yourself that you didn’t understand or were wrong about something, or better yet, admitted it to someone you had been in a heated argument with? When was the last time you’ve seen or heard of someone doing that?
When was the last time, in the midst of continuing to gather information to support your narrative, whatever it may be, that you stopped and thought of one of the most foundational and humbling caveats of speculation:
“Have I honestly considered the possibility that I could be wrong?”
Consider these situations that we all find ourselves within, with humility as their foundation, compared to the self-conscious weight of ego.
1. Life-long learning.
The moment we change from children full of humble wonder about the world around us into self-aware and self-conscious people who are highly concerned about those around us and what they think, our entire attitude towards learning changes. We battle feelings of inadequacy and fear being called stupid when it comes to things we don’t know. To counteract this, we convince ourselves, to appease our ego, that we already know about these things, or that we don’t need to, or that we understand the bigger context around them, and thus don’t need to the details. We are afraid to admit that we don’t know, because that admission reads as failure. It reads as less-than. It reads as “everyone will think I’m dumb.”
Now consider a position of humility. Consider the person who isn’t embarrassed to say
I don’t know — what is going on here?
How freeing. Suddenly, and completely uninhibited by ego pulling you away from knowledge for fear of embarrassment, humility pulls you towards it, open and hungry to learn once released from the Plato’s Cave that ego keeps you within.
There is only one path to life-long learning, and it is the humble admission that you don’t, won’t and can’t know everything, and that’s nothing to be embarrassed about — and that, in fact, it’s pretty strange to stop learning for fear of being embarrassed about something that is prevalent among all of humanity.
If anyone is to be an authority on this, it might well be Carl Sagan
Could there be a better ambassador for humility than one of history’s greatest astronomer-philosophers who, with every brilliant discovery, was reminded of the ego-shattering vastness of the universe, and the gift of being able to continue learning about it for as long as possible? I doubt it.
2. Conversation, not combat.
Consider, as I’ve mentioned, conversations in today’s ego-centric and divisive landscape. We arm ourselves with information to go out into the world and engage in intellectual and conversational combat — intent on identifying those that either do or don’t agree with us and, from there either:
a) determining if you are more or less intelligent than the person who you agree with, or
b) “destroying” or “owning” the person who disagrees with you.
Conversation, debate and interpersonal learning has taken on the characteristics of combat because of ego-centric, divisive pop-culture icons like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro who pander to viewers wanting to see victory in the arena of debate. No one there is interested in the truth — they’re already convinced they know it before clicking on the video. They want to see the current intellectual iteration of violence — some combination of society’s fascination with MMA-like toughness transposed onto intelligence — coincidentally, especially for men, both of these things are complete wrapped up in ego, and hence, actually wrapped up in fear.
This situation is conflict. It is combat. Both participants only listening to the other to cherry-pick points and statements which can be rebutted and refuted, simply waiting for their time to counterpunch. This trend has bled into normal interpersonal dialogue where people are more concerned with getting a knock-out argument so they can carry on feeling like “they are right in how they understand the world” — as if that is some type or amount of knowledge that gives a final say on an idea as ambiguous as the world. Yet, to avoid feelings of intellectual inadequacy, we choose ego, we choose safety, we choose ignorance and even conflict. Just to make sure our tender little underbelly is unscathed.
Now consider a position of humility. Consider someone who, when you’re speaking to them about a subject, calmly and openly tells you:
I don’t actually know about that; what does that mean?
Think about the change in dynamics. Now, one person is a teacher, amicably offering knowledge to a peer, and in doing so, is probably learning that topic even better, as we all know that teaching is the best way to become fully acquainted with a subject. Consider the change in energy, when someone opens up to you, and is vulnerable, yet confident in admitting that they do not know something.
It’s endearing and admirable. It shows strength not in resisting the admission of ignorance, but in accepting it and asking for help in filling in that blind spot. It’s recognizably human.
It changes the entire dynamic from two duelling egos to two humble people — one giving the imperfect knowledge he or she has to the other, to do with what they will.
This is social and personal growth from the bedrock of humility; compared with social and personal imprisonment and regression from the cell-block warden that is ego.
3. The strength of admitting you’re wrong
We live in a post-truth era. In a time where politicians flat-out lie and deny any wrong-doing, as though admitting being wrong would get you sent to prison or worse, which in some scenarios would be appropriate.
Deny, deny, deny.
It has become so commonplace in politics, and pop culture, that we’ve become numb to it, and it has normalized the situation of perpetrators simply never admitting they’re wrong, even when they and everyone around them knows it. This is the ego in full-fledged survival mode, convinced that any admission of being or acting wrong could result in such humiliation that our reptilian brain, still connected deep down in our biology to this voice in our head that is screaming out “this is a threat to our survival” can actually be convinced that the best route through this is to double-down and dig in. Preserve the ego at all costs.
What occurs? Increased polarization. Increased conflict. Obsession with being right and not with what is right. Even internally, as the war of attrition wages on, the person succumbing to the ego may begin to realize
The ego’s job is to kill everything but itself. — Byron Katie
Trustworthiness — gone.
Integrity — gone.
Future potential for communication — worse with every passing day.
Now, consider the person who makes a terrible mistake. Or who gets in a raging argument with you. Or who is simply that person in the office who is always one-upping, or always contradicting you. Awful, right?
Then think of that person coming to you and doing the one and only thing that is necessary to begin rebuilding that relationship from a place of trust:
Admitting they were wrong.
It doesn’t just bring you back to baseline — in my opinion, it is redemptive. It earns additonal points. It means they’ve put you above their oh-so-precious ego. It reopens the book, allowing for the chapter to be written where someone made a mistake; as opposed to closing the book and keeping it closed. It is the same in research, where the most important aspect of continued discovery is always maintaining the perspective that you may need, one day, to go back and say “I was wrong about this. We need to start again.”
There is nothing that makes people want to follow someone more than a human who can, without shrinking from it as though it is some unique fault of his or her’s instead of the wholly common human trait that only ego pushes us to resist, admit that we make mistakes. It is how we learn. How we grow. How we find the truth. And how we find ourselves and each other.
