How Humility Ensures Your Success in Your 20’s

The world is littered with intelligent people who never reach their potential.

When someone doesn’t listen to you, do you want to be around them? No. Most people don’t. When you are in your twenties and trying to make it in your first job, pride can be the thing that prevents you from reaching your goals. Intelligence does not ensure your success in life. The world is littered with intelligent people who never reach their potential. When these intelligent people don’t see things going their way, they fall deeper into their own minds and get more and more frustrated. They are often discouraged and disgruntled.

As a guy who spent 20 years coaching young intelligent people in the corporate world, the number one thing that held people back was their unwillingness to accept and implement feedback. They were uncoachable.

There is a difference between wisdom and intelligence. They are not the same thing. You don’t need experience to be intelligent. You don’t need Humility to be intelligent. But you need both experience and Humility to be wise.

Experience is something you can only acquire over time. If you are in your twenties you might be experienced at going to classes or even playing a certain sport. But you will probably not be experienced in the workplace. The experiences that give us wisdom are the ones where we struggled and maybe even failed. Wisdom rarely grows when things are easy. When things are easy, there is usually nothing pushing us to learn and try something different or new.

But just having experience is not enough to be wise. There are plenty of experienced and intelligent gray haired people who lack wisdom. Why? Because they lack the Humility to learn from their mistakes. When someone refuses to listen to counsel, deflects blame, and will not admit they have room to grow, they will never gain wisdom. Humility is a requirement in becoming wise.