Stay Humble

From the Archives — Jason's earlier writings, lightly revised.

There's a strange rule about learning: the more certain you are that you already know something, the less you're able to learn about it.

I think about that a lot. I've sat across from people who couldn't be taught a thing — not because they weren't smart, but because their minds were already full. There's a name for it: the curse of knowledge. Once you "know" something, it gets harder to remember what it was like not to know it, and even harder to let new information in. Certainty closes the door.

Here's the line I keep coming back to: "We cannot all be right but we can all be wrong, stay humble."

Think about the first half of that for a minute. We cannot all be right. On any given argument — at work, at the dinner table, on the internet — somebody's wrong. It might be you. The math says it's you at least some of the time. So why is "I could be wrong about this" the hardest sentence in the English language?

Because we tie our ideas to our identity. Being wrong feels like being wrong — like it's about us, not the idea. Humility breaks that link. It lets you say, "My opinion just got beat by a better one," and walk away smarter instead of wounded.

That's the whole superpower. Humility doesn't make you smaller. It makes you teachable. You can't be a student without it.

A few things that have worked for me:

Check your certainty. When you're 100% sure about something, ask yourself: how do I actually know this? Did I read it, hear it, or just feel it? "I read it somewhere once" is not the same as knowing.

Argue the other side. There's a technique called steelmanning — instead of knocking down a weak version of somebody's argument, you build up the strongest version of it and take that on. It's harder. It's also the only way to find out if you're wrong.

Say "I don't know." Three words. Nobody ever got dumber by saying them, and everybody respects the person who does. "Let me find out" is even better.

Separate the idea from the person. Your opinion is not you. When it changes, you didn't lose — you learned. The people who grow the most are the ones least afraid to update.

None of this comes naturally. We're wired to defend what we believe, not to inspect it. But every time I've swallowed my pride and admitted I was wrong about something, I walked away with something better than being right: I walked away with something true.

We cannot all be right but we can all be wrong, stay humble.