Intellectual humility is the wisdom of knowing we don’t know everything.
Picture in your mind someone who you think of as "wise." Who's face do you see?
Chances are—if you're like most people I ask this question—you're picturing someone old.
I have a hard time picturing any young person and affixing them the trait "wisdom."
Why? Because wisdom generally comes with time. With experience. With perspective.
Now, simply getting older doesn't make us wise. You can probably picture plenty of elderly people who are not wise at all.
There's a lot to wisdom (I break it apart with the help of several philosophers here), but one of the core elements of it is the idea that you know you can always upgrade your knowledge. And for some people, by the time they've been around the block enough, they realize just that.
But what if we could get just a little more wisdom without having to make decades' worth of decisions and mistakes? I believe that developing intellectual humility can help us do it.
In the following series of podcast interviews, leadership coach Jess Larsen and I chop up what it takes to be a little wiser, by unpacking the power of intellectual humility.
Unpacking Wisdom: The Intellectual Humility Podcast Mini-Series
Shane Snow
