The power of humility

Like many in research, I was brought up to produce the highest quality work I can and stay modest about it. If I achieved something worthwhile, I was told, others would notice; it wasn’t my role to tell everyone. Today however, I find myself in a world where ‘selling’ myself, or my team, is an essential survival skill. 
 
Organisational psychologist Adam Grant tells us that achievement attained by compromising our values is not success. 
 
So if we value humility but want to be successful in research, what can we do? Should we sell out on our principles and boast about our achievements, hoping this will bring “success” only for that to feel hollow if it does? Or stay true to ourselves and use whatever strengths this brings?
 
Can we be confident enough to thrive in research without becoming arrogant? Where exactly does the line between them lie?

​There is no single answer. 
 
First, there are cultural differences that we need to acknowledge and respect: what passes for humble in some countries seems arrogant in others. 
 
Second, even within one culture, the answer will differ for everyone: it is very much a personal choice. We all have slightly different values and ambitions, and different strengths to help us get where we want to go without compromising our values. 
 
So we must each find our own way to navigate this landscape. This is a world where most people are too busy to think for long about the achievements of others. We need to figure out ways to ensure our work gets noticed and appreciated that are consistent with who we really are, not the person our culture, or perhaps well-meant advice, suggests we “need” to be.
 
Selling out may not work anyway
Like everyone, I sometimes receive grossly unfair peer reviews. On one early occasion, as a tenure track scientist faced with huge incentive to publish in ‘top’ journals, I decided to push back in kind. What I thought I did was to cleverly demolish the reviewer’s arguments, suggesting they were unable or unwilling to understand our work. What I actually did was back them into a corner. The reviewer’s answer was swift and final: “This guy needs to learn some humility: Reject!”. The editor duly obliged.

​That reviewer may not know it, and perhaps it was not their intention, but they did me a huge favour. Had I achieved success by selling out on my values, it could have encouraged me to move further away from them, pretending to be someone I’m not to advance my career. 
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Staying rational
This episode also taught me that no-one becomes more rational when they are attacked, least of all a reviewer. As Steve Peters explains in his books The Chimp Paradox and A Path Through the Jungle, an attack sends anyone immediately into ‘fight, flight or freeze’. A conversation between two people in ‘Chimp mode’, as he describes it, is going nowhere. Calm, rational, Human to Human conversation is the way forward. I also learned that the only way to figure out whether some reviewer comments are fair and useful, and use them to strengthen our research, is to first calm down myself. 
 
Isn’t humility just being submissive?
No, that’s not what humility is about. It’s about discarding black-and-white thinking, replacing ‘right or wrong’ with degrees of confidence. We can then defend each point according to the level of confidence we have in it, while recognising that the most important goal is to learn. 
 
Where we are most sure of our ground we can put up a robust, but polite and rational defence, while still remaining open-minded just in case. For example, if we are publishing a finding that we’ve repeated many times, confirmed using independent methods and extensively considered alternative explanations with colleagues, we are unlikely to be wrong. However, we can still recognise that all research has caveats and limitations, and that our natural vested interest in our paper’s success could blind us to some of these. Pointing this out is the true purpose of peer review. When it works well, it plays a vital and welcome role in advancing science.  
 
Alternatively, we may be submitting a grant application to test a hypothesis that is far from certain but seems credible and is backed by some preliminary data. Under these circumstances, it is particularly sensible to build in a Plan B. The risk of being wrong is far higher than in the example above, but it can still be worth exploring.
 
Humility can improve research 
“Arrogance is the end of learning”, writes James Kerr in his book Legacy: What the All Blacks can teach us about the business of life
 
We all crave certainty but as scientists we learn that all understanding is imperfect. Everything is a working model and our job is to make it less imperfect. Humility is the strength that allows us to do this. Arrogance prevents it. Some feel a need to cling to false certainty, driven by insecurity: a fear of being wrong, or worse, being seen to be wrong. The key is to replace this fear with a balance of confidence and questioning. 

​Humility can improve research culture
Humility respects the important role that others can play in moving science forward. It is a world apart from the overconfident person who implies: “I know best”, leaving us feeling small and useless in comparison. Humility leaves our colleagues energised instead of deflated, their minds buzzing with new ideas both for our work and their own. Research culture pays a high price when we let the insecurity of others dominate our own thinking. 
 
Humility can improve mentoring 
­­­There have been many welcome developments in research culture, among them an increased emphasis on mentoring. Humility has a crucial role here too. Traditional research mentoring could be summed up as: “This is how to be successful like me”, starting from a set of assumptions that are unlikely to be valid - that the mentee has similar aims, strengths, weaknesses, values and background to those of the mentor. Coaching instead starts with a question such as: “What does success mean to you?”, and then explores what qualities the mentee has, or could build, to move towards that goal.    
 
Humility can improve wellbeing
Living in line with our values lowers stress and enhances our wellbeing, so if humility is one of these we will feel better sticking to it and this can impact positively on others too. That is not the same as lacking confidence, it is tempering our confidence by recognising our limitations and being open about them. 
 
This approach gives us more options. For example, many people fear questions after a talk or in an interview. The ability to say: “Thanks, that’s a great point that I hadn’t thought of, so I’ll consider it going forward” is a great way to defuse that fear and, crucially, to show willingness to learn. It becomes even better if you can develop the thought a little further in response, showing the potential for collaboration. 

Humility can impress
Finally, such willingness to learn and reconsider can impress others even more than arrogance and overconfidence does. No-one wants to hear about how ‘great’ someone else thinks they are. What we want is to share in their learning process and recognise that we too can contribute. Most people find that a far more enticing interaction. 
 
Humility in science is a mix of confidence and a willingness to question. It is not just good for our science, our wellbeing and our culture, but in the eyes of many scientists, it also trumps arrogance as a way to impress.