The Innate Yet Often Unrecognized Truths Of Humility & Being Humble

On the outside, the ceremony for the order of the engineer looks like it came from a fantasy novel, like Lord of the Rings. Newly-minted engineers take an oath, also known as a ritual calling. It starts like this: I, Todd Lemense, in the presence of my betters and my equals in my calling, bind myself upon my honor and cold iron that of the best of my knowledge and power; I will not henceforth suffer or pass bad workmanship or faulty material in aught that concerns my works, but for mankind as an engineer, or in my dealings with my own soul before my maker.

The calling goes on for several paragraphs in the same tone. Graduates must also pass their hand through a ritual iron ring about the width of a hubcap. They place their hand on a black velvet pillow and receive the iron ring of the engineer, which is placed on the pinky finger of the engineer’s working hand - the hand that wields the wrench or hammer. As we said, it all sounds pretty strange, but that's by design. When the order was formed in 1922, the founding members reached out to fantasy writers to help them instill as much gravity and symbolism into the ceremony and the profession as possible.

The first engineers to institute the pledge called themselves The Corporation Of The Seven Wardens, and when they needed grave words, they reached out to none other than Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book. Herbert Holton, the founder of the original call of the engineer, probably knew it was all pretty silly from the outside, but the time nobody was laughing. The Quebec Bridge collapsed, not once but twice, due to faulty engineering. The first collapse killed nine-tenths of the steelworkers, leaving 11 alive, all while the supervising engineer was sick and henbit on site to inspect the warping iron supports since construction had started; the second collapse killed 13 workers, leaving the people of Quebec with no other option but to carry cargo and commerce across a frozen river, which was how business was conducted across the Saint Lawrence for centuries.

People were losing faith in the engineers. They needed a ceremony; they needed to restore people's faith. They needed one ring to bind their guild together and, most importantly, to remind every graduating engineer to place humility above all else. So, the engineers forge their humility in iron. They wear it on their head that grasps the tools of their trade - a reminder every time they calculate load-bearing weight or strike an anvil…humility, humility, humility.

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If you are on Instagram or Facebook, you get your food pellet by getting clicks and likes. If you're in politics, you're rewarded for getting votes. It doesn't matter if you have your facts right as long as you get people's support. When it comes to job applications, professional bragging is the only way to get ahead. But what if humility, not narcissism, is the true cheat code to life? What if humility gives you all the money and rewards of winning the rat race without ever having a lace-up or compete? What if we had three myths waiting for us to bust, which would prove the value of humility over narcissism?

Myth 1: Humility is all well and good, but it doesn't put food on the table. Success relies on tooting your own horn, right?

Joe: So, I'm going to ask you to scroll down and take a look at a screenshot of the order of the ritual calling.

Todd: It looks very, very formal.

Joe: How fantasy does that look?

Todd: This looks like it should be in a 1600s castle somewhere in Germany.

Joe: it looks like the order of the skulls; it looks Like some secret Illuminati stuff going on.

Todd: This is for educated multiple-degree Canadian professionals.

Joe: Yeah, this is basically what doctors and lawyers go through. To tell people what we're looking at, you can look up the ritual calling on YouTube. And what you'll see is see newly minted Engineers, almost all wearing blazers and ties. They go up on stage and there's this big, huge iron ring that the student passes their hand through to get their ring, which is sitting on like a satin pillow. And behind them, it says the order of the engineer - and it's got a ring on a poster. I swear to God; it's the same type as Lord of the Rings; It looks like a Lord of the Rings poster. Except the words are wrong.

Todd: You have the feeling that this is in some kind of arena with all your classmates from college and then all the elder man, which are the old engineers and professors, just watching on and approving that.

Joe: You watched Game of Thrones, right?

Todd: Oh, yeah.

Joe: Do you remember the Maesters, the old guys that knew everything, and they had their iron chains around their neck, and they would just wear it everywhere? It kind of reminds me of that.

Todd: And this isn't from a hundred years ago. These are pictures from recently. I could tell by the clothes.

Joe: Right. So I ran into this story because I was looking for, weirdly enough, ceremonies - just ceremonies that we do for people who achieve a profession. Like if you're a doctor, they have a ceremony, in which is everybody gets their white lab coat and some schools tell them to swear to do no harm. Not every school does that, but they do have a ceremony where they accept a white lab coat that symbolizes their profession. Lawyers have their own ceremonies; most guilds that still exist today have a ceremony of some sort. This one was the most fantasy sort of epic ceremony I could find.

Todd: Yeah. The ring is better than just a diploma on the wall, right? It's like winning the Super Bowl and getting the super bowl-winning ring.

Joe: Yeah, but the real story behind the ring is way more interesting. It is, it's not a ring that is like a Super Bowl ring saying I won this or somebody carrying the diploma around or a letterman jacket. This is a symbol of humility. So I want to do an episode about humility and what you get out of being humble,

 Todd: I think this honors the people that have perished. When I see my wedding, it reminds me that I'm married. To engineers, that ring can remind these already smart people that this isn't just Math and Science. This is people's lives. People can perish if I make a mistake.

Joe: Right. You may be writing numbers into a spreadsheet, but at the end of the day, you could lose lives if your numbers are wrong. And so it's a powerful reminder. So what we want to talk about with humility - we're going to get into the specifics, but humbleness, in short, is the ability to view yourself accurately as an individual; to view your own talents accurately, and to be able to admit it when you have flaws. Those don't seem like they are promoted in this day and age very much. If I go to a job interview, my closest friends who are all professionals, they tell me to tell stories about yourself.

Todd: Bragg and embellish. Everybody else is so you need to do the same.

Joe: Exactly. You have to showcase your skills and you have to put yourself on display and toot your own horn, because if you don't, no one else is going to. So we wanted this episode to basically be to show that is not the only reason to have humility. It's not just a moral thing. There are real and significant benefits to having humility and I couldn't find a better example than somebody who literally has to wear it for their profession. Their humility is on their hand. Like when they touch a tool or they grab a hammer, that humility is right there.

Todd: Isn't this what we associate any time you hear someone met a celebrity, whether it's an athlete or a singer or an actor actress and they talk about how nice they were? Isn't that just the ultimate compliment and makes you like them so much more?

Joe: Yeah, when I hear the word humble associated with somebody who is like a megastar or somebody who has done something incredible, or the mega-rich, it makes me like them more. So we want to kind of crack that chestnut as far as why do we like humble people and what kind of benefits do we get from being humble ourselves. But first, we want to talk about the ring. Where was it forged and what does it symbolize? So would you mind getting us into the bridge collapse?

Todd: So, it started in the 1880s, and this was Quebec City which is a major city; there's major Commerce there. They needed this to pass over the Saint Lawrence River and the only way they would get across before this bridge was by ferry. But in Quebec, it's very cold so guess what happens to the river? It freezes. So then you're stuck on walking across this very dangerous, very thin ice. So, the city knew that they needed to build a bridge.

Joe: By the way, you can look up old pictures of lines of people carrying stuff across this river, which is nuts.

Todd: The Ice was not even either; it was certainly not a nice ice skating ring. So the bridge needed to be done, but it wasn't a high enough priority. So the state was not actually supporting this as much as it should have. Now, the engineers were already behind because they were doing this on a shoestring budget. This is a long bridge, spanning 4 miles long, 7 kilometers, and once they started working on it, the workers noticed that there was a lot of bending and bowing. And the to head Engineers, who were tasked with this, weren't even on. They weren't on-site and there was terrible communication. They're doing their commission by telegram, not by onsite talking to the men who are actually working on this bridge. It makes you scratch your head. This very long bridge for a very important city that needed resources didn't get the resources and didn't get the right amount of people recruited to do it. They didn't have the experts that they should have. And it collapsed in 1907. The unfinished bridge collapsed, and 75 men were crushed. At the time, it was the world's single worst number-one bridge accident in history.

Joe: Can you imagine going to work and seeing that the bridge you were working on is starting to bend? I know that people skip work because they knew it would collapse or they had a bad feeling about it. What about the co-workers who kept going in? I'm sure everybody said it. Somebody had to have been like, hey, buddy, are you sure you want to go to work today?

Todd: Yeah, and they can see it bending in support areas where it's not supposed to. I thought it was also interesting that the engineers that they had didn't have degrees in bridge building. All of their experiences was from building other bridges, but this one was like 10 times anything they'd worked on before. They were not qualified to do this kind of bridge.

Joe: They had done cantilever bridges before, right?

Todd: Yes, just not that long.

Joe: But the design was good. It is currently a cantilever bridge. The actual Quebec Bridge today is a cantilever, but the issue is that the engineer whose career was making cantilever bridges was sick. He was staying off site, and when his old design didn't fit the river, he just extended it 10%. He made the bridge longer without changing the design to account for that weight, that additional 10% weight of the bridge.

Todd: Well, I know the kind of men that work on bridges are not quite types. I think once they went and try to tell their supervisor what was going on, I think they got shut down.

Joe: There are several moments when concerns were brought to the foreman. And you're dead on. They basically kept being told have faith in the structure and a little bit of buckling is normal. They also tried blaming the metal itself and that bolts weren't lining up, not because it was buckling. They tried to blame it on shipping and being given bent metal.

Todd: Everyone in any kind of corporation knows the blame game how we start blaming other departments. After 75 people died, they shut down production and started investigation. Now I have a question for you: How do they turn a four-way stop with stop with signs into a traffic light? Do you know why they change those?

Joe: I'm guessing just because it would allow more people to go through per turn.

Todd: That is always what I thought. But it's not. It's a certain number of fatalities. People have to actually die to get change, and that reminded me of this bridge story.

Joe: That's crazy. So we're looking at this bridge collapse is like almost the world's biggest crosswalk as far what motivated finally to pay into this project and to get it done right. So, this is almost like talking about institutionalized humility - that you spread humility amongst everybody you're working with. The ring is more or less like what you would do as a kid to remember stuff. This is that except made of iron and humility. So why is it so important? We're going to cover morals first, and then in the second half of our science will cover the actual benefits of humility. Lewis Carroll famously said, true humility is not thinking less of yourself; It's thinking of yourself a little bit less. The notion that we go through life and we have to promote ourselves will not go away. You need to fill out job applications, and you need to tell people when you're doing cool stuff. And like you've said, Todd, you're a salesman of yourself. Everybody is a Salesman. But we're saying that you can do both. You can be a self-promoter and you can be honest about your abilities and skills. I've got a social psychologist quote that describes humility as a quiet ego and that good humility involves a willingness to accept the selves limits and its place in the grand scheme of things. Basically, a humble person has a calm sense of self-mastery more than knowing what they're good at. They Know what they're bad at and they don't necessarily seek praise or confirmation about the things that they're already good at and they're already known for.

Todd: We've all work with people who are just lacking a lot of self-awareness. They kind of think they're good at everything. They're bright, and they're intelligent, but they could still be poor in certain areas, Isn't it nice to know someone that says you take the lead on this? A good team player is someone who knows when to step up and then knows when to step back.

Joe: In the workplace, if you are truly humble, you work less hard because somebody who is humble naturally delegates. You naturally will say, man, I suck at Excel sheets. I must send this to somebody who I know is good at it.

Todd: Well, isn't it another skill to see talent and others as well?

Joe: Absolutely.

Todd: As opposed to, I'm the best, I'm a control freak, and I like to have my finger on the pulse of every single detail. Trust in your team and delegating to the right people is a skill in and of itself.

Joe: Yes, 100%. And when people see that you are humbled and it's a truthful humbleness like you actually are pretty accurate on what you're good at and what you're not good at, they respect you a lot more, and the quickest way to lose somebody's respect is to lie about what you can accomplish. Anytime you meet a one-upper at a bar or any time you talk to somebody who says they're good at everything, or they talk a big game about what they can do - even if they try to deliver and just grossly underperform, you immediately assigned them the tag of woefully incompetent and doesn't know it.

Myth 2: People don't really like us more when were humble, do they? Otherwise, dating profiles would be way more honest and lower-key.

Todd:  What about the strength of this question. This is something that I've struggled with, and it's something I respect in others. When did you become old enough that you realized it was you were mature enough and self-aware enough to ask others for help?

Joe: Oh, God, super recently. I hate to say it, but it was only in last couple of years. I have floated for so long at being kind of the clever person in the room. I didn't ask for help until way late in life. I should have known this in my 20s and it only struck me a couple of years ago that I wasn't doing it enough. What about you?

Todd: When I started doing my own business and I looked at other companies and the guys that try to do everything and how poorly they failed. I realized that I needed to do just what I've spent my life doing, which is the sales part. If you're doing your job right, you won't have any more time or energy for anything else. You are going to have to help recruit, ask humbly and seek out. And I think the big thing about it is of being humble is appreciating other people. And getting the most out of the people around you and really getting a strong, inner team of diverse people. And then delegating to them.

Joe: I got a very good way to put it. If you are a master of something, be humble about what you're not a master of and let other people handle it. In health, when were you first humbled with your health and what you're capable of? Like, what are your limits?

Todd: It was when I went to the doctor. The doctor looked at my blood pressure, he looked at my health, he looked at my age, and looked at the chart and he said, You need to lose some weight, and I said, how much? And he looked at me and goes, you know, while rolling his eyes and left the room.

Joe: I think that it's funny, you say, blood pressure; that's pretty much the same for me. It was drinking and blood pressure in combination.

Todd: What was your bottom?

Joe: My bottom was when I was wearing a heart monitor for a couple of weeks or something like that. Speaking of not being humble, I was giving academic speeches on how to tell stories while wearing a halter monitor.

Todd: He was barely 30 at this point.

Joe:  Yeah, and it's because I wasn't humble in my health. Humility makes you live longer because you're less likely to drive recklessly, and you realize your own mortality. You know, humble people drink less and they give up smoking quicker. It's not that they don't make mistakes and do dumb stuff. Humble people are just quicker to realize when they can't do it anymore and a lot of our studies were going to talk about is humble doesn't mean you don't make mistakes. Humble just means you are able to look back and say, oh, that was bad.

Todd: And everyone's saying I don't want to be humble because I don't want to be soft. I don't want to be walked all over. Sometimes, it seems like nice guys do finish last.

Joe: I would say, in certain circumstances, that's true. We've had an episode about Mr. Rogers and being nice and how incredibly beneficial it is. We had an episode about celebrity insulation, and doing things for other people out of gratitude made people disconnected so badly to where like they couldn't identify emotional traits in other people anymore. Doing things for other people in a very humble manner brought them back to humanity, like it's within minutes. You can bring somebody back to humanity by being humble, by humbling themselves to other people. Have you ever spoken to people who are like near the end of their life terminal or on hospice?

Todd: I deal with people in their 70s and 80s, and the last thing they're going to do in their house before they're going to hospice.

Joe: Have you met people who are humble about their own life, like they're their mortality?

Todd: Yeah, acceptance.

Joe: I don't want to turn this podcast more morbid, but that's something that came up during the study. When it comes to humility and your own existential anxiety, they refer to humility in a ResearchGate article about how humility is a buffer for existential anxiety. It is the idea that you're willing to accept yourself and your life without illusions and think about it as less threatening. If you have a very humble view of your own existence, suddenly things aren't as epic, which can be good and bad. You don't feel quite like the conquering hero, but also, when catastrophes happen, they don't hurt as much. Like people who go quietly at the end, that humble.

Todd: Do you think humility comes with age or are jerks always jerks?

Joe: I suspect humility comes with a lack of testosterone. I think it's age. I think it's both. I think you can meet humble young people, which feels weird, especially when you meet like a humble young guy who has a lot going for them and you're just like what happened to you? Where is your ego? Where'd you put it?

Todd: It is funny when you meet one of those people and you don't very often. Maybe the humility for the age comes from being disappointed.

Joe: I really am starting to suspect that it's not that you gain maturity. It's that you have more of those comforting illusions stripped Away. If you want to meet a dumb old person, find somebody who's been insulated and has never had their illusions challenged. Find somebody who's privileged and nobody's ever come up to them and popped an illusion for them. I just want to share one last phrase. There is a book out that I really want to read. I got snippets of it and articles but it's called Humility The Soil In Which Happiness Grows. And, and in it she talks about how humble people are able to develop stronger interpersonal relationships because not only can they do this trick for themselves were talking about, where they see themselves without illusions, they do it for other people. They can look at somebody else and say, oh you know I get why you're doing these things. I see your flaws. I see your strengths and I can accept that instead of trying to classify them. If you can humble both of yourself and other people, you live a more realistic life. I think these studies are they kind of bear that out.

Myth 3: Okay, so being humble gives us all the gifts in life. Then why aren't I wealthy and happy? I can be humble; I'm humble all the time. So where's my trophy?

Joe: We had an episode where we talked about picking intrinsic values. If you were a student and all your value for yourself comes from grades, if you pick something that can be taken away from you, and that's where your value comes from, that's not humble. You're setting yourself up for a huge fall. If your intrinsic values are morals, not only will those be things that people can't really touch and hurt or take away, but they will serve you better. We have a lot of studies that show that those people are more optimistic. Drive is way more valuable than what you identify as.

Todd: I my mom once if she ever noticed that there's young parents who have their first kid and they're almost arrogant about being a parent. And my mom says in the sweetest voice. She said, well, he said it for a new mother, having your first baby is very exciting and that little baby is perfect. It hasn't done anything to humiliate you yet.

Joe: Do you mind if we talk about the moment of the bridge collapse? We have engineers and workers skipping work because they know it's going to happen. During the research, I saw that there was a moment where they almost stopped it. They came very close to not having this thing take so many lives.

Todd: Yeah, there was just a matchup in communication, and this was on the first collapse. There was a telegraph that didn't actually reach the job site because the engineers in America who again were not on site, thought the other guy sent it. Can you believe that?

Joe: I’m laughing not because It's a terrible disaster; I'm laughing because it sounds like something would happen in Seinfeld.

Todd: The second collapse was not as much from neglect, but you'd assume after that many deaths that they would be more careful moving forward. You wouldn’t assume there'd be a second collapse. Now, the second collapse was not from neglect, but just pushing the envelope too hard work-wise, and 13 people died.

Joe: To give you an image of it. They were raising the center of the bridge for this.

Todd: Correct. They were almost to completion. This bridge ended up taking two decades, amid to collapses, which killed many people, 88 people in total, and it was also slowed down by poor funding. And, of course, World War 1 inconveniently came around, so a lot of resources went over to Europe. The end cost of it was $23M, which is $350M today.

Joe: That is so much money, and it could have been so much less. So, if we want to learn from disasters, we don't have to kill 100 people by collapsing a bridge. We can just learn by getting an F in school or we come back from a bad doctor's visit, or if we realize that we're not being as truthful with ourselves as we should when we face disasters. Have you ever heard of Mastery Behavior?

Todd: No, I'm not familiar with that.

Joe: UC Davis put out articles about Mastery Behavior, and it is the idea is that humility allows you to learn faster. It's more about how quick you are to readdress a failing or a fault in your education. They talk about people doing math homework. Somebody comes across a difficult problem and they simply decide they can't do it so they copy the answers from the back of the textbook. Whereas somebody who is humble, they come across the same problem and instead of just trying to find the answer to get the job done, they rework it in their head and they look up how to do it better, and then next time they're better equipped to do it.

Todd: I've noticed that simpler people, less intelligent people, will learn a little bit about something and think they know everything. And really smart and intelligent people, if they learn a little bit about something, they realize shit; I don't know anything about this; I'd like to learn more.

Joe: That is a very good way of saying it. That's perfect. A humble person will see what they are lacking in knowledge and they'll try to cover that gap. They'll reinvest in that subject. Even if it's really small. I humble person will say, I don’t know this, but I should. If you don't know it, it's better if you take the time to research at figure out how to do it better not just little factoids but a master woodworker. Once they realized that the type of joint that they're using isn't as good as it could be, they look into how to do better joints. They don't just say I can fix what I currently have. They say there's a better way.

Todd: I've been a lifelong exerciser, a gym since I was probably 14. And about five years ago, I was getting a lot of nagging injuries that just wouldn't go away. Keep in mind I’m in my 40s. I've been doing this since I was 14 at least once a week. These exercises, I know how to do these. I know the proper form. However, I realized I'd been doing them wrong this whole time. I changed my form. I watched a two-minute video, and it did that for every exercise, and it turned out I was doing over 90% of them wrong, but I thought I'd be doing them correctly. Changing my form made those injuries went away.

Joe: That is the physical embodiment literally of being humble in your mastery. In short, humility is the willingness to acknowledge your current limitations and it can be almost so short and so quick, it's almost imperceptible. It's not like it's a meditation where you have to sit down and flog yourself for an hour and think about all the things you've been wrong about. It's much more of you get to a problem, you don't know the answer instead of looking in the back of the book, you educate yourself on how to do it better or you look up the actual facts before just proceed. We live in a world where everybody is being rewarded for looking the back of the book; being fast at work and getting more work crammed into your workday. That's where the reward is. But happiness and actual skill and actual mastery, they come from taking the time, which is tough. In our opening, it involves passing your hand through a giant iron ring and accepting a ring on your finger. A very almost fantasy-like pledge. This was serious business building a ceremony that would sort of like cement engineers as their own respective. Before, the wild west of engineering was if you could do some math and you had some good jobs under your belt, you could build a bridge for a city. Today, you have to be part of the guild; you have to have passed through these schools, the seven wardens, even that sounds fantasy. And they went out of their way to hire somebody who literally was a fantasy writer to help them come up with all these ceremonies and symbols.

Todd: It seems to me they did more resources and hired him to do the ceremony details because this was such a bad thing, so they want to make sure that this terrible thing never happened again, and I think that's very noble. Do you know a lot about Rudyard Kipling?

Joe: Very little, actually.

Todd: He has some amazing things from his past. His very, very famous short stories. Baa Baa Black Sheep was actually a story that he wrote as an adult, but it talked about when he was six years old. He went to a foster home with his sister, and just had extreme neglect. He was there for five years and I guess was just a horror show. Later his life as an adult, he lost two children. He got very sick with pneumonia, and his young daughter was with him. He got better. She passed away.

Joe: Oh my God.

Todd: This was tragic, but he had three kids and the second one died too. His son had vision problems. He was 17 years old going to 18 and he wanted to go and fight in World War I. He wanted to protect his country but he couldn't get in. So his dad being a famous author, pulled a few strings and got him to be a lieutenant in the Irish guard, a second lieutenant. He got killed in action at the age of 18. So Rudyard was mourning another loss of a child. Now you talk about being qualified, Rudyard was the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize in literature.

Joe: That's wild.

Todd: So basically, they went out and they hired the most famous well-paid writer of their time who had won a Nobel Prize that year and whose stock was at his highest - the same year the bridge collapsed. So perfect timing. I don't know if you read this in your research, I thought this was pretty cool. Engineers in Canada have once a year, they have a tradition - They take this anti fungus medicine and they rub it all over themselves. It turns them purple, like a Barney. And purple in the Bible is a sign of royalty and a sign of trust.

Joe: They become the purple man group. How did I not know about that? That's awesome. Rudyard Kipling might be best known for The Jungle Book, but my favorite work of his is his poem, If. It’s all about humility and going through life with as much humility as possible. And being able to pick yourself up after, you know, blow after blow after blow.

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son.

- Rudyard Kipling

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