Pride comes before the fall. That is one of those saying that we hear over and over again, and many people don’t understand what it means. Having pride in yourself and pride in your abilities is supposed to be a good thing right?

Pride certainly has its advantages. It helps us to become stronger and gives us the motivation to work harder in order to accomplish our goals in life. It is great for team building and great for advancing society. After all, where would we be without competition?

But pride has a dark side. It can cloud your judgments and cause you to make foolish mistakes. On my journey to study the stock market and investing I made a very interesting discovery. On average Women tend to be better investors than men. The reason simply has to do with pride.
Women will follow basic rules of people who came before them, they will admit when they are wrong and exit a bad situation, and they will try not to let their own ego affect their judgment.

Men on the other hand are built to have pride, they never want to look foolish and want to turn investing into an ego booster. As a result, they don’t listen to others as easily and try to do it themselves, they hold onto bad investments too long, and they refuse to admit when they are wrong even when the proof tells them otherwise.

Pride has also been noted to create many failures in history. In the Roman Empire, the Romans had so much pride for themselves that they refused to acknowledge the immigrating Germans as Roman citizens and treated them poorly. That ultimately led to the Germans overthrowing Rome and ushering in the dark ages.

Even the genius of Albert Einstein would prove to be no match for foolish pride. While the first half of his life was characterized with new knowledge and discovery, the second half of his life was dedicated to trying to disprove inconvenient facts that he couldn’t accept instead of acknowledging the proof around him.

There are many other situations that I can think of where pride can be potentially harmful and can lead to “a fall”.

• When You Have To Have Better Stuff Than Your Neighbor
• When Your Negotiating For A Cause
• When You Are Investing
• When You Are Learning New Skills
• When You Are Solving Complex Problems

Pride has plenty of pitfalls, and when you compare yourself with others it can make you stressed and cause you to make bad decisions in life. Sometimes you need to take a step back and learn how to be humble if you want to grow as a person and become wiser.

How To Be Humble

Now that we know why pride is a good thing, let us look at some ways to get around it and become more humble.

1. Take Up A Humbling Hobbie

Hobbies like poker, golf, and investing are very humbling because you will make mistakes. The best and smartest people on the planet and make the dumbest mistakes in a hand of poker. But it also teachers you to keep pushing forward. You will fall down, but you can get back up.

2. Read and Learn

Reading and learning are very humbling because the more you learn the more you figure out how much you don’t know. We used to think the earth was all there was, than we discovered the Milky Way, this was all that existed until we found the universe, what else lies beyond? Who knows, but knowing that there is so much that we don’t know is humbling.

3. Accept That Some People Are Better At Some Things

Everyone has their own special skills. Somebody else may have skills that you don’t have and vice versa. Knowing that you can’t be the best at everything is also humbling.

In the end know that a little bit of pride can be good, but too much can lead to disaster. A healthy dose of humility is good for us. It gives us the courage to admit when we are wrong and points us in new directions with new possibilities.

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