In 1980, Mac Davis had a hit with the song, It’s Hard to be Humble. Whenever I heard it, I thought it was hilarious because it seemed the singer had no clue how off putting it is to be so conceited. One verse particularly stood out to me:
Well, I could have lotsa friends if I wanted,
But then I wouldn’t stand out from the crowd.
Hard to be Humble lyrics at MetroLyrics.com
When I heard that, I would think that this poor guy didn’t have a clue. Conceit has a way of blinding the conceited person and making them a pariah. A conceited fool is someone to be pitied.
Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him.
Proverbs 26:12 (KJV)
Whenever a person, company or organization has success, they can fall into the conceit trap. Employees working for conceited companies can become conceited themselves. Have you ever tried to call customer service at a company that is a monopoly? Lily Tomlin had a skit where she was Ernestine, the Telephone Operator. It’s a take on two monopolies that had lost touch with customer service. I thought of that skit when “The Phone Company” was going through a court-ordered break up in the 1980s. I thought of it when Kodak imploded because thought they invented the digital camera, they were too conceited to sell it until it was too late. I thought of it when General Motors went through bankruptcy.
Conceit blinds us all. It turns successful people and companies into irrelevant dinosaurs. It blocks us from finding solutions to challenges. It makes us even more risk-averse because who wants to try something new and risk failure when they’ve been so successful in the past? It turns formerly productive people into lazy slugs.
Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble! But find a way to do it anyway. We must place ourselves in situations that require humility if we want to spare ourselves from becoming a conceited, irrelevant bore.
