[Eric Roosevelt]

Originally Posted by James81

It is that simple. When you realize how little you know, you realize that you have a lot more to learn, which in feeds the desire to learn more, to become wiser, etc.

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So, yes, it IS that simple. It's a mindset, basically. If you think yourself to be wise, then you are no longer as receptive to learning new things. If you realize that you are ignorant, you are more receptive to learning new things.

The other component to wisdom, apart from realizing that there's a lot you don't know, is realizing what you do know, and using your knowledge effectively. At the end of the day the important thing is to make intelligent long-term choices.

I know plenty of people who realize how little they know, but who I still wouldn't consider wise because they don't make good decisions. If wisdom is a mindset that doesn't produce positive results, then I don't see much use for it.

That's why I said "no better or NO WORSE" than anybody else. You focused in on the "no better" part and completely ignored and/or glossed over the "no worse" part, which is why it didn't make sense to you.

That's true, I missed that part for some reason.

There is a concept of greatness, but it's not tied to self-worth. It's tied to acheivment, which is a completely and totally different area altogether. Humility, however, is a measure of self-worth, not acheivment.

OK, so you're making a distinction between achievement and self-worth.

I'm not sure I entirely agree though. In my mind self-worth isn't necessarily removed from achievement. There may be much more to it than that, but they're not completely separate.

Worth is simply a way of saying "value", and a value is always measurable (or else we wouldn't call it a value, right?). You say self-worth is measured by humility. I say it can probably also be measured by how good you play golf. My value may go down in that particular area, but I can try to make up for it by being better at other things.

I don't think it's easy to point out one person and conclusively say that he or she is better than another person though. I think we'd have to use more specific categories. Of course that goes against how a lot of people understand the term "self-worth", but this is at least how I think about it. Perhaps I'd be better off just calling it "worth". Self-worth is often more about how good you feel about yourself.