The Value of Humility (Editorial)

Interviewing our 40 Under 40 honorees remains for the Arkansas Business staff an interesting and often uplifting assignment despite years of experience. Reading the stories of so many productive people is a cure for cynicism.

Two of the questions that we usually ask those selected concern their governing philosophy and whether they had any heroes. As for governing philosophy, variations of the Golden Rule predominate, for good reason. It’s the Little Black Dress of maxims, appropriate in almost any situation. Heroes, unsurprisingly but pleasingly, are often parents, grandparents, teachers and supervisors.

This year, for example, Noel A. Sanger, market vice president of United Federal Credit Union in Fort Smith, said he’d adopted a mission statement from the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, which borrowed a quote from American Presbyterian minister and teacher Robert Morrison: “To do what ought to be done but would not have been done unless I did it, I thought to be my duty.”

And Ben Brainard, one of the minds behind the highly successful restaurant group Yellow Rocket Concepts of Little Rock, said his hero was his mother, who raised Ben and his sister alone on a teacher’s salary. He knows citing his mother is a cliché but it also happens to be the truth. “She made me. She’s it,” Ben said.

Through the years, we’ve found that those honorees who are sincerely humble despite often remarkable achievement tend not to crash and burn in later years. By crash and burn, we primarily mean land in prison, whose walls a few — very few — of our honorees have seen.

Our proverb is a mash-up adapted from Proverbs and from a quote of English actor George Arliss: Humility is the only wisdom. The best of our 40 Under 40 honorees know this. They’ll be the ones still succeeding, still serving, 40 years from now.