Man, let me tell you, sometimes you think you know it all, right? You walk into a situation, chest puffed out, convinced your years of grinding experience arm you with the only viable solution. I found out the hard way that believing that nonsense is the quickest path to disaster. This whole deep dive into I Ching Hexagram 15, Modesty (Qian), wasn’t some gentle philosophical retreat. It was forced upon me after I screwed up monumentally.
About six months ago, I secured a seriously major contract. It was a massive systems integration project, and I took the lead immediately. I spent the first week just mapping out the architecture, dictating the timeline, and setting up milestones. I felt like I was unstoppable. I had done similar builds before, so I shrugged off any doubts raised by the internal team—especially the younger folks who kept trying to warn me about underlying legacy code issues. They tried to explain the hidden complexities in the database structure; I cut them off. I told them, flat out, “We’ll worry about that later. We need velocity now.” Total arrogance. I believed my title meant I had the final, infallible word.
You can probably guess what happened next. We hit the first major integration point, and the system melted down. It didn’t just crash; it catastrophically failed, causing downtime that cost the client a small fortune. My perfect design collapsed because I had neglected the foundation. I sat there, in the server room, watching the red lights blink, feeling my face drain of color. I had sunk the ship before it even left the dock.
My boss called me in, not to yell, but just to stare at me with that disappointed look. I was taken off the project temporarily. They told me to go home for two weeks, read some books, and stop being a liability. I needed to figure out why I had become such a damn stubborn wall.
The Humility Check That Saved My Career
I went home and felt sorry for myself for about 48 hours. Then, I pulled out the I Ching. I didn’t use a fancy app; I used the three coins, throwing them over and over, desperately looking for some kind of cosmic sign that this wasn’t all my fault. The universe, or at least the ancient sages, delivered the message loud and clear: Hexagram 15, Modesty.
I poured over the commentary. The image is the Mountain (Gen) beneath the Earth (Kun). A mountain is massive, powerful, unmoving—but here, it’s hidden below the surface. It taught me that true strength doesn’t need to show off. It showed me that if you elevate yourself above everything else, the forces of nature—or in my case, a complicated database—will inevitably bring you low. The text spoke about the superior person who diminishes the superfluous and increases the essential.
I realized my ‘superfluous’ was my massive ego and my refusal to admit that the junior team members, who were closer to the actual code, knew things I didn’t.
When my two weeks of exile were up, I walked back in and immediately did something hard: I confessed. I gathered the core team and I stated plainly that my previous approach was flawed because I had refused to listen. That public admission changed everything. The air cleared up instantly.
I started practicing the power of Modesty:
- I organized daily stand-ups where I only asked questions. I stopped giving answers.
- I made sure the most junior person spoke first in every discussion. I made them explain their concerns fully.
- I actively solicited criticisms of my initial design, writing them down on a whiteboard for everyone to see and validate.
I worked harder than ever, but I worked from a place of service, not dominance. I used my experience to help integrate their ideas, not to impose mine. We slowed down the velocity metrics for a week, but we increased the quality of communication by about 1000%.
We rebooted the project plan. We built redundancy into the areas the young guys had flagged. And guess what? The system launched successfully. It was stable. It actually worked.
The lesson I pulled out of Hexagram 15 isn’t just theory. It’s tough practice. If you want to be successful in the long run, you have to internalize this: you can be a massive mountain, but if you put yourself beneath the earth, you become the foundation everyone else can build on. If you stick yourself on a high pedestal, the winds of reality will eventually knock you right off. I still fight the urge to be a know-it-all, every single day, but now I have the reminder that my biggest contribution often comes when I shut up and listen hard.
