This truth is like the truth that "people suffer not because they don't know, but because they know." For life, we don't lack the vision to know our strengths. What we lack is to know where our strengths should stay. Therefore, the world always makes self-righteous mistakes while seeing its own advantages and shows off its one-sided advantages.
The worst kind of person in this world is not without any talent, but when he knows that he has some one-sided talents, he thinks he is self-righteous with his own talents. In this state, his talent can not only be the advantage of life, but also the root of life disaster.
Because when you can't converge on the edge of the advantage, the edge of the advantage will certainly hurt yourself.
In Liezi, there is a story of "knowing the virtuous but not the virtuous", which goes like this:
Energetic people are often arrogant, powerful people are often brave and arrogant, and headstrong people don't want to hear their mistakes. It is precisely because they have corresponding advantages in some aspects that they are too arrogant because of their advantages. This is not the wisdom of a virtuous person.
Truly virtuous people like to hire people who are old, intelligent but not promiscuous. Such people can know their own advantages, but they will never become sharp because of their own advantages.
Therefore, for a person who runs a country, the biggest problem is how to find talented people instead of always deliberately showing their talents.
Just like Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, in terms of personal ability, Xiang Yu's quality and accomplishment are far above Liu Bang's, but it is precisely because of his own Excellence that he has developed a self-righteous problem. At first, Han Xin, Ying Bu and Fan Zeng all assisted Xiang Yu, but Xiang Yu was skeptical of them.
For example, Fan Zeng, the main counselor of Xiang Yu, had many strategies that Xiang Yu didn't adopt. As Liu Bang said, "Xiang Yu has a Fan Zeng and can't use it." Later, Fan Zeng became suspicious of Xiang Yu and demanded to return to the village in a rage. He was depressed all the way and died in Pengcheng.
From Han Xin's non-reuse, to Ying Bu's departure, and finally to Fan Zeng's departure, all this is precisely because of excessive self-righteousness, which is also the direct factor leading to Xiang Yu's Wujiang River suicide.
Liu Bang, on the other hand, adopted the attitude of "no doubt" and "no doubt" to recruit talents, because Liu Bang knew that to achieve great things, he needed to appoint people on their merits and reuse talents, so he held a job fair whenever he had the opportunity to openly recruit talents, and finally defeated Xiang Yu, leading to the end of dominating the world.
Second,
Arrogant people are arrogant, willful people are ignorant, and it seems that talented people are prone to conceit. The most common mistakes are complacency, self-righteousness, thinking that they are the best in the world, and no one can compare with them, let alone taking others seriously, failing to see their talents and not accepting other people's suggestions.
But there are only two kinds of results brought by this excessive self-righteousness and willfulness. One is fatal, and the other is isolated by others. Both of these results are extremely vicious, from making your life unhappy to losing your life.
Therefore, knowing your talents is not true wisdom. True wisdom is when you can know where your talents should stay.
If we can start with our own self-cultivation, accept others' mistakes and correct criticisms with an open mind, let go of our overly subjective and narrow-minded thoughts, and at the same time, avoid the shortcomings of self-righteousness, in this state, our own advantages can really be used as extra points in our lives.