Humility: Perceiving everyone else as being better than you

Such an excellent piece of life advice! 

It allows us to stay grounded, and not allow our own qualities to get to our heads or consider ourselves superior to others because we genuinely believe that they must have some quality that is better than us - perhaps we just don’t know it yet!  

Dr. Ali Albarghouthi writes, 

"Any good Muslim that we meet MUST have had least one good quality that he is better at than we are. And if we cannot find any, we should say: “Perhaps he has some good that I don’t know about”. When we meet different people and interact with them, we won’t fail to note how they could be superior to us." (Heart Therapy)

Bakr bin Abdullah said, “if you see someone who is older than you, say, “he has preceded me in iman and has more good deeds, so he is better than I am. And if you see someone younger than you, then say, “I have committed more sins and acts of disobedience, so he is better than I am.”

And if you see your brothers honoring you and respecting you, say that “they are merely praising the virtuous act that they themselves are practicing”. And if they neglect or abandon you, say “perhaps this is a consequence of a sin that I did” (Minhaj Al-Qasidin)

When we see people in this optimistic light, not only does it instill in us the need to respect others, and hence will be evident in our conduct of how we deal with them, but it also keeps our eyes peeled to seek out their positive qualities and allow ourselves to be inspired by them.

This mindset allows us to turn people around us into sources of inspiration, by choosing selective qualities from the people around us as our benchmarks, opening the doors for us to heed the call of Allah to 

فَاسْتَبِقُوا الْخَيْرَاتِ

 “Race towards all that is good!” (Al-Baqarah 2:148) 

Who, among the people around you, are your benchmarks and source of inspiration for generosity? Personal discipline? Punctuality? Likeability? Knowledge? Great parenting? Competency at work? High-EQ people skills? Writing? Da’wah?  

With this attitude, humility can turn into a lifehack for productivity & growth mindset!

Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said:

 وَمَا تَوَاضَعَ أَحَدٌ لِلَّهِ إِلاَّ رَفَعَهُ اللَّهُ

“No one humbles himself for the sake of Allah, except that Allah raises his status” (Muslim)