Humility is an effort

I was having a discussion with a musician friend about artists and how much they begin to appeal to us if they come across as humble and easy. We began to wonder whether humility was was an inborn trait or a habit acquired through effort. I wanted to have a better understanding of "humility". Let's start with what is humility. Wikipedia defines humility as "the quality of being humble: modest, not proud, self-abasing. Humility, in various interpretations, is widely seen as a virtue in many religious and philosophical traditions, being connected with notions of transcendent unity with the universe or the divine, and of egolessness; by contrast, some schools of thought are sharply critical of humility" . I would extrapolate and interpret it as the ability for a person, who has achieved a lot in relation to his peers, to not be boastful of it. Fine so does humility translate to an advantage and/or the lack of it into a disadvantage. Let's see how humility is an advantage.

I guess the true belief that one's achievements, however significant they are in comparison with peers in their lifetime or across lifetimes, are insignificant, gives one the ability to be constantly on the look-out to learn. I can think of Ramayana's Vaali's boon, that he get half the strength of his opponent, as a mythological equivalent of a humble person (atleast when aquiring the boon). This boon would be useless, if Vaali, thought the strength of his opponents were miniscule compared to his. This means that a humble person is always on the lookout for learning. He may come across fools in his life and he may have to suffer them gladly. Or like big artists do, surround himself with a coterie of folks, who are responsible for filtering the fools, such that he can be truly humble with people that qualify beyond the fool-filtering process. Also there are artists who are capable of being self-deprecative of their achievements, if the occasion is one where their achievements are being felicitated. If the artist truly believed this, then they should have declined the felicitation, rather than falsely belittling their achievements in the felicitation-acceptance speech.

On the contrary anyone that is not humble, has to essentially be a trail-blazer, because he is treading a path, without publicly assimilating the collective wisdom of the geniuses/artists in their field. Whether or not they succeed as a trail-blazer, is for history to judge, but they atleast start their journey intending to be trail-blazers.

I didn't intend to talk about people that are not humble, but appear to be humble, or people that are indeed humble, but tried to come across as arrogant to show they have some attitude. There are enough well known examples of personalities belonging to both categories.

What to do you think?