Humility is a virtue. Performed humility is a strategy for avoiding accountability — and most of what passes for humility in professional and social life is the latter, dressed up in the language of epistemic virtue.
Empathy is not the moral compass we've been told it is. It's a spotlight—brilliant where it points, leaving everything else in darkness—and our culture's elevation of empathy as the highest virtue may be making our collective decisions systematically worse.
Praise feels like information about what you're good at. It's actually identity assignment. And once an identity settles in, it shapes what you attempt, what you avoid, and eventually what you become. The most limiting thing someone can tell you is that you're exceptional at something.