If you want to learn humility, learn it from the Buddhists.
For a long time I was against humility. I now realize that the problem was not with humility itself, but with the nasty and hypocritical manner in which it is being taught. Most people who claim to instil humility in others are in no way humble themselves. They either take the arrogant stance of fanatically espousing a dogmatic creed – from Communism to Christianity to Islam – at the expense of all else that people know; or they take an even more arrogant stance of deciding that religion and spirituality are for loonies and idiots.
This weekend I went on a Buddhist retreat with Lama Choedak Rinpoche. This person has many accomplishments under his belt, from enduring extreme privation and pain in his learning stages to writing clear, cogent, well-selling books and giving profound and intelligent explanations of Buddhism to audiences all around the world. He did not lord it over me, or try to put me down. He reached out with compassion and kindness and treated me as an equal and not as an underling, even though he knows vastly more than do I and has many more accomplishments under his belt.
Outside of Buddhism, I've found useful C. S. Lewis's claims on this matter. He said that there is false humility – such as telling smart young men that they are stupid and telling pretty young women that they are ugly – and then there is the true humility, which he defined as rejoicing in the next person's success as much as you would in your own. C. S. Lewis was not a Buddhist; he was a Christian who had real wisdom. False humility, such as what he described, does not create humble people; it creates broken people and it creates hateful people. Unfortunately that's how humility has been taught in the bulk of situations in the West, with predictably disastrous results.
Humility needs to be defined correctly, and it needs to be taught correctly. It cannot be done in a manner that is abusive or hypocritical. The case needs to be made that the world is made a better place by people treating each other better, and that there are all sorts of people with valuable qualities. Once that is done, humility follows as a logical conclusion, without there being a need to tear anyone down or to flood the world with hateful and broken people.