To a dramatic extent, our success in life doesn’t depend on talent alone. A sizeable, even decisive,
contribution is made by that highly elusive and emotional factor: our degree of confidence in
ourselves.
Self-confidence isn’t – as we might first imagine – the conviction that we’re bound to succeed at
everything we try. The belief that we can’t fail is an irrational delusion bound eventually to lead to
disaster. Genuine confidence is precisely the opposite: the inner sureness that we’ll be OK even if
we do fail quite a few times and that our sense of self-worth can remain more or less intact, even if
we don’t exactly pull off what we’re aiming at. To the confident person, the stakes are manageable –
which leaves them free to have a go at all the many interesting things in the world where success
cannot be guaranteed.
At the core of a properly confident mentality is a sense that trying and making mistakes are integral
parts of the process of mastery. The people who look highly competent now must, themselves,
have stumbled many times. Our failures are no signs that we must lose in the end.
For their part, the recklessly overconfident imagine that competence is incompatible with any form
of self-doubt whatever and so banish all scepticism and rush at things that no one could possibly
accomplish at once. Meanwhile the underconfident equally see self-doubt as a sign of
incompetence – but because they are only too aware of their own hesitations, assume that they
must be unable to do anything solid simply because they are scared and therefore give up long
before they have even tried.
True confidence builds on an idea that stumbling and making an embarrassment of ourselves is
normal at the start of anything worthwhile – and no indicator of being destined to fail long-term.
Ideally we would see that messing up is a standard feature of the human condition, not a strange
failing of our own and won’t ever have to prevent us from a chance to become more competent in
the future, since every person whose competence we admire once began from a position of
weakness. We learn to get good at things not by never finding them difficult, but by humbly
accepting – and identifying – the problems and the pain and gradually working out how to manage
them.
