Coaches like me are sometimes quick to attribute the success of eminent people to their colossal levels of confidence while downplaying the roles of talent and hard work, as if it were in anyone’s hands (or minds) to achieve exceptional levels of success merely through sheer self-belief.
Consider the following examples:
“No matter what you do, be sure to love yourself for doing it.”
“If you have confidence you will reach any goal you have; but without it, you have no chance of being successful.”
“If you love yourself, your life will be perfect.”
“We all admire confident people—confidence is the most important asset in life and it will always lead to success and happiness.”
“We can all teach ourselves to be confident and then all our problems will be solved.”
“Confident people are ten times more successful than those who lack confidence.”
There are three big problems with these types of claims. First, it is not easy to make your confidence soar, just like that. If it were, nobody would worry about low confidence; we would just extinguish it like we do thirst or hunger.
Second, even if we succeeded at deliberately boosting our confidence, it would not bring us any genuine success. Contrary to what some experts suggest, Trump did not President because he was confident; Aliko Dangote did not become the richest man in Africa because of confidence, and Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, and Roger Federer did not achieve total domination of their sports because they felt good about themselves.
The reason these exceptional achievers have confidence is that they are exceptionally competent. It takes an extraordinary amount of talent—and even more hard work—to attain such levels of competence. In fact, the only unusual thing about these people’s confidence is that it is an accurate reflection of their competence. This sets them apart from the majority of super confident people, who are just not very competent.
The third problem is arguably the most serious one. The illusion that high confidence can help us achieve anything we want puts an incredible amount of pressure on us to feel assertive, and to translate that assertiveness into success. As a consequence, those who lack confidence feel guilty and ashamed, and those who feel confident have unrealistic expectations about what their confidence will help them accomplish.
The high confidence premium is such that people are prepared to do just about anything to attain and maintain extreme positive self-views, equating feeling great with being great. The result is a society that mistakes self-importance for importance and self-admiration for admiration, driving more and more people to be obsessed only with themselves.
Focus on being competent, and the result will be competence.
