Why Trying to Be Confident Makes You Less Confident transcript

It is July 1849 in Lower Manhattan and a man named William Thompson is walking around, walking up to strangers and asking them after a few moments if he could borrow their watch. Now, at the time, pocket watches were very nice, they were very expensive, they were worth a lot, and for some reason, the strangers kept giving the watches to him. From there, Thompson would talk for a little while longer, kind of distract the person, and then he would just get up and walk away.

Thompson stole dozens of watches this way. It was a crime so odd, so unique that the New York Herald felt like they had to come up with a name for it. And the name they came up with was confidence man. The name stuck, and for many decades a confidence man was a swindler. It was a fraud. It was a thief. It was somebody who would talk you out of your own money. These were the snake oil salesman of the Wild West, the people who would show up at your door and promise a cure for cancer and then walk off with your life savings.

These were known as confidence men or as they later became known, con men. For most of human history, confidence was largely seen as a negative thing. It was a pejorative term. Confidence is rooted in the Latin term with faith or believing in somebody or something. And for most of Western history, to believe in anything, to have faith in anything other than God was an offense to God. As late as the 17th century, somebody who walked around with confidence was somebody who walked around with a level of narcissism and self-absorption that was looked down on by everybody else.

So, how did a word that became synonymous with criminal fraud become associated with the feeling that we all want to have in ourselves today? Should it have become associated with that term? Should we want confidence? Should we try to be more confident? Should we do everything in our power to be confident? In this video, I'm actually going to argue that we shouldn't. A lot of our ideas around confidence are misguided and this whole idea of confidence maxing ourselves only serves to make us less confident.

And instead, we're going to discover the one thing that we should pursue, but everybody overlooks. Now, the turn of how people saw the word confidence, it began in the 1890s with William James. And William James didn't even use the word confidence specifically. What William James did is he introduced the idea that believing in yourself was actually a good thing. That you should have faith that you're going to be successful at something.

Now, these ideas ended up being validated a couple decades later when World War I broke out. They found that a large percentage of the soldiers suffered from what today we would call PTSD. And when psychologists went in and studied and analyzed the soldiers that suffered from PTSD, what they found was was that the soldiers who had the lowest belief in themselves were the ones who suffered from the most trauma. So, these findings from the war validated within the early field of psychology that self-belief was a good thing.

People should feel good about themselves, but it wasn't really popularized to the mainstream public until the 1950s. And that came from Norman Vincent Peale. Now, Norman Vincent Peale was a pastor. He also happened to suffer from a lot of panic attacks. But Peale had discovered through his career of overcoming anxiety to get up and give sermons, he had discovered a a number of techniques that were really helpful for him uh to get through his anxiety.

That was affirmations, positive self-talk, visualizations, and so on. And so, he ended up writing a book called The Power of Positive Thinking. And in that book, he wrote of how to train yourself to become more confident. Now, this is the first time that confidence is really put on display to the public as like a virtuous thing that you should pursue and try to achieve. And implicit in Vincent Peale's book was this argument that you need to feel good about what you're about to do so you can perform well at what you're about to do.

Now, this book took off like wildfire. I mean, it sold I think at the time it sold like 4 or 5 million copies, which was huge at the time. I think today it's probably sold 10, 20 million copies. It is a bonafide classic of the self-help genre and it's still widely read today. The problem is is that it was all [ __ ] I mean, it's like with the benefit of 50 years of research, we have found that most of this stuff doesn't do anything at best and can actually backfire at worst.

The problem is is that this is incredibly marketable. You can actually make a lot of money taking people who don't have much belief in themselves and finding ways to give them beliefs in themselves. Despite the fact that the belief in yourself doesn't really matter in the first place. I mean, one way to think about this is that if techniques like positive thinking and affirmations worked, you would see the self-help industry shrink.

Like you would see pretty intense churn among a lot of the businesses. Like somebody would come to a seminar and then they'd be done. They wouldn't need another seminar. But what you actually see in self-help is the opposite. People who come to self-help, they tend to stay in self-help for a long, long time. Now, there are plenty of reasons for that, but if you are selling techniques that supposedly make you feel good about yourself and feel confident for the rest of your life, you wouldn't expect that sort of behavior.

You know what also increases your confidence? Focus. And you know how to get more focus? The sponsor of this video, Brain.fm. Brain.fm uses music that's designed, like actually backed by neuro-science and real researchers, to help your brain shift into whatever mode you need, whether it's deep work, relaxation, meditation, or actually falling asleep before 2:00 a.m. Now, the important thing here is that this is not just background music.

This isn't some dude on YouTube playing rain sounds through a tin can. This stuff is engineered to change your brain state in minutes. It gets past your lazy frontal lobe and hits the good stuff underneath, the part that actually gets things done. Now, whether I'm writing, reading, or just trying to keep my attention span from melting into TikTok soup, I throw on Brain.fm and I lock in. It's kind of like putting noise-canceling and on your thoughts.

Suddenly, the [ __ ] fades and you can just be present with whatever you're doing. If your brain has the attention span of a goldfish in traffic, welcome to the club. But also, you should do something about that. I've been using Brain.fm for a while now and I love it. And because they know I don't promote crap I don't use, they're giving you 30 days of unlimited free access. That's a full month to train your brain to stop being a flaky [ __ ] and actually show up and do things.

Go to brain.fm/idgaf to get your free trial today or check out the link in the description below. So, what does it actually look like to build confidence? I mean, by the research, how do you actually build confidence? Well, it actually was discovered in the late 1960s. It was discovered by Canadian researcher and he discovered it on accident. And it involved a bunch of strangers in a room full of snakes. So, the researcher Albert Bandura is probably the most important psychologist you've never heard of.

Now, back then, Bandura was really interested in phobias and what he did is he took people with intense snake phobias and then he brought them to a room full of snakes. Now, when I say snake phobias, I mean like [ __ ] phobias. Like these people it wasn't just like, oh, I don't like a snake. I mean, there was a woman who never wore a necklace in her entire life because it reminded her of snakes. There was a man who wouldn't stay in hotels because he was so paranoid that there might be snakes under the furniture.

Like these people, their fear of snakes was wrecking their [ __ ] lives. So, Bandura built a room of snakes. There was a window between the snake room and the room these people were in. And he just invited them to take their time and stand there, look at the snakes, and then one by one he invited them to step into the room with snakes. And then once they were comfortable doing that, he invited them to touch a snake. And then once they did that, he invited them to hold a snake.

And then once they did that, he invited them to hold multiple snakes. And unbelievably, he was able to conquer these people's phobias within a matter of hours. But that wasn't even the the amazing part about this is that when they followed up with all of the patients of the study 6 months later and they interviewed them, most of the subjects reported feeling more confident in other areas of their lives. So, not only had they gotten over their fear of snakes, but they found that they were more assertive at work or they felt more self-assured at home, that they were less nervous around certain people than they used to be.

Like, there was something about conquering the fear with snakes that bled over into the other areas of their lives. And interestingly, in his research, Bandura didn't focus on emotion, he focused on skill. He focused on competence. And his framework, which he called guided mastery, basically argued that confidence does not come from feeling better about yourself. Confidence comes from feeling competent. Feeling that you are capable, that you are going to handle the situation well.

And the way you give people a sense of competence is through guided mastery. Is through teaching them that they can handle the situation. Now, he pointed out four ways to give people a sense of guided mastery. The first one is mastery experiences, which is just doing the thing. Like, actually doing it yourself. And he argued that there's nothing that can replace doing the thing itself. The second one is vicarious experiences, so it's watching somebody else do it.

And it's more powerful if you actually relate to that person who's doing it. The third way is verbal persuasion, so if somebody with credibility and authority tells you that they believe you can do it, that will give you more confidence that you can do it. And then finally, number four is your feelings. How do you feel about doing it? Now, this all sounds great, right? And you've probably heard some version of this before, right?

If you want to be confident, build evidence. If you want to be confident, develop competence. Like, this is not groundbreaking stuff. The problem is there's a couple logical holes in this theory. The first of which is that most of us have encountered people who are extremely confident about things that they are [ __ ] terrible at. Like they've no clue what they're doing, but they think they know what they're doing. So, how does guided mastery explain that?

And then the second issue with this theory is that we all know people who are actually extremely good at something, but still very insecure and afraid of doing it. Now, Bandura didn't address this directly in his research, and it really the explanation really wouldn't come up for a few decades later when we understood stood much more about perceptual biases. But the simple answer to this conundrum is that we are terrible at assessing our own competence at things. >> [laughter] >> Like there's a concept that I I've done a video on.

It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's about the fact that people who tend to have zero expertise in a subject matter tend to be much more confident about their knowledge in that subject matter. They they think they know more than they actually do. Whereas the more educated people become about a subject, the more they realize they don't know about that subject. The flip side of the Dunning-Kruger effect is imposter syndrome, which is like somebody who has achieved great competence in an area, but because they understand how complicated and complex their area of expertise is, they can't help but feel like they somehow got lucky or something's missing, but the people around them haven't noticed or figured it out yet.

And then of course, there's just plain old narcissism, which is probably the William Thompson example, right? It's just like you just think you're awesome all the time, and so you're just going to go around doing and saying whatever the [ __ ] you want and believing whatever you want is true. We've all known people like that. We've all met people like that. Obviously, that is not a very functional way to go through life, and that is a miscalibration of measuring one's own competence.

Does that sound right? One's own competent one your one's own one's own You know when you say a word so many times it sounds weird? Okay. I mean, the real nail in the coffin on this whole confidence, self-esteem thing, self-belief thing uh came in the 2000s. So, I'll do another video one day about the self-esteem movement, but it's uh let's just say that it was a little bit hyped up in the '60s and '70s, and by the 1980s, let's just say it was not delivering the goods.

In fact, it was just making a bunch of little narcissists running around asking for participation trophies. But, in the mid-'90s, the American Psychological Association, they were kind of desperate for like a real assessment of self-esteem. Like, does this stuff work? Should we keep teaching it in schools? Are we crazy? Like, what the [ __ ] is going on? And so, they tapped a researcher by the name of Roy Baumeister, and he started actually researching self-esteem more comprehensively.

One of the things that he found that was a little bit shocking at the time is that if you go to prison populations and you measure the self-esteem among like the most violent criminals, they have very high self-esteem. They have a lot of confidence. And it makes sense, right? Like, if you're going to do something as crazy and [ __ ] up as kill somebody, you probably have a lot of confidence in what you're doing. Like, you probably really believe yourself in that moment.

This was kind of the great decoupling in the at least on the research side of like realizing that self-belief is not always a good thing. Confidence is not always a good thing. Confidence is only a good thing when it is accurately matched with competence. When you are realistically assessing your competence in an area and your confidence falls in the line with that. Like, I am not a very confident lion tamer. That's because I've never tamed a lion.

And a lion might kill me. I don't know where I'm going with that. >> [laughter] >> Hear me out. Let's get a lion in the studio. >> [laughter] >> Check it out, guys. Here's an example of false confidence. So, if a real healthy confidence comes from building competence, but we can't really accurately assess our own competence, what the [ __ ] are we supposed to do? Like, how do we actually move through the world in way that we're self-assured and we feel good about ourselves?

Well, it turns out we're approaching this all wrong. Bandura had the first part of the equation correct, which is that you build confidence by building evidence. But the question is evidence of what? It's not the skill itself. It turns out real confidence, a self-assuredness that permeates every aspect of your life, it comes from building confidence around failure. The ability to tolerate failure, the ability to handle discomfort, the ability to weather embarrassment and rejection.

And it's funny because I wrote an article about this, about how confidence isn't about an expectation of success, it's a comfort with failure. I wrote this like 12 years ago. And man, did I think I was a genius. I was walking into the piano lounge like, Yeah, guys. That confidence blog that you're all shedding a tear, so beautiful. That was me. It turned out Aristotle figured it out first. Yes, yes, kids. Yes, once again, what I thought was my brilliant idea, Aristotle figured out 2,300 years before me.

[ __ ] [ __ ] Aristotle believed that uh a good life was a virtuous life and a and the virtues lived in what he called a golden mean between two extremes. So, if you've ever heard the uh the saying moderation in everything, um it's, you know, that's a basically a summation of Aristotle's worldview and and ethical system. And one of Aristotle's virtues was courage. And courage lived in a golden mean between two extremes.

One extreme was cowardice, the fear of doing anything. And one extreme was confidence, the belief that you can do anything. And so, for Aristotle, courage was the happy medium between experiencing the fear and uncertainty and the possibility of failure, but also understanding that this thing is worth doing anyway. It's worth risking something. And I think this is what gets lost in the conventional self-help approach to confidence.

When everybody's going on about how to feel confident and stand in front of the mirror and tell yourself that you're beautiful and happy and sexy and all these things, nobody's actually sitting there and saying like, "What is this worth? What are the stakes? What am I afraid of? And what is worth doing despite being afraid of it?" Because the thing that Aristotle pointed out is that courage requires fear. If there's no fear, then you're just being delusional or you're being rash or you're being an idiot.

Like courage is being able to judge the potential downside of a situation and do it despite the fear. It turns out that courage is actually what everybody is after when they say they want confidence. Confidence is the internal feeling, like the belief that I can do this thing even though it's intimidating and scary. But courage is actually doing the thing. Courage is feeling the fear, feeling the intimidation, and then actually acting anyway.

And it turns out if you use techniques to just give you the feeling of confidence, then you are less likely to feel the need to actually go risk that confidence by actually trying the thing. And what's wild is that if you look at things through the lens of courage and building courage, what those people were doing with the snakes, it was not guided mastery. It was not building competence. It was courage. And the reason that the benefits of handling the snakes carried on through the other areas of their lives is not because they built mastery around snakes, it's because they built mastery around courage, around tolerating failure, around risk, around being willing to try things while knowing that they could go horribly wrong.

Failure is the ultimate mastery experience. It's the [music] ultimate skill to develop confidence because if you feel confident in the face of failure, you feel confident in the face of everything. But not like a fake bullshitty confidence, like a real I'm going to be okay no matter what happens confidence. The beautiful thing about courage is that it will always be needed. Fear will never completely go away. It will just change form.

If the belief that matters the most is that I can survive when things go wrong, then the most information dense experience you can possibly have is failing at something and still being fine. Success teaches you that the task is doable, but failure teaches you that you are durable. And that durability transfers to everything in life. And this is why the real thing, the real confidence, is [music] robust. Once you develop it, it is ever present.

It is the courage that feeds all of your actions. Whereas the fake confidence is [music] extremely brittle and fragile. One bad outcome can completely shatter it and set you back to square one. But not only that, but the false belief can put you in worse and worse situations where failure is cataclysmic. Because ultimately, William Thompson was incredibly confident, but he ended up in jail for the rest of his life. But those who develop a comfort with failure, those are the people that you and I are still here talking about today.