On Confidence (Essay Books)

But our inaction is not in itself cost-free, for in the wings, out of regular conscious awareness, there is something arguably even more frightening than failure: the tragedy of wasting our lives.

Confidence is a skill, not a gift from the gods. And it is a skill founded on a set of ideas about the world and our natural place within it.

Once we learn to see ourselves as already, and by nature, foolish, it won’t matter so much if we do one more thing that might look stupid. The person we try to kiss could indeed think us ridiculous. The individual from whom we asked directions in a foreign city might regard us with contempt. But if these people did so, it wouldn’t be news to us. Th

We may, when with our friends, casually profess to hate the haters (and curse their names with bravado), but in private, over the ensuing months, we simply cannot dismiss their judgements, because we have accorded them a status logically prior to our own in our deep minds.

The capacity to remain confident is, therefore, to a significant extent a matter of having internalised a correct narrative about what difficulties we are likely to encounter. Unfortunately, the narratives we have to hand are deeply misleading, for a range of reasons. We are surrounded by stories that conspire to make success seem easier than it is

In our psychological make-up, the approval of the world effectively supports our approval of ourselves.

The solution to the impostor syndrome lies in making a crucial leap of faith: that others’ minds work in much the same way as ours do. Other people must be as anxious, uncertain and wayward as we are.

The road to greater confidence begins with a ritual of telling oneself solemnly every morning, before heading out for the day, that one is a muttonhead, a cretin, a dumbbell and an imbecile. A few more acts of folly should, thereafter, not matter very much.

When it came to their own children, these underconfidence-generating parents would have applied a similar method of judgement: the issue of how much and where to love would have been to a large extent determined externally. If the world felt the baby was adorable, they probably were (and if not, then not so much). Later, if the child won a maths pr

We start out in life with a very strong impression that competent and admirable people are not like us at all.