confidence is an illusion
so don’t worry if you don’t have it
confidence is an illusion.
if you have “confidence”, you believe you can do something you haven’t yet done. if you lack “confidence”, you believe you can’t do something you haven’t yet done. both of these thoughts are fantasies about something that doesn’t exist.
confidence is an illusion.
recently i was on a call with someone who was asking me about my recent creative work. as i was describing it, he said, “you have a lot of confidence, how did you build that?” but it was easy to sound confident when i was talking about things i’d already done! he compared it to his perceived “lack of confidence”, because he had yet to do them. there was really only one difference in our stories, and it was the “doing”.
so stop thinking in terms on confidence. instead, think in terms of experience.
instead of saying, “i don’t have enough confidence,” instead say, “i don’t have enough experience yet to ensure success.”
why is this different? because the solution is built in to the statement. there is a problem, and the solution is experience. the problem of not having enough experience looks forward to opportunity. the problem of not having confidence is something about personal worth and the way we’re made and the way others perceive us, things over which we have little to no control.
but we have control over experience. just do.
say “i don’t have enough experience yet to ensure success.” then you do it until you say “i’ve done this enough that i’ll likely be successful.”
confidence is an illusion. experience is real.
bonus
a lot of my change of mindset over the last year or two has come from a couple of places. one of those is Jack Butcher, whom i have shared about before.
similarly, Naval Ravikant gives short, clear aphorisms about creativity and business (among other things) that have helped me reshape my thinking — thinking now about real things instead of fearing imaginary things. here’s his most well-known example:
listening to (and reading) entrepreneur and trained hypnotist (master persuader) Scott Adams has (over time) helped me think better, think smarter. i started here:
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams.
maybe these resources will set you down a path of better thinking like they did for me.
Godspeed.