Confidence comes from four sources, and failure outweighs success

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 40:42

   So for example, this is another question I ask in almost every interview. Tell me something you think you're good at. So any listener listening to this is trying to be good at something. If I ask you, tell me something that you believe yourself to be good at, and then give an answer. And then if I deconstruct it, and I say, tell me why you believe that, what you come to find, and this is true categorically across the human condition in every domain, it boils down to four kinds of experiences that that person has had. The number one experience is what's called a mastery experience. It's simply success and failure. Here's how many times I've done this and failed. Here's how many times I've done it and succeeded. But it's not arithmetical. It's the interpretation of success and failure. It's like when Michelle Kwan in the Olympics lost the

2. 41:33

   gold medal to Tara Lipinski. The media said, Michelle, you just lost the gold medal. You must feel terrible. She's like, no, no, I didn't lose the gold. I won the silver. Both are objectively true. Michelle Kwan won the silver, but she did lose the gold. But the interpretation of it allowed her to protect her confidence. And guess what? Later that year, she won the world championships. So, right, the number one source of confidence, the first place the brain goes when it asks itself, hey, can I do this thing? It goes to prior experience. But what you have to be mindful of is the pain of failure hurts more than success feels good. So what happens is we tend to index toward our failures, right? We bring the pain of the past failures to the moment.

3. 42:17

   That's why most people are underconfident, right? Because of the way the memory and the brain. Because they're remembering all of the things that they've done wrong, all the mistakes they've made. A hundred percent. Golfers always want to talk to me about their bad shots. Portfolio managers always want to talk to me about the money they've lost and what they didn't do. And it's like an anchor. It becomes an anchor. It becomes their ceiling, right? The second source of confidence It's verbal persuasions, called verbal and social persuasions.

4. 42:43

   It's the feedback we get from other people. You allude to that. Why do you think you're good at something? Because people have told me that. Here and again lies the bias. Criticism hurts more than praise feels good. So if you just combine mastery experiences where failure hurts more than success feels good, verbal persuasions, criticism hurt more than compliments, over the course of the life cycle, people index toward the pain of their past failures and their criticisms.

5. 43:11

   And they index toward that. And they start living their life in anticipation of indexing toward that. Third experience is called vicarious experiences. How do I compare to other people? We judge our abilities relative to other people. But when we see someone effortlessly do better at something we work at, that lowers our confidence, called vicarious learning. And then the fourth source of confidence in the final. It's called physiological states. It's the butterflies in the stomach. Shane, why do you think you're great at interviewing? Because I can feel it. It's a feeling. But what you come to realize is that the butterflies that you feel when you're interviewing an important person that you feel great about, that gets you excited, those are the same butterflies that people feel when they choke physiologically. It's the interpretation.

6. 44:00

   So in aggregate, confidence is an amalgamation of prior success and failure, what people communicate to us and whether we're good or bad, how we compare ourselves to others, and then how we feel about what we're doing. So if you want to become great at something, you have to understand if you're, so you talked about people who are way overconfident. Here's what's known about confidence. If this is your objective skill and ability, measurable,