Confidence comes last

Some people try to inject confidence into their backside. It doesn't work.

Thinking you know can bring some confidence, but confidence without clarity and competence can be dangerous.

One example is believing that having muscle automatically makes you a dangerous person. It can give you some confidence… until the world collapses in front of you.

I was lucky enough to run into that in a simple jiu-jitsu class, a few years ago, with a kid half my weight and probably half my age.

And there were other situations that followed the same pattern.

The parrot

I must have been about 21 when I read my first personal development book. One of the exercises in the book was to set goals to achieve within a year.

It got me so fired up that within 3 months I had achieved them all. It felt like magic. After all, I just had to know exactly what I wanted and point my attention at it.

In the years that followed I devoured everything there was on personal development. They all said the same thing, but the repetition shaped my brain to the point of turning me into a parrot.

I held very strong beliefs that sometimes lost to logic, and in that moment I felt my world could collapse.

"I learned that the world is like this, and you're telling me it isn't? You don't know what you're talking about."

I said it with total certainty, and the truth is that the more certainties we have, the less we look at what is in front of us.

We can go a whole life being wrong, and that mistake can produce some results too. Like the clock that is right twice a day.

Clarity and competence

Today I care more about what is true, about the things that work, and above all I no longer cling to convictions that aren't mine.

Confidence isn't something you go looking for. It comes after clarity and competence.

What convictions have you been clinging to, even though they haven't proved effective or true?