What Really Creates Unshakable Confidence

00:00:00This is an interesting one, Drew, because I feel like maybe I'm overconfident about this episode. I'm not worried about this episode one bit. I know. In the entire month we've been prepping for it. I got that sense. Zero concerns. Yet, I've been surprised that you have seemed quite underconfident. Yeah, I think that's what makes it work, though, too. Is my overconfidence merged with your underconfidence? We somehow form a balance. Okay. I think so. There's a balance in the force. I think so. I'm not confident about a lot of things, to be honest with you. Like what? You know, just anything. I don't know. I've never put a whole lot of stock in confidence anyway, so I don't know. Well, you might be ahead of the curve on that one. I just feel like this is such a bread and butter topic, and I have been writing about this and talking about it for my entire career. It's a bread and butter topic since we've been working together. I mean, the last 14 years, we've discussed confidence so many times. We've researched it so many times. Yeah.

00:00:55I just feel like, why worry, man? What do you like? Hang loose. What like, like, do you see, see what I'm doing? My, my hands here. This is what we do in, in LA here. We hang loose. Hakuna Matata. Hakuna. Yeah. This is a great intro. Oh God. People are gonna love this. Well, why don't we get into it? You've done the thing. You know which thing I'm talking about. You stood in the bathroom before the meeting, the interview, the date, and you did the pose, the hands on hips, the chest out. Maybe you whispered to yourself, I am confident. I am capable. I deserve this. Maybe you read a book. Maybe you wrote an affirmation on a sticky note and put it on the mirror. Maybe you visualized the promotion so vividly you could feel the handshake. And then, of course, you walk into the room and you felt exactly the same. or worse because now there was an expectation that you told yourself you should feel confident and then what you actually felt made that gap even harder.

00:01:55So you tried it again, you did another book, you did a different mantra, you watched another TED talk, you've been doing this shit for years. Maybe decades. And here's the thing you've never said out loud to anybody. It has never worked. Or at least not in the way that they promised. So here's what nobody tells you about confidence. The entire concept, the way that you understand it, the way it's been sold to you since childhood, was invented by a preacher with an inferiority complex. Before that, for centuries, confidence was an insult. It was vanity. It was a lack of trustworthiness. It was sin. And the research, it's even worse. The most popular confidence technique in history was based on a study of 42 people that the lead author themselves had to eventually abandon. Positive affirmations make insecure people feel less secure. Visualizing success decreases motivation. The entire confidence industry is built on the same error repeated for decades. And that error is exactly what we're going to explain to you in this episode. Today we're going to tell you the story of a minister so crippled by his own insecurity that he built an empire around overcoming it. We'll tell you about a singer that sold out Carnegie Hall without being able to sing a single note. We'll talk about the Stanford psychologist who discovered how to cure lifelong phobias in a matter of just a few hours. So here are just a few of the things that you're going to learn in this episode.

00:03:16You're going to learn why everything you've been told about confidence, from the affirmations to the power poses to the positive thinking, is built on a single fundamental error that's been repackaged and resold for 70 years. You're going to learn the accidental discovery in a room full of snakes that revealed how confidence actually works in people and why the sequence runs exactly backwards from everything you've been taught. You're going to learn why affirmations reliably make people who need them the most feel worse. You're going to learn why you can't think or visualize your way into confidence and what the science actually says about the only thing that builds it. We're going to talk about the cult-like psychological movement that convinced an entire generation of parents, teachers, and school systems to do something that research quietly showed was not working from the beginning. We're going to talk about why the most psychologically healthy people are slightly delusional about themselves, and the precise reason that same trick fails for the rest of us. We're going to talk about why some people seem unshakable in every situation that they walk into, and why it has nothing to do with what they believe they can accomplish. We'll also cover the 2,000-year-old framework that turns out to be empirically correct, confirmed by studies on spider-phobic women, Air Force cadets, and a basketball player who vomited before every game.

00:04:31This and much, much more. So before we take a deep dive into this subject, I just want you, the listener, to sit with a question. What if confidence isn't something that you actually build? What if it's not a feeling that you generate or a mindset that you adopt or muscle that you strengthen? What if confidence isn't something that you actually build? What if the entire framework, the books, the seminars, the affirmations, the poses, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what confidence is, where it comes from, and what it's actually good for? My name is Mark Manson. I'm a three times New York Times bestselling author, and this is Drew Burney, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the man whose entire life has been one never-ending power pose. Look at you. So confident over there. So confident. And this is The Solve Podcast. We aim to be the most comprehensive podcast in the entire world, where every episode we try to solve one practical life problem for you once and for all. And today, we are solving confidence. I'm pumped, Drew, not only because this is just a classic topic that

00:05:36we've been addressing our entire careers. I love these episodes where we get to do the little switcheroo where it's like, oh, you think you want to be confident? Actually, the research shows that you probably shouldn't want to be that. I think out of all the topics we've done so far on the Solve podcast, this is probably the topic where the self-help advice in the actual psychological research are the most diametrically opposed to one another. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We're going to see that. This is one area that the industry just flat out gets wrong repeatedly. Yeah. Astonishingly, repeatedly over a long, long period of time. Over many decades. Yeah. Many decades, many culprits. We will name names and we will correct the factual errors. We'll be right back after this message from our sponsors. I want to thank Hinson Shaving for supporting the podcast. On camera, you notice every flaw on your face that nobody else would, razor burn included. Most razors flex the blade to hug your face, which shifts the cutting angle and makes you press harder, which is where the irritation ends up coming from.

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00:08:03freaked out and anxious about everything. He couldn't sleep at night. He couldn't stop comparing himself to the other preachers and seminary school. He was constantly afraid that he was failing to live up to his father's enormous expectations of him. He genuinely believed that he had what Alfred Adler called an inferiority complex. He just felt bad about himself all the time. And every time he had to go up to the pulpit to speak, he was just so overrun by So eventually, Peele developed kind of a system for himself. He called these thought conditioners. And really what they were was just a series of affirmations, positive visualizations, and some prayer techniques that he kind of cobbled together for himself. And he essentially just used them to kind of pump himself up enough to get up and deliver a sermon. And he found that the more he was able to do this, the more likely he was to get up in front of people and have a good sermon and, you know, perform really well. Now, the critical point here is that this was a personal coping mechanism that he developed for a very specific context and situation that was unique to him. Most people don't have a profession where they're forced to speak publicly on a regular basis, but Peel did. And so because he was a highly neurotic, anxious person, he had to find some sort of system for himself. He found that thing. All of that is great. That's all like everything up until now, I think, is like pretty normal and OK. Here's where things changed.

00:09:29Because he decided that his little personal coping mechanism was the solution to everybody's problem in the entire world. In 1948, he wrote a book called A Guide to Confident Living that became a bestseller. And then in 1952, he followed that up with a book called The Power of Positive Thinking, which a lot of our listeners have probably heard of. Maybe they've even read it. It's been 186 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Not bad. It's not, you know, 325 weeks. Okay, okay. You know, it's a good, a respectable showing. It spent 48 weeks at number one, sold over 5 million copies, has been translated into over 40 languages, on and on and on. It's been a massive hit. It's a self-help classic. It gets recommended all sorts of places. And inside The Power of Positive Thinking, he recommended 10 simple rules for developing confidence in your everyday life. The promise of the book was essentially that confidence is a feeling or a belief that you can generate through consistent mental habits. And the implication of the message of the book was that you feel confident first and then you act or perform second. That is kind of the chain of events that happens around confidence. For the purposes of our episode here, I would like to call this...

00:10:55The Peel fallacy, because this is 100% wrong. And we're going to spend most of this episode digging into why this is wrong and why this leads people astray. So the Peel fallacy is essentially the belief that to be successful at anything, you must feel confident. And then because you feel confident, you will perform better. And I think this fallacy has persisted across the decades. Yeah. Because I think it, A, it feels intuitively true. Let's say I'm really nervous about coming in here and shooting this podcast. In that moment that I feel nervous, I am looking for something to solve that anxiety. And there is an erroneous belief that if that anxiety gets solved, then the podcast will go well. Right. We want it to be true, right? Right. Whereas like that is actually not necessarily true. The research is borne out over and over again that that is not always the case. I think the other reason this has persisted for so long is that it's extremely marketable to people, right? Like people look at high performers and they perceive that high performers don't seem to be very worried or anxious about their performance.

00:12:06And they assume that that high performer was confident and that's what made them a high performer. Whereas the causation is completely backwards. The high performer is a high performer. And because they're a high performer, they don't really worry about their performance a whole lot. The other aspect of the Peel fallacy that we're going to come back to in the next chapter quite a bit is... Is that there is a tendency both with us as individuals, but also in the self-help industry, just as a market to take something that works in a specific context and then generalize that across the population. Right. So it's like I have found things in my life that ease my anxiety, that make me feel a little bit better about myself, that help me get through the day. And it's human nature to assume that because it worked for me, it must also work for you and it must work for everybody else in the studio and it must work for everybody listening to this. And that is just not true. A vast majority of personal advice that works is personal. It is very specific to our personality, our history, our environment, our goals, our dreams, ambitions, all those things.

00:13:09So again, we're going to see this aspect of the fallacy crop up time and time again. And again, I think this persists because as consumers, we want to believe that there's a trick. We want to believe that there's a one size fits all solution to all of our confidence issues to make us to ease our anxieties, to make us feel good in high pressure situations, to improve our beliefs about ourselves. And it's a very seductive thing to buy into, but it's just not the case. You've come right out and said, okay, this is wrong. Yes. And you've been harping against this- My whole career. 15, 20 years at this point, right? Yeah. What I found shocking a little bit was that it hasn't just been that, oh, we kind of figured out along the way that, oh, this isn't right. People were like, no, this isn't right. Right away. I didn't know this either. There were like harsh critics right out of the gate. We- kind of take it for granted now is like, oh yeah, of course you want to be confident and then you can act and you can perform better and all of this. We kind of like just assumed that, or I assumed that when I was a kid anyway, for sure. When I was younger, this is the water we, you and I grew up. Absolutely. It's like my teachers and parents told me when I was a kid, just think positive, just believe in yourself. But this was actually kind of a crazy idea at the time. For instance, there's this guy, R.C. Murphy, who came right out the same year or maybe a couple of years after the book was published, that the power of positive thinking was published. And

00:14:24And he pointed out right away, he's like, Peele was exaggerating the fears of the readers, right? Like when you're taught that negative thoughts are going to ruin your life, you're not going to tolerate those at all in yourself, right? And then not only that, though, his big point that he wanted to make was that you're not going to tolerate the other people who point that out to you either, right? There's like a whole social aspect to it. And we saw this as like the self-help movements grew and grew, you know, through the 70s, 80s, 90s. If you came into some self-help movement and you try to point out, hey, this probably is a little bit toxic, you guys, you would get this huge backlash from it, right? That was happening right away. So Peel had all these fans, like these fanatic fans. Murphy came and pointed out, he's like, these people, if you come and point out something realistic and some fault with this, they just double down back at you, which we see this all the time now too, right?

00:15:15Yeah. Well, and you see this also just, I guess, kind of in the therapy culture of Instagram and TikTok, right? It's, it's like, just block out the haters, cut people out of your life. Don't tolerate any sort of like. You call someone a narcissist and somebody's like, well, I don't know if they are. And then you get like, oh, you're enabling the narcissist. Yes. It's a total incapacity to tolerate criticism. That was already present right after this book came out, which kind of shocked me. I just thought it was kind of like this big cultural thing and everybody hopped on board and it was a big bandwagon and there wasn't a lot. There was some real pushback against this. Another guy, Donald Meyer, he wrote this piece in A New Republic and he called it The Competence Man. And it was a critique against Peel. That is not a compliment. Okay. That is not a compliment. This is actually where the term con man comes. I didn't know this until we researched this episode, but yes, con man comes from confidence. Con man comes from confidence man. Meyer pointed it out. It was a specific American archetype. And this is a little bit of foreshadowing we're going to get to later. But this was a very American thing at the time. The con artist or the con man was somebody who sold you a belief in something that wasn't real.

00:16:18And so it was very much an insult to Peel. He said that he was more of a grifter, that you're trying to manufacture something in yourself that isn't real, that isn't there, that isn't actually based in anything. His real indictment, though, was that... These Peele fans, these fanboys and fangirls that signed up for this, they don't actually trust ability. They don't trust competence. They don't trust work. They don't trust talent, right? They trust the chant. They trust kind of the mantra that Peele was peddling, right? In older traditions or in traditions up to this point or even maybe a few decades before this, This had a name that he pointed to, okay? And it wasn't faith. It wasn't an undying belief in yourself or anything like that. It was actually an appeal to a lower power at this point. Like in Christian theology, let's just take that for example, up to this point. claiming some sort of mastery through like ritual or incantation. Cause that's what people was saying is like, if you just repeat this enough and if you just have the right set of words and mindset and you, you can overcome anything up to that point, like bypassing genuine effort and faith, especially like in the Protestant tradition, you know, the Protestant work ethic, that was kind of seen as sinful. Yeah.

00:17:28Right. That wasn't an innovation. This was heresy. This was like black magic almost. And there was a real backlash against this, a small but vocal group of people led by this like like people like Donald Meyer, who pointed this out and said, it's almost like a cult that you're selling here. So this was very I just found this really interesting that this was actually very present right away. It's interesting to me that this backlash existed in the 50s because you don't really see this backlash show up. in the preceding decades. By the time the 60s and 70s come around, you're into all the free love, hippy-dippy, Esalen Institute, you know, human potential movement. It seemed to be just the whole culture was moving towards that, right? Right, it's just, if it feels good, it is good, right? And these people, there was a small group of people like, hey, hold on, we haven't thought this for a long time for a very good reason, and they just weren't listened to. Not to jump ahead too much, I mean, and not to toot my own horn too much. I promise I will not, like, fucking...

00:18:24self-congratulate myself this entire episode. I will hold you to that. I will hold you to that. So like I said earlier, like you and I grew up in this water and like all of our teachers told us this stuff. Our parents told us this stuff. You turned on TV and like Oprah and Geraldo were like telling you this stuff. It was mainstream that you should always just think positive and believe in yourself. And you know, it's if you can dream it, you can do it, all this stuff. I think our generation, because we grew up in this, we became very cynical about it. If I was to do kind of like an objective assessment of my own career, I like, I think the first five or 10 years of my career, I really made my name on being kind of the millennial who calls out a lot of this bullshit. If you just like blindly tell yourself positive stuff, you're going to become untethered to reality and you're not going to be able to deal with consequences and you're not going to be able to accept feedback or criticism. So you're not going to grow, right? All this stuff that sounds pretty obvious,

00:19:22on the surface and especially now in 2026 it sounds very obvious but like back in 2012 2013 like this was pretty transgressive, right? Especially in the self-help space. But it's been interesting because I do feel like the self-help industry has gotten much healthier and more realistic over the last 10 or 15 years. It is interesting to see like these sorts of critiques have become quite commonplace now. Like, you know, not just us, but like there's plenty of podcasters and authors and people on and seminars and stuff that like openly talk about this now. So it's interesting that we've kind of come back to this after a few generations. Okay. So how much credit can we give ourselves here though? Because was it just kind of like that youth rebellion that we had to, because I remember this too, growing up like in the nineties and like watching Geraldo or Oprah or something like that. And I'd just be like, what the hell are these old people? I think some of it is just like youthful rebellion too, right? Yeah.

00:20:18A little bit of it. I mean, I mean, it didn't sit right with me either. I was just like, this doesn't make any sense to me. And like, you know, I read Think and Grow Rich when I was like in my late teens, early twenties. And I'm just like, what the fuck is this guy talking about? I remember my mom and all of her friends became obsessed with The Secret when it came out. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. And I remember reading that in high school and just being like, what? the actual fuck is going on here. The youthful rebellion piece like opens you up to kind of, right? Like you always want to look for the counter argument to whatever your parents believe when you're young. Now it would be called cringe. Like that's what I felt back then. It's like, oh, this is cringy. Well, what's interesting too is that you're seeing a return to these sorts of beliefs and mindsets with Gen Z, right? So if you go on self-help TikTok and you like watch all these Gen Zers who are posting stuff, it's all this shit. It's like manifestation and like

00:21:07Yeah. You know, don't let anybody kill your vibe. And because I asked myself, I'm like, do I do any of this stuff in my life? Like any of it? There is one thing I do. Oh, what is it? Okay. There is one thing I do. It's actually ironically quite similar to what Vincent Peale used to do. So when I go on speaking tours, obviously, like when you're going to get up in a theater in front of 2000 people, like it's fucking nerve wracking. There's something, too, about being a solo speaker. You're backstage in the green room, like, by yourself in the dressing room alone. And it's just you. The whole show is you. So it is a lot of pressure. And it is, like, pretty fucking nerve-wracking. And so I remember on my first big speaking tour back in 2018, 2019, I developed a ritual, which is music has always been kind of my state pump. You know, it's like always the thing that makes me feel better. So I found a song. It's so cheesy, dude. I feel I'm like so embarrassed. No, no, you got to say it. So Oasis has this song on their first album called Rock and Roll Star. Okay. Okay. And it's and I just started playing that backstage on repeat before my shows. And it became like my pump up. It's like, yeah, dude, you're fucking rock and roll star. You know, like it would just get me over the hump to get me on stage. And then and then I was fine.

00:22:23Well, I'm not saying like none of this stuff like doesn't change the way you feel necessarily in the moment, right? No, but that's the whole thing, right? It's like, what if imagine if I came on this podcast and I like looked into the camera and I told a million people watching this, you need to download Rock and Roll Star by Oasis because that's what's going to make you confident. Like that is essentially what Norman Vincent Peale did. I see. Okay, you're saying you're taking that specific thing and generalizing it. Yes, and we will cover this once we get into all the confidence research about how domain-specific confidence is and how domain-specific interventions are. But that is essentially what is happening, is that Norman Vincent Peale found a handful of His version of Oasis is rock and roll star and then wrote a bestselling book and sold it to millions of people. And it's still around today. I was racking my brain. I'm like, do I do any of these things? I think the one thing I might do is if I don't feel confident about something, I just avoid it. I'll say that. But I don't like, I don't think there's a lot of things I don't try to do.

00:23:24I really don't try to give myself a pep talk before anything. I'm just like, I'll just throw yourself into it. I've noticed if I hesitate that, you know, yeah, it's, That sucks. Like, I guess my, my method is just jump into it and go, which we'll kind of get to that too. But I wonder if some of it was like, I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Right. And in the, in the nineties, and it always seemed like we were a decade or two behind everybody else. I don't know the people around me were never like, they were just like, just do it. Just go. Just, just, just work. That's what, that's all it was. Maybe that's just in my head. What, what was going on there? Have you heard about this new thing called retard maxing? Nope. What is that? Maybe we should do a retard maxing solved episode. What is this? So apparently it's just some random guy on YouTube. His life advice is literally what you just said. It's like, don't think about it. Just do it. Like it's, you know, the midwit meme, right? Or it's like the Jedi on one side and the mid and the idiot on the other side. And then the midwits like freaking out and obsessing about all this complicated stuff in the middle. His argument is basically like, just be the idiot as much as possible because he's

00:24:32in a lot of cases, you're going to end up doing the same thing the Jedi does, right? So it's like, if you want to be confident, it's just like, don't worry about confidence. Just go do the thing and not spoil this four-hour episode. There we go. There's the episode. We're done. But maybe we should just go home. I do want to talk on just kind of the lineage of this strain of thought through the industry over the years. I don't want to spend too much time on this because it's like I could do a whole podcast just on the history of the self-help industry. But you do see this lineage show up again and again and again. Tony Robbins in the 90s and 2000s. Tony has a more nuanced approach. to the positive thinking angle. I think what I appreciate about Tony's work is that he does implement a lot of legitimate psychological principles and recognizing your emotions and working with your emotions and the powers of your belief and challenging beliefs and dealing with trauma. There is a lot of soundness to the advice that he gives, even though it's often packaged in kind of the same rah-rah, just believe in yourself type packaging. The worst culprits of this are very much kind of the manifestation of...

00:25:39whatever thoughts you put into the universe, that's what the universe sends back to you crowd. We already mentioned The Secret by Rhonda Burns. The most recent iteration of this is Joe Dispenza. Like, it is just an ever-present... segment of this market yeah well it goes back to the think and grow rich yes that's basically just the secret right yeah i mean and this strain of thought goes it goes well back into the 19th century like there was a movement in the early 1800s called new thought that actually emerged out of the transcendentalists if we wanted to go back in time and murder somebody in the cradle to get rid of this it would ironically it would actually probably be ralph waldo emerson oh no really which sucks because yeah it's awesome yeah Emerson is awesome. He planted the seeds, though. I see what he's saying. But, you know, Emerson really spearheaded transcendentalism, which transcendentalism was kind of this idea of, like, you can, like, we have a capacity to kind of evolve beyond, like, who we are when we're born. And we can control the direction that our lives grow in. And then that got, like, kind of perverted in the mid-19th century into this...

00:26:41concept called new thought, which was that whatever you believe is going to be true about yourself will become true about yourself. And then that's kind of where that that strain began. The whole point is that this is still alive and well, it is alive and well because of what I mentioned earlier, a it is in the moment that we are feeling in crisis when we are feeling most unconfident. this intuitively feels like the problem that needs to be solved, even though it's not. And then B, you have that fallacy of people look at high performers and they see that they appear confident. And so they erroneously assume that the confidence preceded the high performance when it's actually the other way around. It's the high performance generates the confidence. There's other modern renditions of this too, that like certain techniques or whatever that get peddled in those circles, I think. And there's some interesting research around some of these as well. So we have things like affirmations, visualizations, power posing even too. So if we want to real quick just run through some of this research because it's kind of interesting actually. Let's start with affirmations. Okay.

00:27:44So there's a study in 2009 that was the first to really seriously kind of test if affirmations work or not. And so they gathered these participants and had them repeat, I am a lovable person every 15 seconds. And they had them do this 16 times, I guess. Okay. What happens is that the exact kind of people who need this, actually, it doesn't work for them, right? Basically. So if you have already have kind of a low self-esteem and you repeat to yourself, I'm a lovable person. I can do this. I'm, I'm, I'm going to be okay. I'm, I'm awesome. While you have low self-esteem, it actually makes it worse. Right, because you sit there and you're like, wow, I'm such a loser. I have to repeat to myself that I'm lovable over and over and over again, which just makes you feel worse. And then if you do feel good about yourself, you're like, wow, I don't really need to do this because I feel good about myself. That's exactly what they found. It's just cognitive dissonance is all it is, right? If you have beliefs about yourself that you are...

00:28:41you're not a worthy person or whatever, and you're telling yourself, I am a worthy person or I am lovable or whatever. All it's doing is highlighting that gap and it creates that cognitive dissonance and you have to resolve that cognitive dissonance in some way. And usually what it is, is making yourself feel worse. Your self has to be aligned in some way. You know, it has to be consistent. There's been some other studies around this. There's like a 2020 study that didn't quite replicate that, but they also just found no effect on it. So it's either no effect or a bad effect on this. If you are somebody who has a high level of like self-confidence and self-efficacy and all of that, like your example, when you go and speak, right? Like you've done it before, you know, you can do it. You throw the tunes on, you say you're a rock star and it helps a little bit just to get you over the hump. That's fine because there's not a huge gap between that and what you've already done.

00:29:27they're techniques to pump up your emotional state in the short term, right? So you list, I listened to that song or Norman Vincent Peale, like does his affirmations or whatever. Like the ending result of that is that it improves your mood very temporarily. And once your mood is improved, that can make you feel a little bit better about what you're about to do. Where things go amiss is this assumption that anything permanent is happening. I've met a lot of people who swear by affirmations and, and I've, it's funny, I've been on a number of podcasts where people have I do affirmations every morning. Like, why, why do you tell people they don't work? And I'm like, well, hate to break it to you. It gives them that little mood boost, makes them feel better. Maybe, you know, at the beginning of the day for a minute, five minutes. And then they just kind of, falsely think that that is carrying on through in a more permanent way throughout their lives when it's it's actually not the podcasters or whatever come at you they probably have a good track record of you know doing well and so telling themselves they're going to do well they're like oh yeah i'm gonna do well it's fine it works out and then they move on yeah like that's fine but if you're telling yourself i'm gonna do well and you're just a wreck no that's not gonna help you just telling yourself it's gonna work out is not going to help you

00:30:39Okay. Clip that. Put it on repeat. Okay. Okay. Anyway. Anyway. Okay. Let's go on to the next one. A very related one, though, too, is the visualizations, right? This is a big one, you know, vision boarding or whatever. There's this psychologist from NYU, Gabrielle Odigen, I think is how you say her name, has been testing this for like decades. And it's like really got into the weeds on this. Basically, what she's found is that positive visualization on its own, it's really interesting. It actually reduces the energy you want to put towards whatever goal. So if you're visualizing a goal you have and you put a lot of positive visualization of you attaining that goal, it reduces the motivation you have for that goal. It's like you've already consumed part of that goal. You get a small hit of satisfaction from that goal. So your motivation is decreased from it. Yeah. Like your brain kind of almost treats it as like, oh, you've already got the goal, so I don't need to be as motivated towards it. Why bother? So why bother at that point, right? One of the studies she found, like women who fantasize more positively about losing weight actually lose fewer pounds. Like they don't lose as much weight. Another one she did on hip replacement patients. And those who had these rosy recovery goals, they're like, oh no, I'm going to be fine by next week or whatever. They did worse. Students...

00:31:54who fantasize about job offers, like, oh, I'm going to get this job offer. You know, I can see myself getting it and all that. They end up doing worse in their interviews and everything like that. Exam grades, all this. She did this in all these different situations and found the same thing over and over again. So this is where we run into the manifestation crowd because you get a lot of people who are like, I manifested this, right? It's like, I dreamed about this and then I made it happen. When you do visualize something you want in your life, There's a usefulness in that it orients you towards, I guess, thinking more critically about how to attain that thing. You leverage your perceptual biases to help you get it. So maybe there's a fine line between simply like, explicitly defining a goal for yourself and then like actively fantasizing visualizing about it on a regular basis she actually found kind of where that boundary okay visualization isn't all bad but the thing is is that just like only visualizing the end goal only visualizing having done the thing that's what's bad interesting so visualizing the process of getting there she calls it whoop

00:33:09Okay. This is something you want to attain. So that's the, like the, the thing you want, right? Then the outcome. So you do have to visualize the outcome, getting the outcome and all that. But then importantly, the next two, I think are the most important obstacle. Visualize the obstacles that you're going to encounter along the way. Okay. And, and really see like, okay, this is probably going to come up. I'm, it's kind of like that stoic negative visualization. Something wrong is going to happen. Right. And I need to be ready for it. And then the last one is to have a, actually create a plan around it. So there's a whole visualization arc that you can use, but it's not really a visualization necessarily. It's more engaging in a process. So most people just, they stop at whoa, which is the wish and the outcome. And that's essentially just fantasizing. Whoa. Yeah. Whoa. I wish it was woo because that would be so perfect. But yeah, the obstacle and the plan that like, that's actually where the rubber meets the road. That that's what generates. Yeah.

00:34:01I guess the momentum or the velocity towards the outcome. That's a very active engagement with, I don't even know if I would call that a visualization necessarily, but I mean, there's visualization elements to it, but it's more just like an approach to something because you're creating a plan, you're envisioning the obstacles, you're getting ready for them, and it's just a lot more realistic then. Do you visualize outcomes you want in your life? Because I do, and it's funny, I don't do it intentionally. I just kind of, I'll just daydream about stuff I want. No, I don't. I guess I don't really do a whole lot of that. Interesting. Take me through your process. I've always done this naturally. I've never did it. I remember when I read visualization stuff, I was like, well, yeah, sure. Whatever. You know, like it just seemed like very obvious and kind of dumb to me. Like if I have a certain goal or something, I will just think about not only the outcome, but like the process of attaining that goal. Right. So it's like, I just kind of will mentally rehearse what it will take to get there. And also like some of the benefits of having it, like how cool it'll be if I, you know, I don't know, whatever. I actually have started doing this more recently. One of them, um, I was just talking with you about this earlier. I've been getting into running, uh, like longer distances and more endurance stuff. And I have a good friend who does like crazy endurance stuff and he's kind of taking me under his wing a little bit. I started, I guess I did start kind of doing this a little bit with that.

00:35:17oh, that'd be so cool to do these like crazy trail runs. These guys are up in the mountains, you know, middle of nowhere. And like you're running overnight and stuff like that. I'm like, oh, that'd be crazy. So there's kind of the wish and the outcome to crossing that finish line or whatever. But what I really started doing lately was more of the, okay, the obstacles. The training is... rigorous. And so I have to like really plan for that. So he got me signed up for like a coaching app and stuff like that. From that, you get a plan out of it too. But the obstacles, I've really been thinking more around like almost like visualizing the process around it, running by myself and the heat in the mountains or the cold in the mountains even too. I guess kind of when I visualize or fantasize about stuff. Yeah, it is both the positive and the negative are present, which I guess it's worth noting that Ottingen's entire findings are essentially that visualization is only useful if you include the negative thoughts as well. Yeah, you have to be realistic about it. Right. If you block the negative thoughts and you're just focused on the- As soon as they come in, those are going to wreck the fantasy. Yes.

00:36:18it's a rehearsal for action is what it is. It's not a rehearsal for like, I get to sit back and just enjoy all this. Cause that's what the motivating part. It's not a rehearsal for being awesome. It's a rehearsal for accomplishing work in. Yeah. Putting work in for sure. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Last one that I'm going to cover this time. Power posing. Oh yeah. Okay. I remember this. Have you ever tried this? No. We'll get into this. We'll get into this. Okay. So in 2010, again, not that long ago, A study comes up. I remember this TED Talk. It was massive. It was everywhere. One of the most viewed TED Talks. But what it was based on- Tens of millions of views. Yeah. What it was based on was this 2010 study they did. Okay. 42 people. So already small sample size. Not many, you know. As you see, right. They had the high power pose and a low power pose. So basically, you know, the high power, like- Should we demonstrate? You should demonstrate this. I- Is this the high power pose? I don't know where you're sitting down if it's very- Is this- Chest out, hands on the hip. Like that's the power pose, right? Right.

00:37:13wait, I got to suck my stomach in. Okay, now I'm confident. You look powerful, Mark. You look so powerful. I'm so confident right now. Their claim in this study, though, was that just doing that, that you would have measurable increases in certain hormones, like raise testosterone, lower cortisol, which is a stress hormone, right? Not only that, but then they took more risks after this too. So they had them perform tasks that involve some risk and the people who power pose would take more risks. That culminated in 2012 in this huge TED Talk. And it was, again, one of the most viewed TED Talks out there. It was kind of just one of those fake it till you make it data points. Problem was it didn't replicate. In 2015, there was another set of researchers who did a pre-registered study of 200 people. They found no effect on testosterone, no effect on cortisol, no effect on risk-taking. The only thing that survived was that people did report feeling a little bit more powerful, a little bit better, a little bit more confident in themselves. State pump.

00:38:11Just like before you go on stage, right? Same type of thing. This is not confidence, people. This is a momentary state pump. The lead researcher, I think the senior researcher on this in 2016 finally gave up. Retracted. And she said, no, this was Dana Carney. She said that she doesn't believe that the power pose effects are real. She even walked through all the flaws in this study. Good credit on her. I'm sure she had a lot of pressure. Good for her. Good for her, though. Honestly, more researchers should do this. She noted the tiny sample. There was participants who dropped. They didn't include in this. They had a whole bunch of measures that they took that they didn't report even to. So they were cherry picking big time out of this. And it was just this one small study and outlier effects that they saw. So you know what this reminds me of? I remember back when I was like 20 years old, I read this, but there was a book, I think it was called The Book of Body Language. And it had all this research in it. Like, I remember there was one study supposedly where people in an audience, if they cross their arms, they're less likely to agree with the lecturer or something. Whereas people who put their arms by their side and opened up their body were more receptive to the information. Open versus closed poses, yeah. Yeah.

00:39:19All of it turned out to be bullshit. And I actually think the lead researcher, I think it was a Dutch guy, it turned out he was just like making up a lot of data. All this is to say is that this sort of like nothing burger has been around for a long time. This is kind of pointed at as one of the poster childs of the replication crisis that happened in psychology that I think we're kind of starting to come out of a little bit. Like people were aware of it. The late 2000s, mid 2010s, there was just this whole like, oh shit, we can't. Like nothing's replicated. And this was one of them. And it had a TED talk behind it, right? That blew up. Everybody, I mean, people still probably watch it today and believe it. This was the poster child for the replication crisis. Affirmations. Bullshit. Oh, yeah. Visualizations, mixed bag. You need to visualize the obstacles. Right, right. And the problem solving. Which I would argue isn't really using visualization, but anyway, yeah. News alert, everybody. Planning works. Power posing. Body language. Embodiment stuff. Right. Bullshit.

00:40:17Have you ever tried the power posing? I tried all this shit. Yeah. I tried all this shit. Yeah. I mean, I got really into all this stuff in my teens and in early 20s. I remember doing the whole thing, like looking at myself in the mirror and telling myself things. I felt ridiculous. I was like, this is... So stupid, right? Like if I actually felt these things, I wouldn't have to look in the mirror and say them. You know, the visualization stuff, like I have a very active imagination and I visualize a lot of things very easily. So like, I never understood that. And then the power posing thing, it's funny because I remember back when I was a day in relationships coach, a huge emphasis was put on body language. Body language, yeah, sure. And it was interesting because it was, body language was, first of all, a huge component of just physical attractiveness is body language and posture and, you know, standing up tall. It was interesting because it's like when you do correct people's posture and body language, like you do, there is a noticeable kind of, Oh, there's a state change for sure. There's a little emotional pump that happens. Right. And they do feel a little bit like, yeah, yeah, I'm, I got this right. A useful question is like, is there anything from this that is salvageable from, okay. Yeah. Let's call it the mainstream corpus of self-help advice. You've tried it all. So you tell me,

00:41:28The only person that I will like give a little bit of credit here is Tony. What most classic self-help people do is they just state pump you endlessly, right? Like you just go to one of these seminars or you read the secret and it's just like, you are just getting bathed. You're getting showered in positive affirmation and just being like told that you are fucking amazing in the center of the universe for, for hours. And yeah. That feels really good for a short period of time. I think Tony's a little bit more sophisticated in what he does. He still does the state pumping. Like a lot of his methodology is really like if you look at what he does in his seminars, it's like very driven by like state pumping people. He's a little bit smarter in that he recognizes that people are a little bit more open and suggestible when people. they're in a good mood. So like when you're feeling like shit, when you haven't slept, when you're cranky and you're angry, you had a big fight with your mom or your sister or whatever, like you don't want to listen to anybody's advice. Your focus is very narrow. Yeah. You're like, dude, don't tell me what my morning routine should be like. Fuck you. Right. But like, if you're in a great mood and you're just like vibing and you're having a great time and,

00:42:41you're meeting all these cool people, right? And then you get hit with a piece of life advice of like, Hey, you should try this. Like you're going to be much more receptive to that advice. And so I think he uses it as a tool. He still, he still sells it as like, we're going to make you confident. We're going to make you feel good about yourself. We're going to unleash the giant within, right? That's his whole, that's his whole thing. It is a means to an end in his program, at least. So like, yeah, So I'll give, I'll give a like, like, I guess half credit there. Yeah. I just think a lot of, most of this stuff is feel good bullshit. What do you think about anything though? Like, uh, like limiting beliefs or anything like that? I don't know if this is the same category or not, but you know, we just did the episode on change and I get, I think you could, you could kind of think of limiting beliefs as adaptations that we talked about in that episode where it's like a layer of your identity almost that you buy into. I don't know if that's a different category though, maybe.

00:43:33Yeah, we're going to talk about beliefs quite a bit in the next chapter. I do think there is a lot more credit around the belief stuff because you do beliefs really do create kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like that's further downstream and you're it takes some work to get to them and. Yeah, well, it is tricky, right? So, I mean, we will talk about this. But, like, if you go back to the example of, like, me backstage about to go on, you know, talk in front of a bunch of people. My belief about myself in that moment and my ability to deliver a good talk matters a lot. If I believe I'm not capable of delivering a good talk, I'm going to struggle and suffer a lot more than if I do believe I'm able to give a good talk. This is where... maybe a little bit of moderate delusional thinking can sometimes be beneficial. You're not going to change a belief with an affirmation necessarily. That's what you're saying or a visualization or anything like that or a power pose. Yeah. To sum up everything we've been told about confidence from affirmations, the body language, the positive thinking, the rah-rah stuff. It's essentially been built on a mistake, which we call the peel fallacy, which is this idea that you need to feel a certain way in order to perform a certain way. And that is

00:44:46Not the case. Not only is that not the case, but it's also not useful because you can't really just gin up confidence out of thin air. Ultimately, confidence is built by evidence. It's built by experience. It's built by being in situations and understanding. coming out the other end okay and therefore knowing that you can handle other situations like that one in the future. In a way, confidence is actually not very complicated at all. This is one of those topics where the research in some ways is kind of just obvious, but it's all the narratives and stories and beliefs and things that we tell ourselves that make it complicated around it. So we're going to spend most of next chapter dispelling a lot of those narratives and false beliefs around confidence. We're going to get into the actual nitty gritty of what confidence is, how do you actually build it, what the research actually says about it. The interesting thing is that the most successful confidence researcher ever, A, you've probably never heard of him, and B, he figured it out on accident, and C, it involved a room full of snakes.

00:45:55We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Quo. Confidence is technically invisible. Nobody can see how sure of yourself you feel. They can only see how you show up, which is brutal in business. You can be the best in the world at what you do, but the second a call goes unanswered, the customer doesn't think you're busy, They think next. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the business phone system built so that you never miss an opportunity. Quo keeps every call, text, and voicemail in one place, so your team can jump in and pick up right where it left off. Its AI agent even answers after hours while you're gone. It's rated number one on G2 and trusted by over 90,000 businesses. Confidence is not always what you feel walking in. Sometimes it's the call you didn't miss. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash solved. That's Q-U-O dot com slash solved. All right, let's get back into it.

00:47:05So as we covered in chapter one, for the last 70 years, the self-help industry has been selling us the same formula. You feel confident first, then that allows you to act and perform at a high level. This is just simply not true. And in this chapter, we're going to dig into the research of what confidence actually is. How do you actually develop it and how does it really play out across your life? And interestingly, this started with a single psychologist who stumbled onto this topic on accident. And it involves a room full of snakes, which I'm always a fan of. So the researcher was a man by the name of Albert Bendor. And he was a researcher at Stanford for over 60 years. I did not realize this until we were prepping for this episode, but he was the most cited living psychologist before he died. He was huge. Which you went to grad school. You learned about him in Psych 101 for sure. Yeah. You went to grad school. I'm sure you heard a lot more about him, but it's just funny. Like I would never have guessed that he was the most cited psychologist. Ben Durer had an interesting life story. He grew up in an extremely remote town in Northern Canada. He went to a high school with only two teachers and pretty much from an early age, he learned that

00:48:17you know, whatever you wanted to do, you kind of had to figure it out yourself. Now, he never aspired to be a psychologist. He kind of stumbled into it on accident. By going to such a small school, there was large gaps in the scheduling and there weren't tons of classes available. So he took an intro psych class just to kind of fulfill a credit and to kill some time before his other courses. And he immediately became obsessed. He couldn't get enough of it and he would go on to become one of the most revered researchers we've ever had. So the study in question here is a very classic, dramatic study. Is it me, Drew, or did they not make psychological studies the way they used to? They have all these review boards now and ethical considerations. Dude. They're kind of getting away. I feel like when you read about psych studies from the 50s and 60s, there's crazy shit going on. The Milgram experiment. Dude, there's like fucking prison experiments and like... snake experiments and people shocking people and making them thinking that they're torturing somebody and the good old days yeah

00:49:20what happened to us what happened this one they were at least trying to help people so that was no this this one is awesome so what he did is he recruited a bunch of adults with life crippling phobias so i mean we're talking phobias that was deeply interfering with their ability to to just get by on a day-to-day basis and in this case it was people with extreme phobias of snakes and so Just to give listeners a sense of the extent of these phobias, you had people who changed their routes to work because they didn't want to drive past a park. You had a woman who refused to have never worn a necklace in her life because necklaces reminded her of snakes. You had people who obsessively checked rooms and under furniture, every single room they ever went into, they would have to obsessively check under all the furniture to confirm that there was not a snake in the room. like hardcore phobias. And what's incredible is that the intervention that he designed, it involved no pills, no therapy, no visualizations, no mirror affirmations, definitely no fucking power poses. It was a simple intervention that he called guided mastery. And the process was really straightforward. First, they would watch through a window as he handled snakes and,

00:50:38And after they got comfortable with him handling the snakes, he would simply invite them into the room. They didn't have to do anything. They just had to step into the room. Once he got them into the room, then he would invite them to touch, simply touch a snake with thick gloves on. Once they were able to touch the snake with thick gloves, he would invite them to take the glove off and then touch them again. And then eventually he would get them holding the snakes in their laps, putting it on themselves, holding it. And essentially within an afternoon, he would take these people from crippling phobias to holding and handling snakes for an extended period of time. I know CBT and exposure therapy was kind of just getting off the ground around the same time. I mean, he called it guided mastery, but I read this and I was like, that's just exposure therapy. Essentially. Yeah. It's like you break off a little piece of the thing you're afraid of and you do that first and then you get a little bigger piece and then a little bigger piece and then eventually you're not afraid to do it at all. But that's a bit of an aside because the point here is not about fear. It's it's actually, you know, this is an episode about confidence.

00:51:46Benderer found, which was that when he followed up with these people who had the snake experience, they reported feeling more confident in other areas of their lives. They were more willing to speak up in meetings at work. They were more likely to ask for a raise. They were more confrontational with difficult people in their lives. They had a better time sticking to diets, sticking to routines. But basically the snake cure had... kind of wide-ranging subtle effects in other areas of their lives. As a specific example, like I mentioned the woman who never wore a necklace because it reminded her of snakes. Sure enough, after the experiment, she started wearing necklaces. And what's interesting is that nobody told her to wear necklaces. She just started wearing them. Now, the reason this experiment is important, the reason this whole concept of guided mastery is important, is that the Peel fallacy tells us, believe in yourself first, then act. But what Bandura's research shows us is that you act first, then you start to believe in yourself. So confidence doesn't precede experience, it is produced by the experience. A simpler way to put this is that

00:53:01A feeling of confidence, an expectation of success or an ability to handle a situation, it is built through evidence. When you accumulate evidence in your life that you are able to handle certain things, then that is going to create a belief that you are able to handle subsequent things. If you've never handled anything difficult before and you try to believe that you can, you have no evidence to base that on. Yeah, nobody came into that lab like, I want to be more confident in my life, right? They just came in to solve a problem. But they had this crippling problem in their life, and they wanted to come in and solve that problem. And they left being like, oh, I can solve problems now. And that kind of gave them a more, just a more confident outlook in life. What you're pointing at, I think, is a very important pattern that we need to hammer on repeatedly throughout this episode, In general, what happens is, is you build confidence in specific domains, specific contexts. And once you do that enough, it kind of bleeds out into the rest of your life. It's like a skill almost. Yeah. Yeah. And this is what Bandura found is that confidence is confidence.

00:54:13domain specific. You tend to only feel confident about the things that you have already accumulated evidence for that you've shown yourself that you can handle in your life. And then once you've shown yourself that you can handle that, you tend to feel confident in that specific domain. But you've also built evidence that you have handled something difficult before. Therefore, when confronted with other difficult things, you have a little bit more self-belief going into it. It starts specific and then it moves into the general, not the other way around. It's also related a little bit to the self-determination theory, which is another big theory in psychology that came up by these two researchers, DC and Ryan. We've mentioned it before in a lot of different contexts, but it's a wide-ranging theory. One of the key points in that is that people who do seek, like, I want to be more confident and they seek ways to be more confident end up being not as confident. When the people who just... seek out competence in some domain, just like you're saying, they're the ones who end up being confident. It's a byproduct of all of it, right? It's not what they're seeking. They're just seeking competence. They don't really have confidence in mind at all. But then they come back and they're like, oh yeah, since I was able to do this thing and I proved to myself I could do this thing.

00:55:25Now I feel a little bit better about all these other things. You know what the irony of this? I want to come back to Norman Vincent Peale for a second. The irony is I imagine what happened. I've not studied his life closely, but he's in seminary school. He's terrified of public speaking. He's extremely anxious. He develops all these little tools and systems that get him up onto the pulpit and delivering sermons. It goes well. There was one domain in his life that he was particularly insecure about. that allowed him to be confident in that narrow context. And then once he became confident in that narrow context, it generalized a little bit across the rest of his life, but he drew the wrong conclusion from it. He looked at it and he said, oh, it must've been my affirmations and techniques that made me confident, not I got up and delivered a thousand sermons that made me confident. The solution was actually hiding in plain sight, and he got the exact wrong lesson out of it. Yes, he did. Yeah. Bandura, though, he did have this specific framework around what he called self-efficacy. This isn't confidence. It's self-efficacy is what we're talking about. It's competence, really, is what it is, right? He said, what predicts whether somebody will attempt a difficult task or try something difficult or something that's uncertain even too, right? Which is really what we're trying to do here with like...

00:56:43When people are trying to be confident and then act, that's what they're trying to do. Act on something that's uncertain. He says that it's not about how you feel about yourself generally, but it's whether or not it's based on that actual evidence. That they can actually execute those specific behaviors for a specific task. Okay. So there's really three features that he highlighted out of this. It's not really a feeling that you have. It's more of just a belief that you can at least address whatever situation you're in. Not even necessarily that you're going to succeed. Just like, well, I can try this, right? So it's not a feeling of, oh, I can definitely do this. It's just, let me give this a shot. Also, it's task specific as well. Okay. Like you were just saying, it's not, I have this general belief about myself that I can do anything. No, it's like, here's a thing in front of me. I can probably do this. Let me see if I can. The self-efficacy, this belief in yourself is evidence-based. It's not based on just some affirmation. It's based on experience. It's based on experience with a specific task. You've lived through it. You're not sitting at home putting post-it stickers on your bathroom mirror. Yeah.

00:57:53You've actually gone out and done the thing a hundred times. So right there, you can just see the whole industry got it backwards, right? It was like, no, you have to act first and then you're going to feel like you can't actually do it, right? So if confidence starts with a domain-specific experience, probably what happens for most people, right? It's like... When we hit adolescence, we become socially aware. We start measuring ourselves against others. And when you're a teenager, you haven't done a fucking thing. So, of course, nobody's confident. Everybody's highly insecure. And I feel like what happens for most people is that they develop competence around one thing when they're young. That allows them to build confidence, which then allows them to approach other challenges later on in their life. what that first thing was for you that allowed you to develop confidence? And do you feel like it bled over into other things? Like I was good at school. I don't know if you can say that was necessary. I was smart or anything like that. I just knew I was good at school. And as a little kid, like that's probably pretty important for a lot of little kids.

00:58:58If you're not, then that's pretty hard. That makes for a pretty hard life as a kid. So for me anyway, like that kind of like bled into other areas too. It was like, oh, maybe sports too. And I was okay at some sports as well. And then they did kind of build out from that for me anyway. That's what it felt like. I feel like that's kind of the classic. That's a very classic one. Traditional, you know, like if you talk to parents and teachers like that, what you just described is like the goal for kids. this is also like when I talk about when I grew up, when and where I grew up, I'm like, it was, it was a really good place and good time to do it. Well, cause I kind of fit in with that, that traditional kind of value, I guess. Yeah. I was a mess. Yeah. Yeah. I was a mess. Where did you find your first domain of experience that gave you some confidence? Yeah. Honestly, with me, it probably happened pretty late. We'll get into this in the following chapters. I definitely developed some narcissistic tendencies as a defense mechanism. Interesting, yeah. So I was not great at school. I was terrible at sports. All the things I was really into, like music and reading and philosophy and art, weren't really celebrated or appreciated where I grew up. So yeah, I mean, the two things I got good at when I was a teenager were music and video games. Yeah.

01:00:06I guess music gave me a little bit, but honestly, like not a ton. I don't think I actually developed real self-confidence until I was well into my 20s. And I think I compensated Chapter three, we'll talk through, you know, some of the coping mechanisms and overcompensations that happen for people who are not confident. I think I definitely like struggled through a lot of that through my 20s. I was very insecure for a while. Where's an area now that you still have low self-efficacy, would you say? Anything physical. Like I'm terrible with my hands. I'm terrible, like I'm bad at sports. I'm not coordinated. I'm not athletic. So anytime I'm in a situation where you're supposed to do something that requires a lot of physical acuity or coordination or strength or something, I'm just like, ugh, I'm going to suck at this. Does it really bother you, though, anymore? No, I don't really care. But when I was young, it did. Yeah, sure. It really did. Sure. Certain things get rewarded socially when you're young. So, for example, the first thing that I was actually really good at when I was young was video games. And I know like...

01:01:16A lot of people say that, but like I competed in tournaments. I competed nationally. I competed in internet. I won tens of thousands of dollars playing video games. Nobody at school thought that was cool. Like it was, there was nothing, nothing at, there was like, I'd make maybe one dorky friend who was like really impressed by that. But it was, it was mostly just me on the internet in the late nineties, like playing these games with a bunch of strangers. There was no sustenance to that evidence, right? I built all this evidence that I was good at a thing, but I wasn't being socially rewarded for it. In fact, I was being shamed for it. So it didn't bleed out into other areas of my life the way that, say, the snake example did. I didn't feel like very confident around girls for a long time. I can tell you that, you know, that's another, that's a whole nother. That's a whole nother one. When you do develop that kind of, um, kind of a base level of, I can acquire these skills and whatever, if anything does seem a little bit out of your reach at that point, like I developed a perfectionism around that and an avoidance around it too. So I think that's what some people you got to watch out for because you sit here. Like I've been saying like, yeah, I know I don't, I don't really, I don't do these things and I don't visualize it. I didn't have to do that all this because. Yeah.

01:02:23I just avoided it. You know, if it wasn't, if it, if I didn't feel even a little bit of confident about it, I didn't try to make myself confident. I just wouldn't do it. Yeah. So I think there's some of that too going on. Yeah. Well, we're going to talk about self-esteem and the self-esteem movement in chapter four, because it's one of, one of the things that we have since learned about the self-esteem movement is that if you tell people to feel good about themselves without them earning it, it backfires. Yeah. What you create is a little narcissist. And I grew up being told that I was amazing and could be amazing at everything without earning it, without accumulating that evidence. And so I became a bit of a narcissistic twat, which we will... We'll get to that. We will definitely talk about that. We'll definitely get to that. First, though, let's talk about where self-efficacy comes from. Yes, so domain-specific confidence. Yes, let's talk about that. So he came up with where does this self-efficacy come from? Like, how do we build this? You know, we've talked about the evidence and all that. He had these four sources that he came up with, though. First and foremost, and these are in order. Right.

01:03:26of how big of an effect they have. Yeah, how big of an impact they'll have. First is the mastery experiences, kind of what we've just been talking about. You do it, you have some success with it, and it kind of feeds on itself, and you build up that evidence. It updates the beliefs in the most durable way, okay? Because you have direct experience with it. You have a felt experience with it. You have all the emotional stuff that comes with it. You have... The evidence right in front of you. Importantly to the like early on, like failures, especially early on can be can kind of wreck that process as well. So it's fragile at first. It gets more durable as you accumulate more and more evidence. That's pretty obvious, right? The second one is vicarious experiences. So watching other people do it. And succeed. That can have a lot of impact too. Importantly, though, it needs to be someone you see as a peer or near peer. So this is why, like, if you see like a, I don't know, an NBA player doing, you know, something crazy, like slam dunking from the free throw line or something. Yeah, you and I have no chance.

01:04:24That is not motivating whatsoever. That does not make me feel like I can do that. But if it's like somebody else who maybe I grew up with or maybe just a little bit older than me, maybe they're just a little bit ahead of me. That makes a lot of sense to us, too. Like we can watch other people succeed in a domain that we have some experience in. Maybe we're just starting out. Maybe we're just starting those mastery experiences. And then we see them do it like, oh, that's a little bit motivating for us. Right. Yeah, I think it's, there's a relatability component that has to be there and it's the role model thing, right? Like it's growing up or having somebody around you that it's like, okay, if they can do it, I can do it. We already shit on one Ted talk, but in general, I do actually like Ted talks because a lot of times it's somebody you don't, you've never heard of that has this like amazing talk and they're like, oh, I was this way. And then I did this and something happened. I love those.

01:05:12kind of the people I follow maybe in our industry, they usually have some sort of background where it was like, I was in a really shit place, right? I relate to those people way more than somebody who was just like, oh yeah, I came out of the womb just like shit and excellence, right? Like this is interesting you bring this up because I actually think you just touched on like a really, really important point about the personal growth and self-help industry in general, it's this piece, right? It's the relatability of the person that you're listening to, right? Like tons of people listen to Mel Robbins. She's a middle-aged woman. I imagine a large percentage of her, of her audience is middle-aged women, right? Moms, like with minivans living in the suburbs, right? Because it's when you hear it from her, it's going to land differently than if you hear it from me or you. There's a demographic component of this because it's we need to feel like somebody who came from our background or came from our situation made the transformation that we want to make. It's having those two ingredients side by side. That is is what inspires us.

01:06:16Well, and I think that was the part of the problem with the kind of last generation of the whole self-help thing was a lot of them, you know, were put up on a pedestal or tried to come out and say, like, I'm superhuman and here's how you should. It was the guru model. The guru model. Yeah. These days, it's much more about, hey, I'm just a person like you. Right. Which I said I was going to check you if you pat yourself on your back, but I'll pat you on the back a little bit because that was one of the, like early on, you know, you were somebody who was like, man, I fucked this up. Very anti-guru. Yeah. Yeah. And that was a big appeal and still is a big appeal to a lot of people that you're very honest about that kind of stuff. And that's what we try to do here too. Right. So I get that. But those vicarious experiences need to be rooted in some sense of reality for somebody to actually be able to relate to them and learn from them and gain some self-efficacy from them. Right. Third one, verbal persuasion. So we're getting down the rung here. OK, pretty quick. Being told you're capable can can actually help you develop some self-efficacy. OK.

01:07:15Again, though, it's very similar to the vicarious experience. This has to come from like a credible source, somebody you're familiar with, and somebody who is giving you some grounding in reality around what they're telling you. A close mentor or coach who you've worked with for a while, they know you, they know your flaws, they know your strengths and weaknesses, all of that. Something coming from them telling you, hey, no, you can actually do this and I've seen you do it. a few times before. That means a lot more than the guru telling you, you can do this. I know you can. Or, you know, just somebody on YouTube staring at the camera saying, I know you can do this. Come on. So the evidence is getting weaker as we go down a little bit here. The last one that he, he, he talked about was physiological and affective states. This one, we talked about this, the, the state pump, the emotional pumps. Yeah. Yeah. There's a way you interpret those types of things. So somebody could be like super jacked up, high heart rate, like thoughts going crazy and whatever, and just be like on a meltdown. And somebody could be like, wow, I'm really like, this is awesome. I'm locked in. I'm getting going. It's not real dependable. It's not a dependable source of self-efficacy. Yeah.

01:08:20That's kind of the hierarchy he came from. Again, those mastery-based experiences are the ones that produce the most durable, longest-lasting states of self-efficacy that we can have. So that's what you really should be focusing on. That was his whole point. I was like, go out and do shit. I think if you look at effective interventions, whether it's Bandura or we talked a little bit about Tony Robbins, like there's kind of a laddering up of these four sources, right? Like, you know, Bandura just didn't, didn't bring him in and throw snakes in their lap. He like brought him in. He probably talked to him for a while first and kind of like built a little bit of credibility and confidence. Then he had them watch him do it. And he probably did it in a way that it's like, see, I'm just a normal, I'm not even a snake handler. I'm just a guy at Stanford. Right. And then he, like, once he's kind of built a little smidgen of self-efficacy enough for them to actually try it and do it themselves, then they get to have the mastery experience. Right. But so many people in the industry just stop at that, those physiological states, right? You just need to pump yourself up and you'll be good. It's like, no, there's a ladder to it. Because it's easy. Yeah. It's easy and it feels good. And also people spend money when they're emotionally pumped up. Yeah. Yeah.

01:09:26Ultimately, it's those mastery experiences that you have to get to wherever you start. Okay, so this gets us into what is the actual mechanism for building this self-efficacy, this domain-specific confidence. In the subtle art of not giving a fuck, I had a thing called the do-something principle where I point out that most people assume that the loop is... You have inspiration that creates motivation and then that creates action. And I pointed out that that loop actually starts with the action. It's action generates motivation, which generates inspiration, which generates action, right? So it's the entry point is actually the action. It's not the exit point. I think there's a similar loop with confidence. Like people assume that, you know, they have to develop a high amount of self self-belief that will create good performance that will create a feeling of confidence which will then create high self-belief and so on and so forth and it's like no you actually begin with the performance the action that builds some self-belief which then that builds a feeling of confidence the feeling of confidence is the output at the end of the algorithm it's not the input at the beginning of the algorithm

01:10:34So there's actually a really cool meta-analysis in 2018 about self-efficacy and performance. And it found that performance shapes self-efficacy nearly three times as strongly as self-efficacy shapes future performance. So they've actually been able to deduce a ratio between these two variables, right? Like where it's your belief in yourself is... about as third as impactful on your subsequent performance as your performance is on your belief on yourself, right? So the performance is the higher leverage entry point. You're just going to, you're going to generate a lot more momentum in your life. If you start with the action rather than starting with the self-belief. But the self-belief, you still get something out of that. You still get something out of it. It still matters. It's way higher leverage if you go at it from the other way. If you start with the performance and the mastery experience. Yeah. I see. And then it builds more self-efficacy that way. Okay. So here's a really important caveat. There is an age split here. So for adults, you get this kind of mutual benefit between performance and confidence.

01:11:41Whereas with kids, it's more unidirectional. So with children, performance leads to confidence. Whereas if you try to make the child confident, it doesn't have an effect on the performance. Wow. So, so in many ways, telling students that they can do something that they haven't done. is not helpful. We will, when we come back to self-esteem in a later chapter, we're going to discover that it's actually unhelpful in many ways. See, this was the thing, like I said, when I was growing up, I never felt like the teachers around me or anybody said, you can do it. They just said, do it. Maybe that, maybe that was just my interpretation of the whole thing. I don't know. Maybe it's where we grew up, right? Yeah, it could be. I went to a hoity-toity private school where everybody was fucking special. So we've established this loop, right? The correct entry point is action that kicks off everything else. So then the question becomes like, how do you get the loop going? Like this, this is the problem that everybody faces is like, how do I start? Right? Like it's a catch 22. I am anxious, insecure. I have no experience. So like, how do I get experience? It's like the confidence version of the classic job conundrum of like, how do I get a job? If I have no work experience, how do I get work experience? If I have no job, right? It's, it's how do I get confidence? If I have no evidence, how do I get evidence? If I

01:13:05break it down into small wins. We've talked many times about a concept that I call minimum viable action. It's been in every course I've ever produced. It's been in like probably a third of our episodes of solve that we've done. It is the solution that just comes up over and over and over again throughout any psychological intervention, which is whatever the desired action or behavior is, you break it down to a point that it feels feasible and doable. And then you just start there. A really simple example that I use all the time is meditation, that if it feels intimidating to sit down and meditate for 15 minutes, sit down for one minute. If one minute feels intimidating, then just fucking sit down. Close your eyes for five seconds, right? Anybody can do that for five seconds. And then once you do it for five seconds, you're like, oh, this isn't so bad. Then you do it for a minute. After a minute, you're like, oh, okay, yeah, I can do this. Then you do it for 15.

01:14:02building up self-efficacy through guided mastery. There's also just an entry point with the actions themselves. If you can start with the smallest possible action, it removes a lot of the intimidation. It removes a lot of the narratives and what ifs that are going on. It lowers the stakes to the point that it feels doable. So that's a good example. What are some other examples of this though? Because I think this is a really important point. And there's lots of areas where people aren't, confident. We just did a webinar for our community members a couple months ago. And one of the questions I was asked, and I get asked this quite a bit, is that when you started writing, when you first started publishing your writing online, were you confident? Did you have... self-advocacy, right? And my answer is no. But the answer I always give people is that when I started writing online, the stakes were so unbelievably low. Like I started blogging because my roommate had a blog and he was like, it's pretty cool. You have some good ideas. You should write a blog. And I was like, okay. My expectation was that I was going to write

01:15:07a couple hundred words each week and like my roommates and my mom would read it. And that was kind of it. I didn't have any of these grand visions about being an author and having millions of readers and followers and all this stuff. If I did, I probably would have shit my pants and never published anything because it would have been terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. I hadn't built any self-efficacy in that domain yet, but because my audience was just like three or four So let me just write down some of the stuff that I would talk to them about. And then that built up a little bit of confidence. And then they started sharing it with some of their friends. Now I'm like writing some stuff for some people that I've maybe met once before. I've heard about once before and they like it. And so they start sharing it with people. And after about six months, you start strangers start showing up, right? People I've never met in my life. But I remember the first time that started happening, I was like, oh my God, right.

01:16:04I have no idea who this person is. They don't even live in my city and they're like reading my blog. That's like such a strange thing. And so it was a very gradual ascent, right? Whereas like a counterexample to that would be when I went into music, I really did have aspirations of like, I want to be a professional musician. I want to play arenas. I want to play theaters. I want to play stages. I want to record albums. I want to do all these things. And there was just an incredible expectation put on myself. I went to music school where I'm like surrounded by just unbelievably talented people. And it was extremely intimidating. It was very difficult to keep with it. I was... insanely insecure, despite the fact that I was good at music, I put myself in an environment where I'm like, okay, I know I'm a good musician, but I don't know if I'm this good. And I'm about to be judged and critiques and like my life is going to be based on those judgments and critiques. And it was just too much. I couldn't handle it. That's an important point too. Bandura makes that point. And also DC and Ryan and self-determination theory make that point that usually in those mastery experiences, like it has to be kind of like just maybe a little bit.

01:17:16past your comfort zone where you were kind of trying to shoot for, I need to be mega star, mega rock star guy, you know, and you're like, well, no, you need to practice your scales a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it was, right? Okay. Let me return to the blogging example because like what ended up happening, I ended up mostly writing about my dating life because that was mostly what my roommates and I talked about. And yeah. That started getting traction. The readership started to grow. And pretty soon, like hundreds of strangers who I'd never met in my life were reading about my dating life. And they started emailing me and asking me for advice. Long story short, I became a dating coach. And it was my first business. And it was kind of the very nascent stage of this career. And so there was a period of time where I took socially awkward single people out and helped them meet other single people. Like that was my entire job. I was like a professional wingman.

01:18:07you've lived a weird life anyway go on go on it was interesting because it was the exact same principles i would get these people it was usually like very nerdy men right like some engineering guy who had read 16 books about evolutionary psychology and mating theories and like you know social cues and all this stuff who had all of these aspirations for what kind of woman he wanted to marry and how many girlfriends he wanted to have and what his dates were going to be like. Meanwhile, I'm talking to him. I'm like, okay, you can't hold eye contact. You don't know how to even say hello to a stranger. You haven't showered in three days. Like, okay, let's take care of the basics first. And so I used to get clients. I was usually the guy that they came to when like nothing else worked because I was very practical and I was very critical of that industry. These people would show up and they're like, I've tried everything. Like nothing's working. I've studied all the few. I've done seminars. I've hired coaches. I've like hired matchmakers. It's like nothing's working. And I would take them out and I'd be like, okay, so your goal today is to stop and say hello to 10 attractive women.

01:19:20That's the whole goal. That's all we're doing. Just stop, say, hello. How's your day going? That's it. And they would look at me like they would almost be insulted. They're like, I'm paying you all this money and you brought me to a mall to say hello to random women. And I'm like, yes, that is what we're doing. And it was amazing because they had all these theories and ideas in their head of like what was supposed to happen. And it turned out that for the majority of them, If they just walked up to somebody politely and said hello and introduced themselves and asked her for her name, things went pretty well. The piece that was missing was just really basic social skills and kind of getting over that initial anxiety about an interaction. And then once they were kind of in the pool, so to speak. they figured out how to swim. Like the rest kind of took care of itself. I remember regularly having experiences with clients who they would get angry. Like they would actually like, I would spend a weekend with them and they would get fucking angry because they were like, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars and I've spent two years trying to figure this out. And you took me to a mall and made me say hello to a bunch of random women. And it's like,

01:20:33that's all I ever had to do that like this whole time. That's what I had to do. And it comes back to the self-efficacy thing of like, they just need to get those small wins under their belts. Right. It's like, stop reading about women, actually go talk to one. And, and then once they talk to one, they're like, Oh, this isn't, this actually isn't that hard. Like, why, why was I obsessing over this? Why was I worrying about this so much? And then, you know, after they talk to a certain amount, maybe they get a phone number, maybe they get a date. They're like, oh, okay. Yeah. I just go do this a hundred times. And then I find my wife and like, that's it. I mean, when you break it down like that, it's like, oh, okay. Like it's because you have a very actionable thing you can do that you can approach. It removes a lot of the worry and anxiety around it because that thing is so simple and so low stakes. So I get, I definitely get that. Yeah.

01:21:22Dating itself is a good example of self-efficacy in general because it is something that you kind of have to be bad at to become good at. And being bad at it is very uncomfortable and very painful. But there isn't really a way around getting good at it without doing it. It's something that you have to actually get out there, experience, build that evidence. Because so much of attraction and chemistry is confidence dependent, right? Like you can't really truly present yourself authentically if you don't feel good about yourself in that situation. There is no other way to do it than to do it. What about if you're in a relationship and you're not confident in that relationship? Maybe you had some confidence at one point, some self-efficacy at one point even too. What then? It's interesting because I think in the context of relationships, you know, a lot of the output is outside of your control. So for example, if you're learning woodworking or whatever, the output's a hundred percent within your control. It's very tangible. Yeah. And so you can watch yourself slowly get better at it over time. And then that build that accumulates the evidence is very straightforward. It's like, you know, a lot of things in life are like that.

01:22:30With social skills, dating, relationships, so much of the outcome is outside of your control. And so much of the outcome is actually dependent on one specific person or maybe a small group of people. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself, what self-efficacy are you trying to build? If the confidence I'm trying to build is that my wife likes me, that is not going to go well. Because I can't control how she feels. She is her own person. She has her own thoughts, feelings. Yeah. There are so many things that are outside of my control that happen in her life that have absolutely like nothing to do with me, but can affect how she feels about me in that very moment. So if I base how I feel about myself, if I'm using her reactions to me as the evidence for my own self-worth, it's not going to go well. If I decide to build confidence on my ability to manage the ups and downs of a relationship. That is a skill that is 100% within my control. I guess there's a control piece here. Yeah. And where you're targeting your efforts there too. Well, and this also comes back to SDT, self-determination theory, because I believe part of their framework is there's an autonomy component of it, which means that it's something that you do have control over.

01:23:44Like if you don't have control over it, you don't have autonomy. So you don't develop that sense of confidence or motivation. And then there's the with them. I believe it's belongingness. There's a there's a social component of it. Building self-efficacy, whatever you target to build your confidence in to generate that generalizable confidence, it needs to be something within your control for it to generalize outside of that specific domain. I do think there needs to be some sort of tangible benefit or observable benefit, um, My problem was the thing that I got really good at was not helping me anywhere else in my life, or it wasn't winning me any points anywhere else in my life. Whereas I guess somebody who got really good at football or basketball, it builds friendships, it builds relationships, it gets them noticed and admired at school, and the teachers take notice and compliment them and applaud them and reward them. You know, random strangers on a screen. Right. Right. Okay. Okay. You were starting to touch on what I wanted to get into next year, actually, which is there's one little gap in Bandura's theory and his framework here. And that is you and someone else, we could go through the exact same experience, right? Right.

01:25:01Same failure, same result, same success, same circumstances. One of us comes out more confident and one of us comes out not so confident, right? Exact same experience. Like, why is that? It's this guy called Bernard Wiener. Okay. Okay. Nice name. I'm sorry. I'm going to laugh like a little teenager through this. I'm sorry. Around the name Wiener. This is what got you. Okay. Maybe it's Wiener, but it's spelled Wiener. So yeah. Yeah. He has this framework though, and you just mentioned this. There's two dimensions that matter most. Like how do you attribute the confidence that you get from these mastery experiences or whatever, right? One of them is the locus of control, what you just said. Like what kind of control do you think you have? Is it internal? Like, oh, I did this and then something happened? Or, oh, I just got lucky, right? So there's kind of an internal versus an external control. That's self-determination theory too. Yeah, very much so. The other side of it though is also stability. Okay. So is it the outcome? Is it fixed and permanent? Is this just kind of what always happens? Or is there some sort of variation to it? Okay. So you have these two dimensions. And then what you can see here is there's like these two axes, you know, and you can get all nerdy about it. I won't get too deep into it. But like someone who attributes their success internally, they said, okay, I did this thing. Yeah. I had control over it and I did it.

01:26:17And it paid off. That's internal and it's variable. I did something and it could have went bad or it could have went good. And it went good. If like you have that mindset with it, you get a really strong signal of efficacy from that. Okay. Maybe that exact same thing happened where, you know, whatever the interaction went well with someone or whatever. And like somebody comes in and they say, okay, I went up to them. I was, you know, made strong eye contact or, you know, whatever it is that they did. And the interaction went well. Mm-hmm. Cool. I can do this. Somebody else might do the same thing and say, well, they were just being nice to me. And so it doesn't really count. Right. So it doesn't build any self-help. Exact same experience that happened. Totally different internal experience that happened within them. Right. This is part of a attribution theory, basically, that Bernard Wiener came up with. Can I throw something into this really quick? Because I think it relates to this. So remember Malcolm Gladwell's whole 10,000 hours thing, which turned out to not be a thing. The thing of the 10,000 hour rule that actually is a thing is the concept of deliberate practice. And the researcher Erickson, who like did all the research behind the 10,000 hour thing, he actually found some interesting findings that are related to this, which is that when you are practicing the thing, when you are accumulating that evidence, there's kind of two principles at work that are really

01:27:33to do things more frequently at like kind of a steady state than to just occasionally like go all out. Say you want to get good at something instead of doing it once a month, but doing it really hardcore. Like it's not really going to build that confidence the same way it does. If, if you do it, like say an hour and a half every single day for 30 days straight. So there's like a consistency there. that seems to matter a little bit more than intensity. But the other thing that's really interesting is that he found that you don't really build self-efficacy unless you are at what he called the edge of your ability zone. which is essentially like you need to find the limit of what you're currently capable of and try to expand that limit. So if you try to do something insanely hard and you fail at it, like dunking from a free throw line, obviously that's not really going to build any self-efficacy. Whereas if you do something extremely easy, and I think this is much more common within secure people, is they don't want to push themselves to the edge of their ability. So they like

01:28:30stay in the kiddie pool and do things very safe and easily over and over again, that doesn't build self-efficacy either. So if you're not being challenged, it doesn't build any confidence. And then if you challenge yourself too much to the point that it's impossible, it also doesn't build any confidence. he was kind of vocal against the 10,000 hour rule. If I remember it, it was one of those things where like, yeah, it got completely butchered and bastardized by pop psych writers like Malcolm Gladwell. And then he came out and he was like, you know what? Forget it. From what I recall, it was like, it was literally just a throwaway line. in one of his papers is he was just like, oh, generally it seems that people who achieve mastery, they've put in at least 10,000 hours, but they've, there was like a very wide range of hours that people put in, like some put in 3000 hours, some put in 30,000 hours. He kind of just made a generalized statement of like, It seems most masters at crafts have put in over 10,000 hours and then Gladwell zeroed in on that and turned it into a quote unquote rule. But the reason I bring this up, because I do think it relates to the attribution thing. I mean, ultimately, there is such a thing as quality of evidence. The same way there's shitty evidence in a courtroom that like nobody really believes, there's shitty evidence that you can show yourself.

01:29:48that you probably won't really believe. And so if you were playing basketball 30 hours a week and you're just beating up on a bunch of sixth graders over and over again, you're not gonna build any confidence because that's not good evidence that you're good at basketball. That's bullshit evidence. So the quality of that evidence really boils down to, is it something that's in your control? Is it something that has a variable output, right? Like, does your effort matter? Is it something that you are challenging yourself? Are you at the edge of your ability? And is it something that you're doing consistently and repeatedly? Yeah. Right. It's like, and if you're hitting all those things, then it becomes good evidence because then you get to see the progress you're making. You get to feel the challenge. You get to feel yourself overcoming the challenge. Basically what you're saying is like the work that you do put in has to be interpreted correctly. Yeah. More or less. Right. Like there is a way where we can interpret all of those things in the wrong way. Like, oh, I just got lucky, even though you did put in the work.

01:30:44I actually just thought of a really interesting example of this. So back when I was coaching, one thing I noticed is that, you know, a lot of clients that I worked with had social anxiety. And so I would take them out to a bar or a party or whatever, you know, to meet single people. And a lot of the socially anxious people would drink. And one thing I noticed over time is that all of my socially anxious clients that drank, they never got over the social anxiety. The social anxiety never improved. They used it as a crutch. They used it as a crutch. And I think what was happening, right? Because it's, you know, to build self-efficacy, you need that evidence, but that evidence needs to be grounded in reality. You need to feel like it's you that's doing it. But if you're drunk, you're not. It's not you. It's not you doing it. It's the booze. And you're not getting an accurate reflection of the result, right? Because you're drunk. So you probably think she's totally into you and you're just like fucking making a fool out of yourself. It's filtered through the booze. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's good one. I never put that together until just now. It's an interesting, I never knew why that was, but that actually the self-efficacy loop explains that. Yeah.

01:31:56Really what Bandura is showing and what we're trying to say is you have to base it on evidence and that evidence has to be grounded in some sort of reality. Right. SB, high quality evidence. Can't be bullshit evidence. There's one little caveat I want to bring up here, though. There was a little bit of a monkey wrench that got thrown into this. All right. There was a couple of researchers back in the 80s, Taylor and Brown, and they actually found that mentally healthy people... kind of fudge this a little bit maybe like they actually tend to overestimate just a little bit on their evidence okay so they see the evidence out there and they embellish it maybe just a little bit they see and they're like oh yeah look i did that thing and it was a really good thing when it maybe was due a little bit to luck or circumstance or whatever it was like that was me yeah there's three positive illusions that they hold okay one was an unrealistically favorable view of themselves

01:32:46An exaggerated sense of control. So we talked about that locus of control. And they're like, oh, no, I control this. I definitely control this. Where, again, it might have been due to outside circumstances or luck. And then there's a tad bit of unrealistic optimism around it, too. OK. So people who are generally mentally healthier and stable over time kind of have a little bit of a bias. They're a little bit unrealistic in these things. So we've been arguing, again... Like base this evidence in the reality of the situation and not based on trumped up thoughts about yourself. Right. Which that is true. At the same time, too, a little bit of positive self-delusion seems to go a long ways. A couple of caveats to this, though. So they found that people who are actually like more depressed, though, or even anxious actually tended to have a more accurate view of themselves, unfortunately. Right. So there is a little bit of truth to that saying like, oh, smart people are depressed. Right. Because it's like they kind of do see themselves more accurately. You know, you know what drives me crazy is like every time somebody is really pessimistic and you tell them stop being pessimistic, they're like, I'm not pessimistic. I'm realistic. Like that. That is always a pessimist default defense. Just being realistic. Yeah. And I fucking hate.

01:33:59That the data shows that they're correct. Yeah. Well, I mean, so what if you're right? You're miserable. Exactly. Exactly. Right? Like believe what's useful, not true type of thing. Yes. Like we've talked about that a lot. There's a kernel of appeal in there, almost, that you could say, right? Like you could be a little bit delusional about yourself. And we've already said that, yeah, you can kind of trick yourself for a little bit. Another, though, important caveat to this too, though, was the kind of durability of that stability, I guess, comes from actual evidence already being there to begin with. Like, you kind of have to be someone with a healthy self-esteem and evidence to be there. To be able to benefit from that delusional, slight delusional positivity that you have about yourself. Okay. So like, let's say a brain surgeon or something like that, who just thinks they're awesome, you know, and they're super smart and all of this. Well, there's a little bit of truth to that already. They might be a little bit inflated in that. Yeah.

01:34:53But there's already something underneath that. It goes back to like, this doesn't help the people who are already in just a horrible place. You can't delude yourself from a horrible place. So there does still have to be kind of like that baseline of realistic evidence underneath all of this before this actually holds. Before the delusion actually benefits you. Actually benefits you in a healthy way. Okay. That's so ironic. Isn't that weird? It's like the people who don't need to be delusional are the ones who benefit from it. Yeah. And the ones who could kind of use the delusion to... It just makes them feel worse. So it's a cruel fact of life, I guess. The rich get richer. Yeah. As usual. I mean, this reminds me a lot of Daniel Gilbert's research. He found a very similar thing around happiness, which is that happy people tend to be slightly delusional and that depressed people tend to be pretty accurate in how they see the world and how they see themselves. He called it the psychological immune system.

01:35:46We kind of need to be moderately delusional on the positive side to keep ourselves motivated and functional. And I guess taking risks that day-to-day life requires, taking the social risks, the physical risks, the financial risks that life requires. I mean, we're all a little bit narcissistic, right? Absolutely. We kind of have to be. Absolutely. If you did just look around and see reality for what it was at every single second of every single day. That would be tough. It would be rough. Yeah. It's, but it is important to note that there is a sweet spot here, right? Like it's the optimal amount of delusion is, is more than zero, but it is, it is still a small amount, right? You don't want to be like full fledged delusional, uh, thinking you're the queen of England and, you know, that you're going to cure cancer with a bottle of snake oil. Basically what we've covered here, we've covered Bandura's research, right? Confidence starts in a specific domain. And then once you achieve it in that domain, you accumulate the evidence in that domain, it then kind of bleeds out into other areas of your life and it makes it more achievable in other areas. But that accumulation of evidence within that single domain, it really has to happen in a particular way. The most important method to do it

01:37:03actual action and experience, but you can also accumulate it through watching other people do it through being told and persuaded by people you admire that you can do it. But most importantly, that evidence cannot be bullshitted. You cannot fake the evidence. You cannot put it on easy mode and convince yourself that you're an expert. Like you actually have to genuinely challenge yourself, put yourself in situations that have real stakes. And then also, you know, Pursue confidence in something that you have control over, that you actually affect the outcome in a significant way. And so these are the fundamental principles of building confidence. If that wasn't already complicated enough, as you just covered, there's a whole attribution process to this, which is that you could do something amazing. But if you don't believe you're responsible for doing it, or if you think you just got lucky, then. Or if you think that it doesn't really matter, you're not going to benefit from that evidence. You're not going to get that confidence boost. And so attribution is a big part of this. And what we're going to find is that we make attribution errors all the time. And that's what we're going to get into in chapter three. The ways that we all misattribute the effects of our actions.

01:38:15And this is going to get into everybody's favorite topics. We're going to talk about narcissism. We're going to talk about imposter syndrome. We're going to talk about overestimating yourself, underestimating yourself, like completely missing the clues to your own abilities, things that all of us have experienced. And it turns out that it's actually very difficult, I think, to be realistic about your own skills and your own competence around a lot of things. Yeah. And we're going to kick it off with maybe my favorite story we've ever done on Solved. I can't believe this is a true story. I'm so excited to tell it. It's utterly incredible. Stay right there, more solved coming up after this. This episode is brought to you by Factor. Confidence is hard to fake, especially when you feel like garbage. You skip lunch, you run on coffee, you get bad sleep, and everything starts feeling heavier than it actually is. How you eat quietly shapes how you feel. And let's be honest, Healthy options are hard. Factor takes all of those decisions off the table. Meals are designed by dieticians. They're made by chefs and they are delivered directly to your door. Ready in two minutes. Now I've been living off the mustard dill salmon quinoa bowl because I'm just that type of guy. It tastes like something I would actually order at a restaurant, not just diet food. And it fits how I'm eating at the moment.

01:39:39It's all fresh, never frozen, over 100 meals, rotated weekly, including globally inspired flavors like Mediterranean and Asian. So there is always something new that you can try and look forward to. And Factor also has meals built around your goals, whether it's weight loss, overall nutrition, more protein, GLP-1 support, and a muscle pro line for strength and workout recovery if you want to get jacked. Now I use factor and I think you should too. So head over to factor meals.com slash solved 2026 50 off and use the code solve 2026 50 off. That's all one word to get 50% off and free daily greens per box with the new subscription only while supplies last until nine 27, 2026 see website for more details. All right, we're back. Let's jump back into it. Her name was Florence Foster Jenkins, and she might have been the most delusionally overconfident person who ever lived. I love this story, Drew. I don't totally know why I love it. It is so absurd and just ridiculous, but I do think it proves a really important point that is important for this episode. So Florence, she was born in 1868 in Pennsylvania. Her father was extremely wealthy and rich, and it turned out that she was actually a child prodigy at piano. So she competed in a bunch of competitions, was, you know, lauded and celebrated. But...

01:41:05At age 15, she eloped with a 30-year-old guy and got married to him. Shocker, that guy gave her syphilis, and so she left him. But in the process, her father disowned her, and so she ended up moving to New York City, where she was this broke, single, syphilitic woman. woman who gave piano lessons to survive. And this went on for decades. Now, once she got to her forties, her father passed away and he left her a lot of money. And once she inherited all of her father's money, she decided that she was going to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a professional singer. So she went out, she hired a singing coach, she hired an agent, she hired a manager, she hired an accompanist, and she started practicing. And it quickly became apparent that she could not carry a tune to save her life. She was completely tone deaf. She had no rhythm. She was always off beat. But she had so much money and she was paying people so much to support her singing career that nobody really wanted to tell her. Everybody just kept encouraging her, told her to keep going. So this went on for a while. She wasn't really getting any better. And it soon became apparent that she couldn't get a gig because she couldn't sing.

01:42:25And so she decided instead of singing for somebody else's venue, why don't I just create a club myself? And so she founded the Verde Club. It had over 400 members. It had a lot of members of New York's elite society as part of it. And she started hosting annual charity events, fundraisers, all sorts of things where, of course, she would sing and she would perform. Yeah. And again, she ended up in situations where everybody in the audience is there because of her money. Everybody is there because they want to maintain a relationship with her because she has all these connections in high society in New York. And so the fact that she can't carry a tune to save her life, everybody just kind of overlooked it and was polite and applauded anyway. This continued to escalate. And after a number of years, Florence decided, you know what? I really want to take my singing career to the top. I'm going to sing in Carnegie Hall, the most prestigious venue in the Americas. And so she booked herself at Carnegie Hall and invited all of her friends to.

01:43:30It's amazing because this was the 1940s. And at this point, she became a kind of meme before there were even memes. Like word got around that this woman thought she was a professional singer, but she actually couldn't sing. And people thought this was funny. So they just kind of bought tickets. Yeah. because it was funny. So she sold out Carnegie Hall in two hours. There was a waiting list two months long to get a ticket. And when she showed up, she showed up with a little tinsel angel wings, a little cheap plastic tiara, and threw out roses to the audience. And on top of that, she selected the most difficult operas in existence. I have a list here of the pieces she tried to sing. She tried to sing Queen of the Night from Mozart's Magic Flute. She tried to sing Brahms. She tried to sing Strauss. These were catastrophically beyond her capabilities. And anytime the audience started bursting into laughter, they just covered it up with more applause. So the end result is a ridiculous situation, which is that Carnegie Hall is being sold out

01:44:35night after night, has a waiting list to get in for a woman who can't sing. It shows the absurdity of what happens when confidence goes too far. This is the end result, right? Like if you do just believe in yourself, if you apply the Peel fallacy and just blindly believe in yourself with no attribution to reality, then you're going to be and just assume that anything you want is going to happen, and you are enabled by the world around you, this is the end result. It's just absolute absurdity. Ridiculousness. So in last chapter, we talked about how confidence is built through accumulating evidence. And that evidence that's accumulated, it must be tethered or mapping to reality. But the complication is that often our understanding of reality is relative based on what the people around us see as reality. Florence Foster Jenkins thought she could sing largely because the people around her continued to let her think she could sing. And so she developed a delusional level of confidence around this one area of life. that she was actually fucking terrible at. And this is where we get in the trouble. When we are completely miscalibrated towards our actual competence in a specific domain. When we think we are excellent at something, but we're actually terrible at it. Or when we think we're terrible at something, but we're actually excellent.

01:46:04Both of these traps crop up time and time again. We all succumb to them. We all get tricked by them. And we all tend to make the same mistake over and over again. If we drastically overestimate our abilities, we will become delusional and narcissistic and completely untethered to reality. And not only will this cause us to fail, but it will cause us to fail in some of the most embarrassing and catastrophic ways. And then if we drastically underestimate our own abilities, then we prevent ourselves from taking action. We hold ourselves back and prevent ourselves from being able to succeed as much as we potentially could. And so it turns out that there's actually a number of mechanisms in our minds that can get out of whack or lose an accurate reading on where our own abilities and our own competence lies. We easily succumb to either overestimating or underestimating ourselves in certain domains. And when we overestimate or underestimate ourselves, our confidence works against us rather than for us. Okay, so the most common of these is the Dunning-Kruger effect. And a lot of people have probably heard of this one, right? And it's what Florence fell victim to here. This is when somebody who's really incompetent thinks they're actually competent or like a stupid person thinks they're really smart or an incapable person thinks they're capable with something, right? A lot of times too, it's when capable people don't

01:47:26realize how capable they are. They think they're incapable or stupid or whatever it is, right? Okay. So there were two researchers who figured this out back in the nineties, Dunning and Kruger. That's why it's called the Dunning Kruger effect, right? And what they did is they had this study where they brought students in and they gave them all sorts of different tests on like logic and grammar and humor before they gave them their scores. They had them rate themselves What they found was pretty interesting is that people who scored low on these different tests, like the bottom 25%, they thought they actually scored in like the top 30%, 30 or 40%, right? They overestimated their ability by that on all these different tests. Some of the people who scored higher too thought they scored lower and all that. But the main finding is that incompetent people think they're way more competent than they are. Dumb people think they're smarter than they actually are. The conclusion they came to out of this was that the skills you need to do a task are the exact same skills that you need to assess that task to evaluate how good it is, right? So if you don't actually have those skills in the first place, you can't evaluate yourself accurately, which is exactly what we've been talking about. It's like you need accurate evidence, right? In order to have real confidence.

01:48:33You know so little that you don't know what you don't know. Exactly. Kind of like the beginner's fallacy. A lot of times you start out and you figure out something and you think you know everything about it. I do this all the time. Like, I get into one little thing. I'm like, oh, I know everything about this. The thing is, though, is that once you get trained in this a little bit, once you are shown that, you can correct that evidence back to what it was, right? I didn't realize this, too, but the story that kicked this whole thing off for them, it happened in Pittsburgh, another Pennsylvania reference here. It was this guy, MacArthur Wheeler. He robbed a couple of banks in Pittsburgh in the mid-'90s. It was on camera. He got caught. And the police show him the—he's, like, denying it. The police show him the footage with him on it, and he said— but I wore the juice. And they're like, what the hell are you talking about? The guy rubbed lemon juice on his face, thinking that would hide him from the cameras. Okay. Okay. So it's like his incompetence and robbery was only matched by his incompetence and not noticing what he didn't know, basically like not knowing what he didn't know. He was so scientifically literate and made him confident. Yes. He knew so little about this that he was so sure about it. Okay. That's the Dunning-Kruger effect.

01:49:41One of my favorite quotes ever, it comes from Bertrand Russell, and he said, the whole problem with the world is that idiots are so sure of themselves and smart people are so full of doubt. And I always think about that when I come across the Dunning-Kruger. There's interesting too, there's a medical condition, which is if someone has a brain injury that paralyzes them on one side, sometimes they will not even realize that they're paralyzed. You can ask them, they're like, hey, can you grab that with your left hand when their left hand is paralyzed? And they're like, nah, I just don't really feel like it right now, you know? That's so weird. They will convince themselves to that degree. They have an actual medical condition. Well, there's people without medical conditions who can convince themselves of just as many absurdities. Yeah. Again, though, what they did find, too, in one of the studies that they did, they took all those people who scored really low, like in the bottom 25%, and they retrained them on some logic tasks and then gave them another logic assessment. After that, they were much more accurate in assessing themselves. Yeah.

01:50:37It's a really simple fix. To bring this back to the attribution piece that we talked about, to effectively build confidence in your life, you need to be able to accurately attribute the results of your actions to yourself. And if you're just an idiot and don't understand anything, then you're not going to have an accurate attribution. You don't know what actually produced the result. You don't know how much of it you were responsible for, how much was just luck. And because you don't know any of these things, you probably just assume you're awesome. Without any basis in reality whatsoever. But then as you build up that knowledge and that understanding of what you're doing, you start realizing all the different variables and factors and all the different ways that you could potentially mess something up or that you could be better. And that actually, in a sense, lowers your sense of confidence, but it makes it more realistic. Yeah, but it's all in that attribution. Like you misattribute your own ability and then you misattribute the actual assessment of your ability in that. So yeah, there's the mismatch there. You're right, yeah. It's just kind of funny too, just one little tidbit. In that original Dunning-Kruger study, they ended it with a little joke that said, this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.

01:51:59So they just came out and said, maybe we did the same thing. Very ironic. Yeah. Yeah. Which I thought was kind of funny. So yeah. So the second misattribution error that I want to talk about is another very common one, which is imposter syndrome. And interestingly, there's not a whole lot of research and literature around imposter syndrome, which I find very fascinating, especially given like in our industry, like it is becoming a pretty hot topic. I mean, there's so many prominent examples of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome. You see this all the time of just like insanely successful, prestigious, award winning people who are like, I got lucky. I don't understand why how this is happening. One of them that I've written about before is Maya Angelou. You know, she published 11 books. She won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She has three Grammys, a poem read at Bill Clinton's inauguration. She wrote a feature film screenplay, directed another. She collaborated with Martin Luther King Jr. on the civil rights movement. She was nominated for multiple Pulitzer Prizes. By any neutral measure, she's one of the most accomplished American writers of the 20th century.

01:53:00But it's interesting because apparently before publishing each book, she tells people, she says, each time I send a book to the publisher, I think to myself, oh, they're finally going to find out. They're going to find me out. Every book. Yeah. This was all luck. Yeah. I had nothing to do with it. So imposter syndrome, I think, is really interesting because in a lot of ways, it's kind of the inverse of the Dunning-Kruger effect. With the Dunning-Kruger, you're so ignorant about the domain that you're in that you kind of just naively adopt some beliefs that overestimate yourself in that domain. You don't understand what goes into it. So it seems simple to you. So you just assume you're going to be good at it. Whereas the imposter syndrome is kind of the reverse, where you are so thoroughly educated in your domain and you are so unbelievably aware of all of the variables and factors and different luck and chance that goes into a thing that you can't help but look at it and say, how did this happen?

01:53:57like, why me? Right? You know, we talked about building confidence through accumulating evidence and that evidence is accumulated by breaking things down in the small task and then slowly building up the process that you go through when you do that is this process of like starting out like, okay, I only know a little, so I'm going to get a little bit better. And then I'm going to get a little bit better. It's kind of like compound interest, right? Like you just slowly over the course of years, you accumulate all this knowledge and understanding and competence. and our brains are calibrated in such a way that that learning curve kind of happens at like a steady rate over a period of time. I think what happens with imposter syndrome is when the results start to vastly outstrip the effort. Like, I went through this when Subtle Art Not Giving a Fuck took off. I went through a period of pretty intense imposter syndrome because it's like... I was just, I mean, you were there. I was just a fucking dude with a blog and like posting a bunch of shit on Facebook. And next thing I know, I'm like number one in 12 different countries. I'm being invited to speak in front of thousands of people. I'm being invited to like Fortune 500 companies to speak to executive teams. And I'm like,

01:55:06what am I doing here? This is an accident. You're like 32, 33. Yeah, I was 32 years old. Yeah. And it, again, it's another miscalibration, right? Of like, I assumed my, my improvement and my progress in terms of competence was like pretty steady over a number of years. And the real world results that I received reflected that steady, inconsistent improvement. And then all of a sudden you get this, like, 10x or 100x jump and it's like well i didn't get 100 times better but my results just got 100 times better so something's wrong either i got lucky or somebody made a mistake around here and i think in essence that is what imposter syndrome is it's like it's this feeling of like okay i'm good but i'm not that good i'm sure maya angelou like was like why am i getting invited to the president's inauguration why am i being like handed all these awards and It's a mismatch, I think, in proportion. Yeah. Yeah, the results outstrip your perceived competence there. That makes sense to me. You know what I mean? Because like, yeah, your results, like you said, your results are 100x, but your abilities were like, you were still the same guy. Right. Right? Yeah. What happened in my case...

01:56:19and I think this is kind of maybe how I got over imposter syndrome, is I eventually just recognized that the industry or the area that I'm in, that curve is extremely exponential. When you're kind of far down on the curve, a 5% improvement results in a 5% increased result. But once you get... up towards the top of the curve, once you go from like 98th percentile to 99th percentile, that's not a 1% jump, that's like a 500% jump. And then when you go from 99th percentile to 99.5 percentile, that's another 500% jump, right? So ironically, I think it is just... having an accurate understanding of the domain that I'm in reoriented me appropriately to be like, oh, okay, no, this actually makes sense. I'm not this crazy imposter who like randomly- It's the nature of the industry. It is. Yeah. You don't necessarily have to experience these huge results to experience imposter syndrome either. A lot of times people even see it as a sign of progress because you probably are pushing yourself just a little bit even too. And you're in a new situation where you're like, ooh, I don't know if I belong here. That's maybe a good sign. Some people see it as a good sign. I would see it as a good sign too. If you think you're an imposter in a situation, it's probably a good sign that you're at least paying attention, right? You're paying attention to what's going on around you. You're like, I'm pushing myself maybe into a new territory or something like that. And maybe it's probably good to have a little bit of that. It's definitely better than Dunning-Kruger.

01:57:45Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I've been in rooms with like a lot of extremely successful people. And my experience generally is that most of them feel this way. It is interesting that at the top of the pyramid. most of the people are like, how did I get up here? I'm just a guy with a blog, or I just went where they told me to. Whereas when you go to the bottom of the pyramid, you run into Dunning-Kruger. You run into people who think they're the next big thing. John Steinbeck had this amazing quote about Americans. He said, the problem with America is that everyone who's poor thinks that they were just an unlucky millionaire. Anecdotally, I've seen this quite a bit. When I lived in New York City, I had a neighbor who was one of the... top researchers at McKinsey McKinsey. I mean, you know, they work with all of the biggest companies and corporations in the world. And I remember I had dinner with him once and he told like the most fascinating thing. He said that he was actually, when he was there, he was in charge of like one of the larger research projects, um, across all their client companies of really trying to identify top performers. Yeah.

01:58:53Very early on. How can you correctly identify maybe a future CEO or a future C-suite executive or a future like brilliant researcher straight out of college? And so they ran like tons of studies and experiments and tracked people for, I think, like a decade across lots of different companies. And he said that the conclusion that came back is that there are two ingredients that generally have to go together. All of the superstars had both of these ingredients at the same time. And he said the first one was they were obsessive overachievers and perfectionist. The second trait was they chronically underestimated themselves. He described it to me as, he said, like, overachievers with crippling insecurities. Yeah, yeah. Just a neurotic ball of net mess. It's basically people who are, like, excellent at what they, like, obsessively pursue excellence, and they always think everything they do sucks. He's like, they're miserable people, but, like... They will make a great CEO one day. Corporate America. The little research they have done on imposter syndrome. They do find that it's not that these imposters actually underperform. They just expect to underperform. And generally speaking, they're no different than anybody else on any measure that they give or that they've been tested on.

02:00:11The real attribute is that the bad outcomes, they attribute those to their ability. And then the good outcomes, they usually attribute to luck or circumstance. There's a couple of good things, too. They cheat less. Impostors cheat less. Yeah, people who feel like they're imposters cheat less because they're trying to prove themselves all the time, right? There's two different types of imposter syndrome. You have the true imposters who really just, they really do think that. It's probably these people at McKinsey. They really think they are imposters. They really do have a negative self-evaluation. And then they have what they call these strategic imposters, which I kind of like this. Oh, they like downplay them. They downplay it because it's more of a social saving face type of thing. They actually are accurate in their assessments, but they just downplay as kind of a socially acceptable way. Kind of a humility. Yeah. Performative type thing. The showing how humble I am. Yeah. Right. You mentioned something a few minutes ago that I want to double click on because I do think it's important. I don't want to let it just pass because it is actually really important. You pointed out, you said like anytime you are put in a situation that maybe stretches you beyond your current level of competence.

02:01:11it is natural and expected that you should feel a little bit imposter-ish, right? I mean, you see this a lot, you know, people who get maybe a big raise or a big promotion or start in a new career or a new company or whatever. I've seen this with friends with, like, when they become parents for the first time. They're like... I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Like, why, why is anybody trusting me to like take care of this thing? It's a very natural response. There's that old quadrant thing, right? Where you start at unconscious incompetence, then you go to conscious incompetence, then conscious, conscious competence, then unconscious competence. You are, um, being thrust back into the quadrant of conscious incompetence. You are, you are suddenly very aware of all the things you don't understand and you, all the skills you have not yet adopted, um, But that discomfort and that feeling is what forces you to adopt those skills. That's a healthy place to be. Right. That's where growth happens. The closest thing we have to like a mechanism for it, it's called the spotlight effect, right? We overestimate how much we think people are paying attention to us, right? And they've done various different studies on this. Basically, that's kind of the underlying mechanism is that we overestimate, oh, everybody's looking at me. I got this new job. You know, I got this promotion. Now everybody's looking at me when it's like, everybody's kind of like, oh yeah, he's there. Cool. Cool.

02:02:21Moving on. People tend to overestimate this one. There's this kind of like cool study they did where it was back in the 2000s where they had people put on a Barry Manilow shirt, which for college kids back then, it was like, that was embarrassing. Right. Let's go. That was embarrassing for them. And they predicted about half of the people who put this on thought, oh yeah, everybody's looking at me and making fun of me. It was only about a quarter of the people, not half. So it's just a simple example of how we overestimate You probably remember this. I did a video a few years ago about the spotlight effect. I went down the Venice boardwalk in a chicken suit. I delivered the entire video in the chicken suit. Nobody stopped me. Nobody said anything. Nobody cared. The whole video is about how like nobody fucking cares. Nobody's nobody's paying attention. Right. everybody's going to forget. The spotlight effect thing is important because again, a lot of our understanding of what is reality, right? What is evidence is socially based, you know? So if we assume everybody's looking at us and expecting certain things from us falsely, then we can draw the wrong conclusions about our own competence. I've seen a handful of people in our industry who have like very publicly said that imposter syndrome is like

02:03:31not a thing and you should never feel it. And I just think that's like the most fucked up. That's a really good point. Unrealistic. Because if you were the type of person who never feels imposter syndrome, never feels like you need to learn more and grow to earn the spot that you're in, there's another name for that. And that is our next miscalibration, which is narcissism. This is the internet's favorite pet subject at the moment. I think the first thing to understand about narcissism is that it's a little bit more nuanced than the lay person probably assumes. I think these days, narcissism is often just interchanged with the word selfishness, right? You know, people are like, that person is selfish. They must be a narcissist. Narcissistic traits are actually, there's a lot more subtlety going on than just being. being a dick and overestimating yourself. The useful example here, arguably one of the greatest chess players to ever live, was a prodigy from America named Bobby Fischer. What I hear said a lot is that Kasparov had the best career, Bobby Fischer had the highest peak.

02:04:29In 1972, he became the world champion. He defeated the Soviet Union's champion, Boris Spassky. He was very big because it was height of the Cold War and everything. But Bobby Fischer was like a very enigmatic person. As soon as he won the world championship, he completely disappeared, like just went off grid. And then he refused to play again. And then when the chess federation really pushed him to defend his title, he kept nitpicking problems with the game formats, with the way the tournament was going to be hosted, the scoring systems. There was always some technicality that he could point to for why it was unfair that he would have to play under those conditions. And so he ended up never playing again. He ended up vacating his world championship. And he actually retired from chess completely. Yeah. And what's interesting is that once he lost that kind of domain expertise of chess, the rest of his life unraveled. Like he had been a child prodigy. He was one of those kids like, I mean, he was playing chess professionally since he was like fucking 12 years old. So he was not a balanced person. And once chess was removed from his life, he didn't really have anything else to fall back on in terms of self-efficacy or a well-rounded identity. Yeah.

02:05:41And so he spiraled. He became a little bit of a crackpot conspiracy theorist. He would go on radio stations in random countries and say crazy things. He got arrested in Japan. He had his passport revoked. Basically, Iceland eventually allowed him to live there because that's where he won his world championship. kind of forgotten by the world. You and I discussed this before the episode. We settled on him as an example here because there's plenty of selfish assholes that we could have picked here, right? But I think Bobby Fisher is an interesting example in that... narcissism, it's not about the selfishness and it's not necessarily even about overestimating yourself because Bobby Fisher was legitimately the best in the world at what he did, but he was narcissistic because he could not tolerate ego threats. He could not tolerate criticism. He could not tolerate negative feedback or negative judgment. And so if the Dunning-Kruger is just somebody who's very ignorant and assumes they're much better than they actually are, and imposter syndrome is somebody who is so aware of all the factors that went into their success that they underestimate themselves or maybe feel a little bit less confident than their competence reflects. Narcissism is just a person who is constitutionally incapable of accepting narcissism.

02:07:15the negative feedback into that calibration system. And so the only evidence they receive is the positive. And so it just, it pumps them up endlessly in kind of a delusional self-confidence that is actually incredibly fragile. It can be derailed in a single moment. It must be defended at all times. And it actually makes for a very miserable person and a person who's very miserable to be around. I think it's very important to stay on narcissism for a bit here, not just because of the miscalibration thing, and that's what this chapter is about, but more practically just because so many people mistake confidence for narcissism and vice versa. I've done a mini series of videos on Instagram about the difference between confidence and narcissism. And... It's interesting because I know when you look at dating research around narcissism, you see a pretty consistent effect where narcissistic people are genuinely mistaken for being confident and they are judged as being much more attractive in the immediate term. But then after the person gets to know them after a couple dates, they become perceived as extremely unattractive because the fragility shows up, right? So the narcissist has a lot of self-efficacy. They have a lot of belief in themselves, but that belief is very tenuous. It's very reliant on external validation and people buying into that frame of reality.

02:08:46And so if anything happens in the narcissist's environment that does not support their delusional self-belief, the narcissist lashes out, attacks the person, undermines the person, refuses to hear certain things, refuses to accept feedback, and ultimately finds ways to kind of sabotage the situation. This is also why I tell people that the fastest way to distinguish between a narcissistic person and a confident person is to simply give them critical feedback. Just tell them no. Just say, no, actually, that's a bad idea. A narcissist will lash out. They'll get very defensive. They'll get very angry. They'll attack you. They'll tell you that you're an idiot, that your idea is stupid. A confident person will actually, you know, even if they're a little bit hurt, they'll want to hear more. They'll say, oh, interesting. Tell me more about that. Why do you think that? Even if they don't agree with you, they will respect your opinion. But a narcissist, because their self-efficacy is so tenuous, they can't stand for you to have a different opinion. Your opinion must be either rejected or

02:09:50Or changed. It's because they've staked all of that on that external validation, right? Like their whole self-regard is staked on that. So any threat to that is very, it's very threatening. It's very dangerous for them because if they accept that, then what do they have left? There is nothing left. It's kind of the opposite of the self-mastery that Bandura talked about, right? It's not based in any real world experience. It's just based on that external drip of external validation that they have. I think what is also distinct about narcissism versus a Dunning Kruger imposter syndrome is it is extremely socially validated, right? Like, like a Dunning Kruger person, they might overestimate their own abilities, but it's not because they think they're a special superior person. They're just clueless, right? They're just, they think they're good at a thing that they're not good at. Whereas a narcissist, they need to believe that they are extremely good at a thing that Because there's also this narrative piece of I'm better than these other people. I'm special. I deserve special treatment. And so they need to feel superior to others. And that is also part of the miscalibration, right? Because it's like if every social interaction you go into, you have to feel superior or better than others, then you.

02:11:13by default, you're never going to get accurate feedback from the world about where you actually stand. And so you're never going to build real confidence. Like an actual confident person would be able to walk into a room and be like, well, I hope I'm better than these other people. I hope I'm good at this thing. I think I'm good at this thing. But if I lose, that's fine. I'm just going to learn from it. I'm going to improve. A narcissist is going to look at it and they're just, they're not going to be able to tolerate the thought of being inferior. But that's just one type of narcissism, right? Yes. And that's the most common one we think of. When people use the term narcissist in just the general sense, that's what they usually mean. So there's... two types of narcissism there's the grandiose narcissist which is the classical narcissist the narcissist who believes i'm better than everybody else so give me special treatment but then there's also the vulnerable narcissist who also has a delusional belief that they are somehow worse off than everybody else that they are uniquely victimized that there's something especially unlucky about their existence and therefore they deserve special treatment and attention right

02:12:16Right. So the commonality is I deserve something special. I deserve something. I'm entitled to something. Exactly. It's the entitlement. Yeah. Both are based on a completely inaccurate measurement of self versus others. All of it is externally based. All of it's the validation comes from the outside. Yes. And so the grandiose narcissist has kind of this endless craving for other people to validate how great they are. fucked they are, how unlucky and unfortunate they are, how victimized they are. So you get this really fucked up situation with vulnerable narcissists where they will like actually put themselves in positions to be taken advantage of and to be victimized because that feeds their own narrative of how special and how much attention they deserve. Just goes, you know, it's so wild. We just, we have to have a consistent story no matter how fucked it is, right? Yes. That's, yeah, I don't know. We would rather be miserable than uncertain. Yeah. Do you find yourself around spending a lot of time around narcissists these days? I know you've talked before that, you know, you've, there definitely were a lot of narcissists in your lives and-

02:13:26I'll admit I've had some narcissism at different points. We're all a little bit narcissistic. I went through a phase where I think I was a bit narcissistic. Today, I've developed a pretty strong allergy to narcissistic people. I feel like I spot them pretty quickly, and I have zero hesitation of like, bye. But coming back to... kind of my story, my situation. You know, I mentioned earlier that I never felt like I developed that domain confidence when I was young. You know, the video game thing obviously didn't really pan out. The music thing, it gave me a little bit of confidence for a little while, but then like as soon as I tried to take it professionally and went to music school, like I'm not. I actually felt incredibly inadequate and then I ended up quitting, which also didn't feel very good. I actually think one of the reasons I got into self-help so much, and I think this is probably true about a lot of people, is I did feel so just broadly insecure about.

02:14:27across all of my life. I felt insecure in school. I felt insecure socially. I felt insecure romantically. I mentioned earlier, I went through this phase where I did try all this self-help stuff. I did try all the affirmations and I did try like the body, you know, the body language shit and all that. And I got into the dating coaching stuff. Yeah. And I look back at that period and I was like pretty narcissistic. Like I was very self-absorbed. It was all positive thinking all the time. I was very kind of like had this grandiosity thought irrationally highly of myself. And it just made me an asshole to a lot of people. And I think two things happened concurrently in my 20s. One is, is that I discovered that I actually did have... quite a bit of talent and skill for communicating with people relating to people and then also for writing and i did develop a lot of domain confidence in those two areas and then simultaneously i realized that you know i ended up

02:15:26hurting a lot of people that i cared about just from like being such a selfish prick and it's one of those classic cases of like okay you know eventually all all of your failed relationships the only thing they have in common is you right so it's like you built some evidence yes yes i definitely built some evidence I'm like, okay, I've like really pissed off half a dozen people I care about in the exact same way. I think I'm the problem. Kind of the confluence of those two things. One was like actually building some genuine confidence and competence in some areas of my life. And then secondly, realizing that I was kind of overcompensating through some narcissistic tendencies and I needed to like chill out a little bit on myself. By the time I got to my late twenties, my thirties, I was a little bit well-adjusted and had kind of a genuine good self-esteem and self-efficacy. But it was a messy process to get there. It's a very messy process. I don't know. The older I get and the more I see narcissists around or I see narcissistic behavior, I just feel sorry for them now. And that'll ruffle some feathers because I get it. Like...

02:16:33they do hurt a lot of people. Like I get that. And I went through periods too, where I had like probably been a little more narcissistic than I needed to be. But when it's taken too far, I get it. It hurts people. But it's like, there is some sort of, they weren't taught. How, how to build that evidence. It's a coping mechanism. They're hurt people, hurting people, right? Yes. There's that old saying, hurt people, hurt people, right? Right. I'm not saying to dismiss their behavior. I'm not saying it excuses it. It explains it to some degree. And so, I don't know, the older I get, the more I'm just like, man, I feel sorry for these people. You know, it's kind of sad. It's a dead end. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is a dead end. I don't know. Maybe it is because I used to kind of be like that, but I just try to stay away as much as possible. Yeah. And I still think that's the right, the right move, but you can still feel sorry for somebody for it. Why do you think it narcissism is having such a big moment right now? I mean, it's like, I will say this from our content. There's like an insatiable demand at the moment for narcissism content. And I find it interesting because this has not been true up until maybe like three or four years ago. I think this is one reason. I don't know if it's the reason or a big reason.

02:17:35I do think a lot of it is people don't want to take some responsibility for their own behavior too. And it's a little bit of a, maybe not projection, but it's just a way for them to deflect some responsibility around things. Again, I get it. I know these people can be hurtful and do a lot of harm. That's, that's true. But I, I also think it's just a way for people. people to excuse their own... They didn't take responsibility in that relationship necessarily. People just have different wants and needs sometimes. And some people interpret that as selfishness, and then that gets taken to, like you said, that gets taken to narcissism. So instead of saying, this person wanted something different than I wanted, and they held a boundary, sometimes that's the thing too. It's like when people hold boundaries... Other people see that as selfishness. They can't handle that. And they're like, oh, this person is a narcissist because they told me what they wanted and they didn't want the same thing I wanted. I think there's some of that. I don't know if that's the full story. I think there's a lot of that going on. It's just easier to call somebody a narcissist rather than saying this. I was hurt by this and it's nobody's fault. Then they have to deal with like the icky, messy. Yeah.

02:18:37feelings of, you know, dealing with other people. Nuance and complication and dealing with other people who have different wants than I do. I don't know. How does that land for you? I have a very cynical theory around this. Extremely cynical theory. I don't know if I believe this, but it is something that has occurred to me, especially given, like, how popular this content is specifically around social media, like short form content. So when you look at research around social media, social media power users tend to be pretty high in narcissistic traits. So narcissists, by and large, are on social media the most. They tend to engage the most on social media. They tend to post the most on social media. And narcissists don't think they're narcissists. They think everybody else is a narcissist. Oh, okay. And so what I think is that you have these social platforms where their power users are pretty high in narcissistic levels. traits and because they're high in narcissistic traits, they probably struggle in a lot of their relationships in their lives. And because they are, they're high in narcissistic traits, they don't take responsibility for those struggles and they blame everybody else. And so when they see content about narcissism, they're like, that's why, that's why I'm surrounded by narcissists. And so they like, and they share, and then I just make another video. That is pretty cynical.

02:19:59But it makes a lot of sense. And we make money, Drew. That's true. Yeah. I use that term very carefully anymore. I don't go around calling people narcissists. It's so overused. Yeah. It's so overused right now. Especially like if you're talking about narcissistic personality disorder, that's a whole different ballgame. Whole different ballgame. If you're just calling somebody a run-of-the-mill narcissist, even though too, I don't even use that. I'll call people an asshole. Yes. A lot. I like that word way more than being a narcissist because sometimes people are just an asshole, you know? And it comes back to that subtlety, right? Like- selfishness is not necessarily narcissism. Like plenty of non-narcissists behave selfishly at times, having a big ego, being overconfident, right? Like lots of people who are not narcissists are overconfident at times or have a big ego at times. Narcissism, very specifically, it is that combination of the entitlement plus inability to accept feedback. It's like those two things wrap together. If you're not good at establishing your own boundaries, then other people who establish boundaries are threatening to you. And that can look like narcissism to some people. So again, it's just like, I wanted this person to do something. They said, no, they're a selfish, narcissistic asshole. I think that comes up more than people realize. So just to summarize, leading into this chapter, we talked about how confidence is built by accumulating evidence, that evidence is dependent

02:21:23This chapter, we talked about how if you can't calibrate what is realistic or what is reality, right? Like if you have some sort of delusional perception around yourself or the world, or if you're surrounded by people who enable a delusional perception like Florence Jenkins, then you will not get an accurate level of confidence to your competence. I do think it is worth stating plainly that the goal in life in general is not necessarily to be confident all You shouldn't be confident about things you're bad at. That would harm you. That would be bad. Whereas you should be confident about things you're very good at. So the goal with confidence isn't to accumulate as much confidence as possible. The goal with confidence is to have an accurate perception of your own competence and your own abilities in each situation. And so if you want to feel confident in more situations, then you should aim to be more competent in more situations. So in this chapter, we covered a few different ways that we get miscalibrated. There's Dunning-Kruger, which is we're just so clueless that we assume we know way more than we do, which ironically then prevents us from learning because we feel like we don't need to learn anything. We talked about imposter syndrome, which is somebody who is put into a new situation. Maybe the results of their efforts have outstripped their perception of their own confidence. And so they feel like they don't deserve it or they're not ready for it.

02:22:45But I think you and I both agree that this is generally, it's either A, a high quality problem, or B, it's just, you know, part of the payment of growth. You know, it's just, it's a natural side effect of putting yourself in new situations and expanding your own abilities. And then, of course, we talked about narcissism, which is less about the confidence in general. It's more about the inability to accept feedback from. and the social narrative around entitlement, special treatment. You have grandiose narcissists who have just delusional levels of self-belief, self-efficacy coming out of their ears. They probably believe they're amazing at things that they're actually terrible at, much like Florence Jenkins. Whereas you have vulnerable narcissists who chronically underestimate themselves because that gets them special treatment and that gets them validation from others. And so they refuse to accept feedback from the world to maintain that self-perception. It's funny because at the top of the episode, you kind of joked. You're like, I've never really worried about confidence. I just do things. And sure enough, here we are like three hours in and it turns out, yeah, you probably shouldn't be worrying so much about how much confidence you have because confidence is downstream of competence. So the goal of confidence isn't to accumulate massive amounts of it. The goal of confidence is to accurately reflect the competence you feel in the world. And when that confidence does not accurately reflect your competence, it's not.

02:24:12you suffer. You either overestimate yourself and set yourself up for... massive failures and embarrassment, or you chronically underestimate yourself and put yourself in a situation where you never realize your potential, you never achieve the things that you could achieve, and you never live up to maybe some of the goals and dreams you have. This raises a really interesting question. Because if confidence is domain-specific, if it's really just about building evidence about one skill or one situation, how is it that some people seem confident no matter what situation they walk into? Some people just seem to be pretty okay trying a new thing and understanding that like, hey, I guess I'll just get good at this. Whereas some people like really freak out and become very neurotic and anxious around any sort of newness or uncertainty. And so up until this point, we've talked about how generalized confidence is the way like Norman Vincent Peale espoused isn't really a thing that the route to general confidence is selecting specific domains and accumulating evidence of competence in that domain. It turns out you can build generalized confidence, but that approach to building generalized confidence is a bit counterintuitive. And,

02:25:25And as we'll see in the next chapter, experts for a long time thought they knew how to build generalized confidence. They kind of bought into the Peel fallacy for a while. And if you were born in the last 50 years, it probably fucked you up a little bit as a kid. Stay right there, more solved coming up after this. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. We treat confidence like it's a prerequisite to starting something, but usually it's the other way around. You start and then the confidence later catches up. Take starting a business, for example. Most people, they never even start because the list of reasons not to outlasts their nerve. Now, Shopify clears that list and makes it easy to make things happen. Everything you need to start selling is ready from day one. And it especially helps with the scary part, the moment that somebody goes to pay you for the first time. This is where a lot of sales quietly die. But Shopify checkout gets more of them across the line and more returning customers details are already saved. It's just one tap and it's done. And because Shopify runs everything from setup to checkout, you can focus on what actually matters. Growing the damn thing, making a better product, and you have all the tools to do it.

02:26:41With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash solved. That's shopify.com slash solved. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash solved. All right, we're back. Let's jump back into it. So a quick recap up to this point. In chapter one, we talked about how most self-help advice gets confidence completely backwards. This is the Peel fallacy. This idea that you need to feel confident or believe that you're confident before you can actually perform well. Turns out that's not true. In chapter two, we learned it's actually the reverse. You have to perform well, and that's what builds confidence. Confidence is the output, not the input of high performance. But there are a couple caveats to that building of confidence. For one, confidence is domain-specific. Two, you have to build that evidence, but that evidence has to be rooted in reality. And then in chapter three, we learned about all of the ways that we perform misinterpret reality, let's say. We are miscalibrated towards reality. We overestimate ourselves in some situations because of our ignorance. We underestimate ourselves in other situations because we just assume that we got lucky or that we were in the right place at the right time. And then, of course, there's all sorts of social comparison aspects, different narcissistic tendencies that can warp our perception of how good we are at something. Okay.

02:28:15And that can give the illusion of confidence. Now that last point is really important because in this chapter, we're gonna take a little bit of a detour to talk about self-esteem because self-esteem is very relevant to this discussion of confidence. And up until this point, we've really been shitting on the self-help industry and traditional self-help advice and the Peel fallacy and how it's gotten it backwards. But it turns out that conventional psychology also got this backwards for a good 60 or 70 years as well. And their version of getting this backwards was the self-esteem movement. So I want to take a few minutes and just kind of briefly catch our listeners up on what self-esteem is, where the idea came from, how prevalent it became for a number of decades, how it infiltrated public policy quite a bit. and what the repercussions of those mistakes ended up being, because it's going to relate back to a lot of this discussion of confidence that we've had. So the concept of self-esteem, it goes all the way back to the early days of psychology. I think from the beginning, everybody kind of had this intuitive sense that people seem to have a relationship with themselves. And if you have a good relationship with yourself, or if you tend to have relationships,

02:29:32positive feelings and thoughts about yourself, you probably are doing better in life versus if you have bad thoughts and feelings about yourself. William James was one of the first people that really tried to pin down this concept and put a framework around it. And he simply defined self-esteem as your successes divided by your pretensions. essentially what you achieved divided by what you expect of yourself. And so if you have insanely irrationally high expectations of yourself, you're probably going to feel bad about yourself quite often. Whereas if you have very low expectations for yourself and you actually achieve quite a bit, you're going to feel very good about yourself. Now this little equation, it's fun, but I think it's more descriptive than prescriptive. Like it doesn't really tell us what to do, right? Like it Does it mean we should have low expectations for ourselves? I don't know if that's necessarily the case. Does it tell us that we should go out and achieve as much as possible? I don't know if that's necessarily great advice either. The thing that William James intuitively got correct was that he saw self-esteem as an output of your actions and behaviors, not an input of your actions and behaviors.

02:30:43As we're going to see, this is going to change pretty soon because the next generation of psychologists came along, starting with Carl Rogers in the 40s and 50s. And Carl Rogers, you know, Rogerian therapy, we've talked about on some previous episodes, you know, his big thing was this concept of unconditional positive regard. So what he noticed in his clinical practices is that generally people who came in with a lot of problems, there was an intense amount of self-judgment and an intense amount of shame. And they seemed extremely critical about themselves and often in very irrational and unfair ways towards themselves. And so Carl Rogers was just very focused on getting people to accept themselves, right? Like just tolerate their own flaws and faults. And sure enough, he discovered that if you were able to do this, it then seemed to free people up to actually improve their lives in some meaningful way. Now, around the same time, Abraham Maslow was doing his early work around humanistic psychology, and he was playing around with different hierarchies of psychological needs. You know, most people at this point are pretty familiar with Maslow's philosophy.

02:31:54pyramid. Turns out the pyramid is not very empirical. It was just kind of a throwaway framework that he jotted down in a notebook, but that's a podcast for another day. But Maslow was the first person who really put self-esteem as a need. And not only that, but he put it like pretty high in the hierarchy. And so he saw it as a prerequisite to high human functioning. And I think this is, uh, him and Rogers are kind of the first point where you see this argument of like, no, self-esteem is not the result of living a good life. It is necessary to live a good life. And so this is where the Peel fallacy creeps in. And I have not seen any direct evidence that Norman Vincent Peale pulled from Maslow and Rogers, but Maslow and Rogers were prominent and doing a lot of their work in the 1940s when Peale was going through all of his insecurities and anxieties. So it would not surprise me if Peale kind of pulled his framework off of Maslow and Rogers and then.

02:33:00popularized it to the mainstream. Yeah, either way, it was kind of in the zeitgeist, right? Yeah. That was just kind of the thought that was coming up in the culture for sure. So once we get into the 1950s, you start getting into some of the work by Nathaniel Brandon, and he wrote, a very popular book called the six pillars of self-esteem. And this is where you really see the concept just like take hold and Brandon and a number of researchers and psychologists around him, like really strongly believe that if you could just make people feel good about themselves, um, then you would see all sorts of good positive outcomes happen as a downstream effect of that. It was really just the Rogerian idea of unconditional positive self-regard on steroids to the point where there was a strong moral inclination of like, we should be implementing this into schools. We should be implementing this into prisons. This should be part of our public policies. It's like, giving people high self-esteem, making sure that everybody in society feels good about themselves. So then that will enable them to go out and achieve great things. And so by the time you get to the 1970s and 80s, this is just the water that everybody's swimming in. Self-esteem and the Peel fallacy, not only is it dominating the personal growth and self-help spaces, it is now just kind of accepted orthodoxy of...

02:34:31psychologists and is being aggressively pushed into public policy. So one simple example of this is that in the 1980s, there was a California assemblyman by the name of John Vasconcellos. And he was the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and controlled the entire community. California educational state budget. Now, Vasconcellos became a bit of a self-help junkie. He attended Esalen Institute. He got really into the human potential movement. I believe he went to like a Wayne Dyer seminar or something, and he just got completely converted. He was like, this changed my life. Everybody needs to do this. And he actually had quite a bit of power in the state of California to implement a lot of these changes. So in 1986, he managed to create the California Task Force to promote self-esteem and personal and social responsibility. God, you gotta love bureaucrats. These names, so good. So this task force commissioned UC professors to research the link between self-esteem and six social problems, crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, welfare dependency, and academic failure. And so the California state system...

02:35:41started implementing this research. They started really digging into everything and really trying to see where these interventions helped and what sort of difference they were making. So the researchers studied for over three years, and they found nothing. There was no link. There was no connection. There was no causation. They couldn't find anything. The problem was, was that the guy who controlled their budget wanted there to be a link. He had basically staked his career on there being a connection between self-esteem and all these pro-social outcomes. So in 1989, the task force published its public report and the press release declared a strong relationship between self-esteem and social problems had been, quote unquote, definitely confirmed. The statement itself was false. It did not reflect the data accurately. The researchers who allowed it to go through knew it was false, but they also knew Vasconcelos controlled the University of California state budget. This was crazy. I didn't know that. I knew that, you know, the self-esteem movement started in California. Like, oh, I've heard that story. I did not know there was like a systematic kind of papering over of the actual results at the time. They knew it was false and they kept pushing it.

02:36:55I think this is wild. This is one of the few times that political corruption has intersected with psychology and actually had a very real impact and effect on the world. This task force report from California, it went on to become the best-selling state document in history. It sold over 60,000 copies. Vasconcellos became a... national celebrity. He went on countless talk shows. More than 40 California counties formed their own self-esteem task forces. The ripple effects lasted for decades. What it did is it validated the hypothesis, which had been around, you know, since the 60s, that If you could just make people feel good about themselves, then they would perform highly as a result. It's the Peel fallacy all over again. Well, it's one thing to be like Peel and write a book about it. Yes. And it's another to be a government official and like, this is our policy, institute it and scale it to that degree and institutionalize it. So that's what I just found wild. And they did it knowing that it wasn't actually true, that it didn't actually work.

02:38:09I mean, I don't know about you. We talked a little bit earlier in the episode. You know, you said that you didn't feel like this stuff was pushed on you. I didn't feel like it was like shoved down my throat in that way. Yeah. I do remember like the grade inflation stuff that I do remember being a thing. Like when I was in middle school, like, oh, everybody's getting A's and B's like, this is weird. So I do remember that. Yeah, we had great inflation. We had participation trophies. I remember I was horrible at sports and I got a trophy for everything I did, which I remember at the time just thinking it was ridiculous. I'm like, why are they giving me a trophy? Like, I don't even want to be here. This also could have just been the water I swam in, though, too. And it could have just been like there was a lot of positive regard around it. Because I do remember there were definitely adults around me saying, oh, you kids are so coddled these days. I do remember that. But I just don't remember it being like shoved down my throat, like everybody's special and everything like that.

02:38:53Great inflation was definitely there. There was a lot of that. So I very specifically, because I was an underachiever in school, and I very specifically remember my teachers telling me. that i could do anything i wanted that i was brilliant anything i dreamed i could accomplish i just had to believe in myself that like i remember going to school counselors and they were telling you know like did you have like assembly speakers come and stuff oh yeah okay okay maybe i'm misremembering just a little bit because i remember this now there was like motivational speakers who would come to our school yeah we had motivational speakers come we had uh i remember we yeah i mean there was tons of stuff okay Yeah. Okay. I might be misremembering this a little bit. Like, I think it was a little bit since I was a kid, I didn't know what came before that. Yeah. Yeah. And to tie this back into some of the research we talked about earlier, right, about the link between performance and confidence.

02:39:45Remember, adults, if you make them feel better about themselves, they will perform a little bit better. Kids, they will not. And in fact, what you find with children, and this is actually a very important point for the parents out there, when you are trying to motivate and validate your kids... It's very important that you validate them for things that they've done, not for things that they are. Because if you tell a kid, you're so smart, you're so great, you can do anything, and they haven't done anything, what you're actually subtly doing is you're creating an incentive for them to not do anything. Because they're already being rewarded for just existing. And so if they actually try and fail, then they risk losing what they already have. Whereas if you only validate them for the things that they try, then you create an incentive for them to keep trying new things. And this is really important. This is something that I mean, you see it come up a lot with gifted children. You actually there's some I did a YouTube video on this last year, but there's some really interesting research around kids who are particularly talented or gifted. It's very common that they get validated way too much when they're young. Yeah.

02:40:56And so what happens is that they actually become demotivated. Because obviously when you're young, anything you try to learn, you're going to fail at. You're going to be bad at it first. And so if you're one of these kids that is just always being told how great you are without doing anything, then you actually develop some neuroses around trying and failing. You just kind of become a sloth. Right. Yeah. Or perfectionism takes over to the point where you don't act and don't take those risks. And yeah. Yeah. You see that a lot. So yeah, we kind of forget now, but it is hard to overstate how big the self-esteem movement got. Like, not only did it comprise the entire self-help industry and personal growth industry, by the mid-90s, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. But we're talking about education systems across the Western world. We're talking about public policy. We're talking about, like, Government bureaucracies are being created. NGOs are being created. You're talking about prison systems, correctional systems. Corporate programs. Corporate programs, seminars. Billions and billions of dollars, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of jobs are hinging on this idea that if you can make people feel good, they will perform better. The problem was is that the academics...

02:42:16quietly knew the math was not mathing. The data was not lining up. There was not much strong evidence going on. So around the year 2000, the Association for Psychological Science decided that somebody needed to get to the bottom of this. Somebody needed to like really figure this out. And so they tapped a researcher by the name of Roy Baumeister at the University of Florida State. And Baumeister is a superstar. You and I are both fanboys of him. Anybody who's like... If you're a psychologist listening to this, you probably know who Baumeister is. And if you're not, you probably don't. But Baumeister is a bit of a badass. And he was tapped by the Association of Psychological Science and basically told, like, look, you have all the resources you need. We'll give you all the researchers you need to help you. Get to the bottom of this. Figure this out. What? like get the data right and come back to us with what the reality is, what the effect sizes are. And it's worth noting that Baumeister himself fully subscribed to self-esteem. He was completely bought into the movement, totally bought into the idea that you needed to make people feel better about themselves. And so he took the project on with a lot of pride and gusto. And over the next few years, what he found was –

02:43:38basically a nuclear bomb to the self-esteem movement. He published a paper in 2003 and the results pretty much just murdered the self-esteem movement, like shot it in the fucking face. Deadness tracks, yeah. And it has been dead ever since. Yeah, shot it dead in its tracks, more or less. And then it basically said what we already knew about it, that too, right? That self-esteem really is largely an outcome of success, And artificially inflating it, like you said, especially in children, doesn't produce better outcomes, doesn't produce achievement. It actually a lot of times does the opposite, like we've talked about. There were two tiny effects that did survive kind of the scrutiny of it, though. One of them was just kind of people with higher self-esteem were a little bit happier. Yeah. And they did, they were a bit more likely to just take action on things like this behavioral activation type things. Right. But the quote from Baumeister was it fell short of, of what many psychologists had hoped for, including himself, like you said. So he took a very honest look at this and.

02:44:43Up to that point, he kind of thought that for the past 30, 40, 50, 60 years, this has been the holy grail of psychology is finding a way to get people to feel better about himself. And he just flat out admitted like, no, that's actually wrong. He also found though too, interestingly, which we've kind of already talked about, a connection to narcissism. High self-esteem, they found, was actually positively associated with a lot of narcissistic traits. And not only that, but when ego is threatened under these circumstances, aggression became actually a lot more common. So somebody who was very high self-esteem staked a lot of their identity on something and you threatened them, they were much more likely to become aggressive out of this. I believe they even did some of these studies in prison populations. You think about this a little bit. Yeah. Just think about it. If you go into a prison, you're probably actually going to find a lot of people who are very high in self-esteem. They think a lot about themselves, right? And they're also very, very aggressive if you threaten their self-esteem in any way, threaten their identity in any way. Baumeister was one of the first ones to really find that connection there.

02:45:47The conclusion that they really came to, though, out of this was that it wasn't the level of self-regard that you had, the level of self-esteem that you had that predicted the problems, but whether or not it was anchored to anything real, which is exactly what we've been talking about this whole time. That evidence building, that mastery experience that you have. If you can link your self-regard and your self-worth to something that's actually real in the real world that you've done... that's a more durable form of self-esteem and that you don't get all the aggression and everything with it. If you just pump up self-esteem and don't anchor it to anything real, it becomes very fragile at that point and turns into narcissism. So this is kind of what they found in the early 2000s when they started doing all that. There was another set of researchers too, another couple of them, Crocker and Knight. They basically found that same thing. And they said, self-esteem, it wasn't about the level that you had. It wasn't how much you had, but what you staked it on, what you staked your self-esteem on. So if you tie your self-esteem, if you tie your self-worth

02:46:42um to a specific domain then any threat to that domain is also a threat on you okay and this is where you get the like you get a lot of people coming back at you and it can turn into aggression at some point like physical actual physical aggression at some point what they found is just even ordinary feedback if you've placed all your self-esteem in this one area and you get ordinary feedback from it you you'll get very defensive with it too i don't know about you but i like that's Definitely been times in the past where I stake a lot of my self-esteem on being the smart kid or whatever. Like I was good in school and like went to grad school and like had this whole identity around being smart and any perceived slight of my intelligence, I would get incredibly defensive about it and even lash out at people sometimes too, or just be like, oh, fuck you. You don't know you're dumb, you know, whatever. You don't know what you're talking about. And I had to kind of really sit and wrestle with that for a long time. It's interesting because by my definition, yeah.

02:47:33that's not self-esteem, right? Like if you're having to defend yourself all the time. You don't have a whole lot of self-esteem. Right, you clearly don't feel great about yourself. So it is, I mean, maybe at some point we'll do an episode on self-esteem, but I've always felt like one of the core issues of self-esteem has just been a definition problem and a measurement problem. And it is interesting because if you do go back to some of those original things, researchers and writers in the 50s and 60s, they did define it in a much more holistic way, or they tried to at least, right? And if you go back and read Nathaniel Brandon, like he talked about that self-esteem is, it really is a comfort with yourself. even when things are not going well. It is a willingness to be different or be rejected or to have your ideas not accepted because you feel comfortable enough with yourself, right? And this is often the difficulty with psychology is that when it comes time to measure things,

02:48:32it's very difficult to measure psychological processes and psychological experiences. And so to get some form of measurement, you have to boil things down into like a simple survey and, And once you kind of water it down into a survey question, you dilute the concept and you kind of make it a little bit of a caricature, like a cartoon version of what the original kind of philosophical claim was. Right. I mean, just like with Carl Rogers or Maslow or Young, like they were not they were not empirical at all. But they were also not advocating for like an unrealistic form of self-esteem. They were trying to get at like, hey, there needs to be something here that you can rely on that you can lean on. Yeah. Right. Can I go on a tangent really quick? I'll allow it. I mean, we're already on a tangent. This comes up a lot. You know, there's a lot of discourse these days around like therapy culture. Right. And one of the more intelligent things I've seen written about it is.

02:49:38came from a writer named Freddie DeBoer. And he basically made the argument, he said that therapy concepts, you know, there's a certain class of ideas and concepts that are very good and healthy on an individual level, but they become unhealthy on a social level. And I could see self-esteem being one of those things. Because when you think about Carl Rogers, right? Like, I have a lot of sympathy and understanding for like where he was coming from you know if he was a clinical psychologist right he's working with individual people people are coming to him with like massive life issues huge crises going on in their lives and they're probably coming in being unbelievably harsh on themselves and so of course he rightly observed which i think all of us have observed the same thing like all of us know somebody in our lives that is irrationally hard on themselves and makes themselves miserable quite frequently because of the amount of self-judgment that they have. And so I think Carl Rogers was just making a very obvious observation of like, Hey dude, you shouldn't do that so much. You should give yourself a break, have some love. You know, like if you're, when your partner fucks up, you don't like scream at them for every little error that they make. Like you, you have some compassion, you forgive them, you know, you tell them it's going to be all right. Yeah.

02:50:55Uh, you, you, you look at the better sides of their, their personality. Like, why don't you do that for yourself? That was it. I think what the self-esteem movement is that they tried to take that concept that was true in the micro and then make a macro version of it. And it's like, well, let's just make everybody feel great about themselves. And cause then clearly it will map, you know, well onto society. And I just think it's one of those, uh, concepts that it, it just doesn't work that way. It was same. You can't scale it. With peel, where he's like, this worked for me, so it should work for everybody, right? Same. Same fallacy. Yeah. Whatever it is, a technique, a therapeutic modality, whatever it is, working on the individual level, once you scale it, then it just gets perverted. That's a definitional problem, I think, too, because everybody has a different definition of it, like you said. So, yeah, that's an interesting little tangent we went on. I'm glad I allowed it. You should feel good about yourself for allowing that. Where this like gets into problems though, too. So the Crocker and Knight, the whole thing around staking your, your self-esteem on a single domain somewhere. Right. You've also talked about this before too, about like diversifying your identity. Yes. Right. If you do stake your identity on too many things, this is something I definitely realized where like a long time I was just like,

02:52:05I got to be a smart person or whatever it is, right? And that's a very fragile way to live. So you need, you know, maybe there's some relationships you need to stake your identity on as well. Maybe there's other areas. Maybe there's hobbies. Maybe there's whatever. So, yeah. But the problems you run into, though, Crocker and Knight, they identified several areas. The two big ones, though, really were learning and relationships. It's like when you learn... When you're learning something, you're staking a lot of your identity on that. Any setbacks on that are like considered huge catastrophic failures at that point. And then you're stupid or you can't learn or you can't do this. You're incompetent. And again, it's just like a catastrophic failure on your part. The other one is relationships, though, too, because at that point, what you're doing is you're staking your self-esteem on all of that external validation, which we've already talked about, too. You're looking for an external source. of a little drip of validation. And when you don't get that, boom, that's also a catastrophic failure. Right. Of your identity. Yeah. Around that. So there's kind of a metabolic tax to it too that they've, they've come across, you know, like when, if your self image needs this constant defending, there's kind of a low grade vigilance that's going on and you're always on guard and you're always like looking for some external way to, to get that validation. And it's just, it's exhausting. Self-esteem is definitely not what it's cracked up to be, but that's what we found. Yeah. Yeah.

02:53:24Again, it's the side effect of getting things right. It's not the cause. So we were raised to believe that self-esteem was something that we could be given, you know, and we could be given it through trophies, compliments, encouragement, great inflation. But what nobody actually told us is that self-esteem that isn't earned doesn't stick. people can tell us all the best things in the world about ourselves, but if we didn't do anything to be told that, it's not actually going to help us. It's not actually going to make us feel better about ourselves. And it turns out in many ways, this can backfire. And that backfiring explains, I think, a lot of the problems that the last few generations have grown up with. So we've taken the self-esteem detour. And I think that's useful as context for what we're going to explain in the rest of this chapter, which is how you actually do build that generalized confidence. Because if you can't delude yourself into feeling confident, as we saw with the Peel fallacy and the self-esteem movement, how the fuck is it that some people just seem to be so self-assured in so many situations? Like there are...

02:54:34generally confident people in the world. We've all met them. We've all been around them. Maybe there have been times in our lives that we've felt that way ourselves. So where does that come from? How do we get it? If self-esteem is not the way we get it, if the Peel fallacy is not the way we get it, how do we actually get it? So Bandura came back to save the day. In the late 2000s, I think around 2007, 2008, Bandura returned to the concept of self-efficacy, but he added to it. He found a broader, more widely applicable concept. version of self-efficacy. Now, we talked earlier, Drew, about me not patting myself on the back too much, but- Go ahead. Go ahead, Drew. Can I just give myself, can I just take a victory lap on this one? So I wrote something probably about- 12, 13 years ago. I think it started as a viral article. Since then, I post it on social media all the time. One of the drums that I bang on frequently is I say, confidence is not an expectation of success. Confidence is a comfort with failure. And that is exactly what Bandura found. That generalized confidence, it is not...

02:55:44feeling like you're going to succeed in every domain you go into, generalized confidence is a comfort with failure and setback, no matter what you do. So one way to think about this, right, is Bandura's original finding was that self-efficacy or confidence can be built only within a domain. Right. But that domain can be a lot of different things. That domain, it could be woodworking. It could be music. It could be relationship skills. It could be your career path. It could also be managing failure. You could treat managing failure as a skill that you can develop confidence in. And almost magically, if you choose that skill to build confidence around, a tolerance of failure, that makes you confident across the board. That is what allows you to walk into any room and feel self-assured and not worry what's going to happen to you. Because you know you can handle the worst case situation. Now, Bandura called this coping self-efficacy. I like to think of it as like meta self-efficacy. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very meta skill. Yeah. Uh, because it's almost like if you and I have been drilling towards the core of what confidence is, I think this is, we have now just entered the core. Yeah. Like this is the base level that if you want to feel confidence across a wide span of areas and experiences in your life.

02:57:11the way to do that is to become comfortable and develop self-efficacy around the tolerance of failure around the tolerance of challenge and setback. And of course there is just, I mean, this is not new. Like once you get into accepting and embracing failure, like now you're, now you're calling back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Like this is stuff that's been around for thousands of years. Obviously, Any process of learning requires a certain degree of failure. Any process of growth requires a certain degree of failure. And acceptance and tolerance of failure is what drives humility. It's what drives compassion. It's what drives forgiveness. Like so many of the classic virtues of the Western world are rooted in. in a tolerance for failure and an ability to manage and overcome failure. You know, when we were doing research, the best example I came across of, uh, like a process to build this meta self-efficacy is, um, is there's, there's a great story about Sarah Blakely, who's the founder of Spanx billion dollar company. Um, Blakely had, um,

02:58:22zero entrepreneurial experience before she started the business. She had sold fax machines door to door for seven years. She had faced constant rejection. She had no experience in fashion. She had no experience in clothing or textiles. She had no business degree, no connections, no venture capital. She had never started a business before. All she did is one day she cut off the feet of her pantyhose, wore them under white pants to a party, and realized that she had found... a gap in the market that a bunch of women were really interested and excited about this super simple thing. She called dozens of hosiery mills. She was turned down by every single one. And then finally, she convinced one to make a prototype. And it's, you know, from there, the rest is history. But the interesting thing about Blakely, there's this anecdote that she tells from her childhood that's super fascinating, which is that every day that she came home from school, you know, most parents, I don't know if your parents did this, but fascinatingly.

02:59:24Mine certainly did not. Most parents, though, when kids come home from school, the question they ask is, what did you do at school today? Right? Her father asked a different question. He said, what did you fail at today? Yeah. Every single day. And so she had to come home and tell him something that she tried and failed at. And what this did was it conditioned into her brain that failure is completely normal and okay. And actually that that is what you get rewarded for in life. First of all, I'm trying to imagine my parents asking me this question and I'm like, I can't, I like can't even visualize it. Yeah. Yeah. Second of all, I'm trying to imagine what the hell I would say to them. You know, like my parents would say, you know, tell me one good thing that happened today. That was right. You know, it's more of a. It was back to it's all the positive thinking, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I do like to say when I go skiing with my friends, I joke a little bit and I say, if you don't eat shit at least once, you're not going hard enough. Yeah. Terrible advice. Don't take that. You're going to hurt yourself with it. But the spirit behind that idea is definitely there. It's a weird upbringing she had for that. It's not a normal thing. Very weird. Yeah. I imagine this mindset is pretty common in athletics. Yeah.

03:00:39I could see coaches trying to really foster this in athletes. But other than athletics, I really think business is the only area that you see this widely encouraged. I remember very early on in my career where I was very much struggling to get by. was not making much money trying to like launch products, sell products. Like nobody was buying anything. I remember going to a seminar and, and this guy got up on stage and he said that if 5% of your customers are not asking for a refund, you're not selling hard enough. And that blew my fucking mind, blew my fucking mind. I was like, I'm like, shit. Yeah, I'm not doing anything, you know, and it's I don't know, like I have personally found and I do think in many ways like business is often a very great proxy for personal growth and development because it has the financial stakes, obviously. So it's like you fucking care. And at the end of the day, you fuck your ego. Like if it's if you're losing money, like you just have to leave your ego at the door. It is ruthless in making you reevaluate like a lot of your own emotional assumptions and dispositions.

03:01:46learning how to accept that what you thought was true is just like not true at all. I agree definitely with that. I think it's more accepted in that community and it's not, it hasn't gotten really as distributed throughout other parts of society and culture. You know, we talked about the loop. Back in chapter two, the competence loop, like getting that started. There's that chicken and the egg thing. The obstacle to getting that started is rarely like the belief in the skill. Like a lot of times you're like, yeah, I could probably do that. But really what it is is like, but what if I fail? I could probably figure that out over time. But a lot of people, including myself with a lot of things, it's like, I'm not sure I could handle the failure around this. You're right, there's a high tolerance for that in the business community, in the entrepreneurial community. For whatever reason, and athletics too, for whatever reason, it just hasn't spread to the other parts of. You know, there's a, like for instance, if you grow up in a really difficult background, like there's no margin for error. That's true, that's a good point. That's a very good point. Like I think about how my wife grew up, like she had zero margin for error. Like she couldn't afford to fail a test or miss a week of school, you know? Like it is, it could be catastrophic.

03:03:00Not only that, but actually too, if we think about it, the default kind of is to just not go there, right? Inaction is kind of the default for a good reason. Like it's less risky. Not taking the risk is actually the better option just from a survival standpoint. Inaction really, it's not a character flaw. It's kind of what we do. We have to learn to be okay with failure. It's not the other way around. So remember all the research on learned helplessness? Yeah. Um, so back in the, what was this like the fifties and sixties? I think 60s. Yeah. They did. They did the research on that. And that was Martin Seligman actually to another famous psychologist and what they found. I don't know how far you want to get into this. It was the, the dog study though, where they were. Yeah. Where they shocked dogs randomly. And they found that if you, if there was, if it was unpredictable when the dogs would be punished, that they just gave up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what the conclusion they made was like, oh, if the dogs didn't know, this is uncertain, unpredictable. They couldn't they couldn't figure out what was going to they couldn't predict what was going to happen. They would just give up. Right. In the mid 2010s, they actually came back and they said, actually, we got that backwards. The default is to just not do anything. We actually have to learn that to do something, to do something in the face of failure and uncertainty. Yeah. So they had that backwards for like 50 years.

03:04:17If I can bring Maslow back for a second. Okay. This just occurred to me. All right. Like listening to you talk. Let's just accept at face value Maslow's hierarchy, which I don't think either of us totally buys into Maslow's hierarchy. I don't think even Maslow bought into Maslow's hierarchy. Just the pyramid actually wasn't his invention. Yeah. That was a marketing thing in the 60s and 70s that came out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was also, it was a concept that was revived after he died that he never published himself. And he probably never published it because he didn't put a whole lot of weight on it. It was an idea. It was just an idea. It was like a throwaway idea that he had. To bring back Maslow's Pyramid, because I do think it is used... There's enough truth in it that it can be useful to think about. If you think about the lower levels of his pyramid, right? Like physiological needs, safety needs, and then community or connection needs, right? Those you can't really risk losing. Right, right.

03:05:12Those are very high stakes things. And those also kind of become the safety net for you to take risks in other areas of your life. So if you do have a stable environment with a loving family and a strong network of friends who can support you and take care of you, that liberates you to take more risks and become more tolerant of failure, which then... builds confidence and self-efficacy and self-esteem, right? All the great things. But if you don't have those things in the first place, like it's, it's actually irrational to risk your financial stability to like become comfortable with failure. We talked about this in the purpose debate. We did do a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, uh, my friend Scott Barry Kaufman has like revised Maslow's hierarchy to He revised it into a sailboat, but he basically made this differentiation. He said that there is a fundamental difference between the lower levels of the pyramid and the upper levels of the pyramid, which is that the lower levels of the pyramid are, they're protective, right? You have to have them. If you don't have them, you will just...

03:06:17suffer and be miserable. Whereas the upper levels of the pyramid are like optional, but they are optimal. They help you flourish. You don't need them, but by pursuing them, they help you flourish. And so that would be your steam and your, uh, self-actualization and your sense of purpose and all that stuff. So anyway, that's just something that occurred to me. I mean, I don't want to say self-esteem is a privilege. Cause that feels like it's probably going too far, but it's, if you have the opportunity in the safety net in your life where that you can tolerate a lot of failures, um, to a certain extent, that is a privilege position. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And there's probably some people who can do it without that, but most people are not like that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense to me. Okay. So we kind of just established that meta self-efficacy is actually a domain specific competence around failure. Right. I actually think it's broader than that, though. I think it actually has to do more with uncertainty. Like you're good at sitting with uncertainty. Interesting. Which failure has a lot of uncertainty around it, right? That's very Buddhist of you, Drew Burney. Well, hear me out. Okay. There's a really rich literature around what they call the intolerance of uncertainty with this too, okay? Now, intolerance of uncertainty, there's kind of like there's cognitive, there's emotional, there's behavioral aspects to it.

03:07:35You think uncertainty is a bad thing. It's a stressful, bad thing, right? It's unfair, it's dangerous, whatever. Yeah. So right there, you've already kind of pigeonholed yourself into a certain way of dealing with this, right? You have an emotional response to that too, an aversive emotional response. You're anxious about... uncertain things. What might happen. What might happen. And oh my God, there's a million horrible things that could go wrong in this situation. Right. Yeah. But then you also have all these behavioral responses to that. So what that does, you know, you have those cognitive distortions, you have those emotional reactions to it, and that motivates you to engage in a bunch of coping mechanisms around uncertainty that actually just end up making it worse. Okay. Right. Okay. So for instance, yeah, there's like excessive information seeking, you know, there's somebody who goes out and researches for, uh, whatever, months before they can buy a carpet or a rug or something like that. Right. Um, then you have like reassurance seeking. That's a big one. If you're not confident in a relationship, you go to the person, you keep, um, reassure like seeking reassurance from them. Um, you avoid the decision altogether, maybe, um,

03:08:39You keep checking on things. You premature commitment to the safest option. You just see, okay, that's the highest certainty option. I'm going to go with that, even if that's not the best situation or the best decision in that situation, right? Each one of those, okay, each one of those behaviors that you do, they give you short-term relief from that anxiety of the uncertainty, right? Right. But it actually prevents you from discovering that you would've just been fine without having that certainty. Wait, so, okay, that's actually really interesting. So back in chapter two, we talked about the mechanism of building self-efficacy. There were a few factors that were involved and one of which was you needed to be at the edge of your capability. And then the other was that you needed to have accurate feedback that was based in reality. of like how you performed. And if we're constantly looking for reassurance and for other people to tell us that, you're okay, you're doing fine. No, it's gonna be fine. Everything's okay. Like here, look, everything's arranged perfectly. What you're doing very subtly is you're robbing yourself of the ability of developing that self-efficacy around uncertainty because you are removing...

03:09:45A, you're no longer at the edge of your capability. And then B, the feedback that's coming back to you is that you need somebody else to reassure you to handle uncertainty. If you look at uncertainty as a skill, you're never developing the skill. It's like you're never taking the training wheels off. And so you just you continue to flounder in a fear of uncertainty. Right, right. You're learning, but you're learning in the wrong direction here. Yes. Because what you're learning is not how to deal with uncertainty. You're learning how to avoid the discomfort of uncertainty. Okay? Okay. That's really what you're doing here. And so every time you do that, you're just reinforcing like, oh, no, I need to avoid this uncertainty by engaging in all these behaviors and all these reassurance seeking behaviors. Yeah. And so every time that comes back up again, you're just going to engage in that loop over and over again. You're not actually going to get good at sitting with uncertainty. Yeah. You're just avoiding the discomfort of the uncertainty. That's what you're teaching yourself. Interesting. That makes sense to me. Yeah. So people who are high in the intolerance for uncertainty, they actually, and they see this, they become less confident over repeated decisions. Like it's the exact opposite of what they're trying to do, right? Each decision, rather than generating like that mastery evidence that we talked about, it's actually draining your confidence further. Because again, you're just avoiding the discomfort rather than engaging with the uncertainty there. Yeah.

03:11:07It is interesting. I mean, I'm just doing like a common sense check. And, and when I think about the most confident people I know or the most confident people I've been around, there is kind of just this, like it, like they don't even think about the result. No. Yeah. Right. They just do things. They just do things. Yeah. And, and it's, and they take what comes and, and they understand they're like, Hey, it might not go well, but whatever. We'll deal with it when it happens. And, uh, To me, it's like a piece of this too is really coming back to that, like knowing, understanding what you control and understand what you don't control, right? Because it's the things you don't control, you're never going to be certain about them. There's nothing you can do to be certain about them. And what you just pointed at, the mechanism you just described shows that the more you try to be certain about them, the more you just foster a greater sense of uncertainty. And so, yeah, I do think it does...

03:12:06kind of come back to the stoic thing of just focus on what you can control and then just let go of everything else if you think about it too taken to this extreme this is like ocd right yes so people who have an obsessive compulsive disorder around something like clean cleanliness or whatever the more they check the more anxious they get about it yeah because again they're just reinforcing that like i can't sit with this discomfort so i have to engage in these repetitive behaviors around it so it's taken to an extreme that's what it is Yeah, that makes sense. One of the biggest takeaways here is that uncertainty is not the enemy. It's actually the price of admission to kind of anything worth having or having a broad generalized sense of confidence. And the people who try to eliminate uncertainty, they just... unintentionally promote greater intolerance of uncertainty, greater anxiety, greater fear of the unknown. So ultimately, if we're trying to build a skill, the skill of confidence, it is the ability to act without needing to know what the outcome is.

03:13:10Like that seems to be like the seed at the core of all of this. So it's interesting. I mean, this episode is taking us on quite a journey. You know, we started with a very conventional understanding of confidence from Norman Vincent Peale. At this point, we've now, we've dug into all the research, we've debunked it in a bunch of different ways. We went through the self-esteem movement. And really what we're drilling down and we're finding is that at the end of the day, the trick isn't to feel more certain of your success. It's to become more tolerant of your failures, which means that pursuing confidence isn't really about pursuing anything per se. It's almost about allowing things to happen. It's developing this kind of paradoxical ability to do things without expecting a certain result, which is a bit of a mindfuck in like, we're now leaving psychology land and entering into philosophy land. And I think that's where we're going to end up in chapter five, because the conclusion that, you know, that I've come to, that we've come to in our research, is that confidence isn't even really the right question that people should be asking, right? Like we've been hammering on this point throughout the episode that confidence is a byproduct of doing the right things, not the cause of doing the right things.

03:14:40It is the output, not the input. So the question remains, what is that input? What allows you to act without expectation? What allows you to tolerate failure and uncertainty, but still do things that seem worth doing? And what we'll find is actually an ancient virtue that has been around for as long as human civilization has been around is, And it turns out, modern psychology backs up, that this is what we should have been focusing on all along. We'll be right back, stick around. This episode is brought to you by waking up. There's a voice in your head that shows up right before anything that matters. The interview, the hard conversation, the big pitch meeting, it always says the same thing. You're gonna blow this. Now, we think confidence is making that voice shut up, but it actually doesn't work that way. See, you can't argue with that voice, and the harder you try to fight it, the louder it becomes. What actually helps is changing your relationship to the voice. Now I've meditated for over 20 years, and the app that I keep coming back to is called Waking Up. It isn't about emptying your mind or feeling blissed out. It's actually about seeing your thoughts for what they are.

03:15:56not facts, not orders. It turns out that's what confidence really is, not silencing the doubts, but knowing that you don't have to believe a word it says. So if you want to start changing how you hear those voices inside your mind, here is your shot. Waking Up is giving Solved listeners 14 days for free so you can try it out for yourself. Go to wakingup.com slash solved. That's wakingup.com slash solved. So go find out what your mind does when you stop fighting it. All right, let's get back into it. So we have spent multiple hours now breaking down confidence into its most fundamental constituent parts, analyzing it, understanding the nuances of it. I want to return to the question that we raised at the top of the show, which is, is confidence even the point? Is this even something that you should be worrying about, thinking about? And in this chapter... I want to argue that it's not. I didn't realize this until we started researching this episode, but for most of human history, confidence was not a compliment. It was not a good thing. It was not something that people aspired to have. And I think once people understand why that is...

03:17:10they'll actually agree. So if you look at the etymological roots of the word confidence, it comes from Latin. It comes from confidere, which is the combination of con, which means with, and then federe, which roughly translates to faith. So it's like with faith or with trust. And for most of Western history, confidence meant it was a relational status. It was essentially that you trusted somebody or that you had faith to, That somebody was going to come through for you. It had nothing to do with how you felt as an individual in the moment. It had nothing to do with your ability to perform anything. It was simply, I have confidence in this person. It means I trust that this person is going to do what they say they're going to do. It wasn't until the 15th century that this idea of confidence in yourself began to take shape. This idea of like you could rely on your own powers and your own ability within your own life. But what's interesting is that at the time, this was seen as a bad thing because ultimately you should only have confidence in God. That was the argument at the time. The church saw self-confidence as transgressional. It saw it as a sin because you were essentially saying that I don't need to believe in God. I don't need to trust God because I trust myself. It's with this background that you get to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries that...

03:18:37where you have a phenomenon that's cropping up, which is essentially just these snake oil salesmen. People start popping up on the Western frontier and in different American cities, claiming to have cures for everything, claiming that they can solve all your problems, running all sorts of scams and frauds and misdirections, and basically cheating people out of their money. And you know what these scam artists became known as? They became known as confidence men. Again, alluding to this idea that they had more trust in themselves than in God or society. So you really don't see the transformation of the word confidence happen until the 20th century. And as with self-esteem, it began with William James. You know, everybody's heard the term, fake it till you make it. Well, it turns out that this idea originated with William James. He had a principle that he called act as if. Act as if you're already good at it. Act as if you already know what you're doing. And then the behaviors will generate the reality. This idea wasn't taken that seriously at the time. It wasn't until World War I broke out and 15% of the soldiers who were fighting on the front came home with what today we would call PTSD.

03:19:52But at the time they called shell shock, they were completely debilitated mentally, like falling into constant panic attacks, just completely immobilized. And the Western militaries looked at this and they're like, well, we would actually like to be able to kind of predict who's going to be able to maintain their poise and their effort on in battle and who's going to crumble and fall victim to shell shock. It was during the war that they went out and contracted a bunch of psychologists for the first time to start studying soldiers and really trying to deduce who was going to be useful and reliable in battle and who was going to crumble under pressure, who was going to fall victim to to shell shock or PTSD. And so it was here for the first time that the idea of a soldier who was confident in himself and confident in his ability to handle adversity finally became legitimated. Is that a word, Drew? I'm the author here. I don't know. And from there we get Maslow and Rogers and Norman Vincent Peale. And by the late 20th century, confidence was not only seen as a good thing, it was seen as a virtue itself. As we discussed in Chapter four with the self-esteem movement, a multibillion dollar seminar industry arose teaching confidence to the masses.

03:21:12Dozens, if not hundreds of self-help books were coming out promising the benefits of confidence. Psychologists and institutions were trying to implement self-esteem practices into education, into society at large. Everybody wanted confidence. It was seen as a virtue. And by virtue, I mean it was seen as a inherently good thing. Something that was worth having in and of itself. But as we covered earlier in the episode... Confidence is not always a good thing. You don't necessarily always want to maximize as much confidence as possible. There is such a thing as overconfidence. There is such a thing as being confident in something that you have no business being confident in. There's a lot of situations in which confidence can backfire on you. And this seems to have been lost in all of the modern discourse, even today in a more skeptical, critical self-help industry. Confidence is by and large seen as a universally positive thing. I guarantee you everybody who has tuned into this episode and listened this far, they have done so because they want to be more confident. So I think it is important to point out the fact that confidence has not always been seen as a positive thing. For most of human history...

03:22:27philosophers, religious leaders, people at large have looked at confidence with skepticism, with lots of criticism. And everything that we've learned up until this point has shown us that confidence is not the input for high performance. It is the side effect or the byproduct of high performance. And that if you try to give people confidence without them earning it, what you essentially create is just a little narcissist. Now, what's interesting is, We have not talked about this in at least four or five episodes, which must be a record for solved. Aristotle got this right. Yeah. He returns. For Aristotle, one of his cardinal virtues was courage. We talked about Aristotle and his virtues way back on the values episode over a year ago. And Aristotle defined virtues as a golden mean between two extremes. Aristotle saw balance as being... the fundamentally righteous and virtuous way to live. And everything that is good in life is a balance between two extremes that when overinvested in, like lead to bad effects. And so for Aristotle, the virtue of courage exists on a continuum between cowardice on one end

03:23:47and confidence on the other end. If you are unwilling to face challenges and deal with uncertainty, then you will just behave cowardly. Whereas if you run into every situation without any concern or fear for what is going to happen to you, you become reckless. You become overconfident. And what Aristotle argued is that a courageous person, a virtuous person, it's not that they don't feel fear. It's that they feel an appropriate amount of fear. And they're properly able to calibrate their own abilities in relation to the threats that they face. And this sounds familiar because we spent... pretty much all of chapter two and three talking about how it's not about being more confident, it's about having an appropriate level of confidence given your ability and competence in that situation. So everything that has led us up to this point has led us to the fact that confidence is the output of being able to act despite uncertainty. And that acting despite uncertainty, that is courage. Courage is the input. I'm gonna do this thing forever.

03:24:55not knowing if it's going to go well or not. And then confidence becomes the output. It's like, Oh, either that went well, which builds confidence or it didn't go well, but I survived it and I learned from it, which also builds confidence. So when we say that confidence needs to be earned, courage is the mechanism by which it is earned. And, when you were able to act despite your fears, when you were able to act despite uncertainty, when you were able to do something despite the chance of failure, That is what eventually builds that coping self-efficacy, that generalized confidence across many, many domains. And it grants you the ability to walk into a room with some semblance of self-assurance that, you know what, whatever happens, I'm going to be okay. What's funny, yes, Aristotle got it right, right? What I'm realizing more and more too is that whenever we say that, Aristotle got it right because he just noticed something that's already kind of within us, right? Right. Um, and this has kind of been born out in the research as well. And this is what we see over and over again as well as like, we kind of just discover, yeah, Aristotle was right, but that's because there's like a fundamental human nature that he discovered underneath of it. Right. For example, Christopher Raitt back in the late two thousands, he ran some studies on air force cadets around courage. So he wanted to know what, like, how do people see courage?

03:26:16What do people think courage actually is? So he got all these Air Force cadets together, and he starts running these different experiments, came to the conclusion, everybody kind of converged on the same things around this. And this is what I mean, it's like, it was already there. Everybody kind of knows this. They weren't fed Aristotle or anything like that. Of course. What he found was people defined courage as one you deliberately choose to act, okay? It's a deliberate choice that you go out and make. You do it knowing there's real risk as well. and you do it for something that is worth the cost. It's a worthwhile activity that you're engaging in, to you personally, right? If you strip out that last part, the worthy goal part, that's what Aristotle was talking about when it's just recklessness. If it's just something you choose to do and it's risky, that's just reckless. If you choose to do it, it's risky and it's worthwhile. That's what defines courage. These people, these cadets, and they've done it in other just general populations too. Everybody kind of converges on those things. Okay. Notice what's missing from that though. There is actually nothing about fear there. You might feel fear in that, or you might not. You can make a courageous decision without fear. This is the problem with people when they try to really focus on the confidence part. What they're really trying to do is I don't want to feel fear in this, right? Fear has nothing to do with it.

03:27:32And this is why the Peel fallacy has proliferated so much because really it's just people buy into it because they just want to stop being scared. They don't want to be scared. Yeah. Whereas really it's you feel the fear and you do it anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Um, or, or fear might not even be there too. It might not even be the case, but most people, when they think about it, it's a fearful situation, right? What mattered really though, was it was the choice, the risk and the worthy goal again. Okay. Um, there was another set of studies they did, um, around people who had, uh, phobias of spiders, right? So what they did is they kind of, they have a courage scale that they gave them and a fear scale and then a phobia scale, all this, and then they expose them to spiders. See what happens, right? What they found is those courage scores they took beforehand actually predicted how close they would get to these spiders in the lab, regardless of how scared they were, though, too.

03:28:23Some of them had very, very high fear with very, very high courage. Some of them had high courage with low fear. All the combinations you can think of. Didn't matter. Courage predicted it independently of all of that, whether they would approach these spiders or not. You can have the fear there and still have a lot of courage. And still act and do it in a positive way. Yeah. Right. There was kind of a strange wrinkle with this though, too, that they found, which was they, they measured these women's courage scales twice, once during the lab and then once a couple of weeks later. And what they found was that it was only the, in the moment, courage that they had, kind of the state courage that they had that predicted whether or not, because maybe two weeks later, they didn't have a lot of courage and that didn't predict whether or not they approached those spiders in the lab or anything like that. Right. The conclusion they came to, I think it was a really interesting one. It's not that you can read your courage. Like if you're just sitting there and there's, you're in a safe environment, nothing's going on. There's no opportunity for you to be courageous. You actually don't know how you're going to be, how you're going to act. It's only in the moment that you're going to act that you can actually

03:29:29act in a way that you need to overcome something like you can't predict it unless you do it which i thought i find is kind of interesting you can't just say i'm a courageous person it's like well what situation are you courageous right right which is really interesting as well can i just point something out really quick which is really interesting so you listed those three factors of courage right like you deliberately choose to act you know there's a real risk and you do it for something that you're not a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a

03:29:53you perceive as being worth the cost. Yeah. If we go all the way back to chapter two of like what builds self-efficacy, like what, what that feedback loop actually needs to look like those map perfectly onto those same requirements, right? You deliberately choose to act. It's that internal locus of control. You have to believe that you have control of, you know, your actions or behaviors in the situation that you're in. Otherwise, you don't get that perception of building a skill. There needs to be a real risk. You need to be at the edge of your ability. You need to be pushing yourself in some way. You need to be like stepping outside of your comfort zone. Otherwise, if you're just playing on easy mode, you're not improving anything, which means you're not building any confidence. And then you're doing something worth the cost. You're doing something that actually has stakes involved that actually matters to you, which again, it's putting yourself on the line. It's opening yourself up to that negative feedback in a real way that is necessary to ground the evidence that you're accumulating in truth.

03:30:51Otherwise, if you're just, if it's stuff that doesn't matter, if it's stuff you don't care about, it's not meaningful evidence in any way. So it's the same mechanisms that are present in building that self-efficacy and building that evidence of competence in your life. They're essentially rooted in the process of courage itself. And confidence has nothing to do with this. Again, confidence is a side effect. It might be the output of it, right? It's the side effect. Really, the conclusions all these courage researchers come to, courage means it's acting when confidence and when certainty and when clarity isn't there. Yeah, this by definition, yes. That is the definition of courage. It's not that the fear isn't there or anything like that. It's acting despite all of those things, right? Again, it's just another variation of the Peel fallacy, right? People think they need to be confident to be courageous. And it's like, no, you have to be courageous to become confident. It's the causation arrow is pointed in the wrong direction in most people's heads. Okay, yeah. So just to drive this point home, to beat the dead horse here, that courage is not like acting without fear or anything like that. They found with like paramedics, firefighters, emergency responders, first responders, right? Really what they found with this is that it's not that they carry more tolerance for like the chaos or uncertainty or anything like that. It's that they've simply been through those things enough times that they notice the pattern that even if everything goes to hell, like,

03:32:16Like it's like they know what to do. They've responded to that enough times. Right. That they can do that. That they're, they, they have this calm banked experience that they have. It's not that like courage is kind of this accumulated deposit of prior, prior encounters with that uncertainty is what that is. And they find this again, like in the first responders and people who are very uncertain, chaotic environment. It's the, it's the meta self-efficacy. It is. Right. Exactly. It's, it's the skill of tolerating discomfort. Right. Right. And the way you build this, which we've already mentioned in some ways, right, is through exposure. So exposure therapy is actually one of the most effective therapies for all sorts of different anxiety disorders, which, again, people who are looking for confidence are trying to mitigate anxiety and fear around things, right? But exposure therapy, you know, it's a frontline therapy for phobias, for panic disorders, for social anxiety issues. OCD, even PTSD, right? Highly, highly effective at treating that. It's difficult. It can be difficult for some people. It's definitely not fun. Not fun. But you can actually mitigate a lot of these maladies with just a few hours of work even too, right? Just exposing people to...

03:33:26that fear, that uncertainty, and showing them that even though that ramps up, that it's going to be okay, right? Now, for decades and decades, we've known that this has worked for a long time. The mechanism is really interesting, though, because for a long time, a lot of these researchers and clinicians thought, well, oh, we're reducing that fear. And actually, that's not the case. You're just teaching people how to sit with that fear and how to deal with that fear, right? And actually what they want you to do, they want you to be keyed up in these situations. They want you to be more fearful in these situations so you can face higher and higher levels of fear and see that you're going to be okay. Okay? So that's kind of one of the lessons you need to take from this is like, yeah, you When you fear something, turn towards it. Like, engage with it. Ramp it up even, too. So the real goal of exposure therapy is like this expectancy violation, right? So if you're somebody who is seeking a lot of, like, reassurance in some way, or if you even have one of these disorders that we're talking about, you have this expectation that if I don't do this or if something wrong happens, then something terrible, even more terrible, is going to happen, too, right? So the point is to violate that expectation repeatedly.

03:34:37So you get in a situation, maybe it's snakes, maybe it's spiders, maybe it's cleanliness. Maybe it's just failure in general, right? I don't want to fail. If I fail, then everyone's going to hate me. I'm going to die alone. You know, you go to that. The goal of an exposure therapy, though, is to violate that expectation enough times so you see that it's not no longer true. And again... Aristotle had this right. Aristotle must have known about expectancy theory 2,500 years ago because what he said, he said courage is building a courageous character through repeated brave acts. You only become courageous by being courageous, by facing whatever fear it is and realizing that your worst fears almost never come true. And even if they do, you can probably handle them. Yeah. It took modern psychology, you know, all these years to figure that out that again, Aristotle was right. There's a related like stoic practice here to, you know, called negative visualization, which is imagine the worst case scenario and then like mentally plan for it ahead of time and realize that.

03:35:41it is not nearly as catastrophic as you think it is or that it feels like it's going to be, right? So it's, you know, you have this idea of like, okay, well, I've got this presentation I have to give tomorrow, and what if I bomb and I embarrass myself and I just like completely make a fool of myself. If you actually, in that moment, it feels terrifying, but if you actually sit down and start kind of writing out like, okay, what does bombing look like? What actually happens? Like, what is everybody in the room actually thinking? Who's paying attention? What repercussions does this actually have on my career? And you realize you're like, oh, it's actually not nearly as big of a deal as I thought it was going to be. Even the worst case scenario sometimes. Even the worst case scenario, you're just like, oh, that's not that bad. I could handle that. Yeah, I'd be fine. But it doesn't feel that way in the abstract. Yeah. It was really cool. A few years ago, we did a YouTube video. Honestly, it was like one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in my career. So we took two women. They had never met each other. They were both terrified of driving. And we flew them to Vegas. And within two days, so one of them, their names were Angelica and Nora. Shout out to them if they're watching or listening. And...

03:36:56I believe one of them, she couldn't drive further than her neighborhood. So even like the furthest she would drive was to her gym, which was like just a few minutes away. The other one, Nora, I think she had only been on a freeway once in her entire life. Both like very intensely afraid of driving and flew him to Vegas, rented a car, put him in the car. And within two days, I had them drive us back to Los Angeles from Vegas, which is a seven and a half hour drive. And it is incredible. Cause I mean, essentially what I put him through, it was entertaining at points, but what I put him through was just very intense exposure therapy, right? We started him in a neighborhood and then I got him onto a freeway and then I got him into, we went to a racetrack, had him race Ferraris and Lamborghinis and just kept like blowing up that expectancy over and over again. everything we did, they would kind of freak out at first and be like, this is going to be a disaster. You know, I'm in danger. And next thing you know, like they're, they're driving through LA traffic, uh, during rush hour and they're fine. Just a couple of days. Yeah. And the coolest thing about it is, um, you know, I've, I've kept in touch with them a little bit since, um, they became friends over the course of the video and, um, they still meet up every couple of years to do road trips together. Cool. Yeah.

03:38:24Yeah. That's really cool. Which is like very, very awesome. Very satisfying. Just a side note, my favorite part of that video, you had them do challenges, right? Yeah. And one of them lost and they had to go through a drive-thru in like a Barbie car or whatever. Yes. In a toy, a toy Barbie car. That was good. She did it. Yeah. She did it. Horribly afraid of driving, not afraid of driving. of being embarrassed. Yeah, right, right. Comes back to domain confidence, right? I want to draw a connection back here that is just like so massive and obvious. Exposure therapy is a process of building courage around something. If we go back to Bandura and his seminal study with the room full of snakes and people with phobias, you could look at that study again as what was actually happening was simply exposure therapy, right? Bandura had this whole idea about guided mastery and how to build self-efficacy through, like, developing competence and skill. But in a sense, what was actually happening was these people were confronting a fear. They were being courageous.

03:39:27And they were building courage through exposure therapy. And yes, while they quote unquote developed a skill or a competence of, I guess, handling snakes, what they were really building, the skill that was actually being built in that room back in the 60s was meta self-efficacy, was the realization of like, I can do hard things. There are things that I am deathly afraid of. that I can go do them and they're not that bad. And sure enough, Benderer's own results showed that those people went into other areas of their lives and suddenly had more courage. They had more confidence. They were able to act more independently and accomplish more things. So I think in a sense, meta self-efficacy is simply courage. It is building the skill or the virtue of courage over a long period of time, and confidence is the output of that courage. And so anybody listening to this who wants to feel confident, who wants to feel more comfortable in difficult situations, pursuing confidence is not the point. Pursuing confidence, especially if that confidence is not earned, feeling more confident in situations if you have not built the appropriate evidence of that confidence is not the point.

03:40:44It's going to backfire. It's going to lead to narcissism or Dunning-Kruger or imposter syndrome. You're going to be miscalibrated based on your actual experiences. What you should be pursuing is courage. Courage is ultimately what matters. And what's crazy too is that there are actually many examples in the world of people who are incredibly high performers and they are not confident. We talked about him in the imposter syndrome section, but I'm going to go one further and tell an even more incredible story of somebody who was fucking terrified and became definitely the best in the world during his era at his craft. Maybe one of the, maybe the best person ever. So we are recording. This is during the NBA finals. I'm a big basketball fan. I don't even know if you watch basketball. not since the 90s man yeah he's so boring drew i'm a big basketball fan and uh you know these days there's a big goat debate of like michael jordan and lebron james everybody forgets bill russell bill russell was the original og goat his winning track record is like comical i'm gonna read off his resume and you're gonna be like that's fucking fiction that doesn't exist okay

03:41:59So Bill Russell, he won 11 championships in 13 years. He won an Olympic gold medal. He won five league MVPs. He was the first black head coach of any major US sport. He coached his own team to two more championships while he was still playing on that team. In elimination games, in tournaments, he was 22-0. He played high school basketball for three years and won national championships, two of them. He played college basketball for three years and won national championships for two of them. Basically, of every year of Bill Russell's life that he played basketball... He won a national championship or an international championship in 85% of those years. That's how I've I. Yeah. How is he not in the conversation? Yeah, he is. That's insane. The most winning athlete I have ever heard of anywhere. So people who know sports have probably heard of him and they probably know a lot of the things that I just said. The thing that most people don't know. is that he vomited before every single game. Just in the locker room barfing? That is not an exaggeration. Not the big games, not the championship. Oh, every single game. Every single game he puked before every single game. It was so routine that his teammates described it. They said that it became part of their pregame routine. There's one story that they were in the NBA playoffs. I think they were in the semifinals.

03:43:27And it was time to take the court, and Bill Russell had not vomited yet. And so the coach called all of the players back into the locker room and told him that they weren't leaving until Bill puked. This time too, they're still playing 80 games or whatever a year, 60, 80 games a year. So he's puking 60, 80 times a year. It's like every three nights, he's puking before a game. He's just so overwhelmed with anxiety. I mean, it's interesting because interviews with him and interviews with some of his teammates, they all say the same thing. They say it mattered so much to him. He wanted to win so badly. Yeah. that he drove himself to becoming sick before each game. And it comes back to that point about courage, right? It needs to matter to you. There has to be stakes involved. It has to feel something that is worthwhile to you. The point I'm making with this is that... I don't think there's any world that you would look at that. Like if I told you, I said, there's a basketball player and he becomes so overwhelmed with anxiety before every time he plays, he vomits in the locker room. Would you call that a confident person? No, I would say he's probably a terrible basketball player. Right. But he's he's the most winning American athlete in the history of U.S. sports.

03:44:40Confidence is not the point. It's not the point. Courage is the point. Bill Russell had courage. It's something that mattered so much to them that he didn't care about the anxiety. Like you said, he developed, he habituated himself to the fear and the anxiety. He took something that mattered so much to him that he was willing to buke before every single game. And so I guess after four plus hours of you and I pontificating and sharing research i think this might be the the first solved episode where the final conclusion is you should not really be thinking about the topic of this i mean you you kind of joked at at the top of the show of like i've never really thought much about confidence i just did things and i kind of joked of like That might be the point. We might just end the episode right there because that is kind of the point. You should kind of just do things. Obviously, don't do things without any thought put into them. Don't do things for no reason, right? Don't be reckless. Don't be cowardly. Don't be...

03:45:51stupid, like pay attention to the things you care about, push up against the edge of your own abilities, find things that matter, find things that have stakes and do things in a way that you get realistic feedback from them. And yes, having confidence in various domains, it is nice. Once you've done something a thousand times and you've done it well, yeah, you will start feeling confident around that thing. And it will be nice. And that confidence will modestly help you perform better in the future. But that is such a side effect. That is such a footnote to like the larger story here, which is that the skill you should be getting good at is courage because that courage will allow you to tolerate failure, to tolerate uncertainty, to act in the face of obstacles and challenges. And that skill will bleed out into every area of your life And we'll just make it more likely that confidence results as part of the process. So if I could summarize everything we've talked about in just a sentence or two, it's that confidence is not the input that results in high performance. That is the Peel fallacy. You don't need to feel confident about yourself. You don't need to believe that you're good at something to perform highly. Confidence is the output or the side effect of the courage to do something.

03:47:19and do it well. And so if you are trying to improve your life and if you want more confidence in your life, you should not focus on confidence, you should focus on courage. It is in many ways analogous to the episode we did on happiness, where we pointed out that if you pursue happiness, you are likely going to remove yourself from it. Happiness is the output or the side effect of doing things that are purposeful or meaningful. It is the same thing with confidence. Confidence is not the thing you should pursue. It is the output or the byproduct of practicing courage. Well said. So to wrap up, you know, we always do an 80-20. I feel like this is going to be a very short 80-20. What would you say is the 80-20 of confidence? Stop chasing it. Yeah. It's one of those, you made the parallels with happiness. I would argue though that happiness, you do want happiness, right? It's just, you got to go about it kind of the backwards way. With confidence-

03:48:17I just don't even think you need it almost. Like, you know, it's not like happiness where it's like it is a it's a it's a good good thing to have. I know for me anyway. OK, the whole uncertainty thing was really kind of eye opening for me. I think I knew it. But what I've seen, I think in my life, when when I don't feel confident about something, there's a huge difference. problem I have with uncertainty around whatever it is. Whether that's in, you know, anything I'm trying to do professionally, in relationships, whatever, I notice that as soon as I am uncertain about something and I get anxious about that uncertainty, I start grasping. I do a lot of grasping. It's that external, I'm looking for external things to grasp onto for some security, right? Yeah. If it's in a relationship, it's like, I need reassurance from you or I need some sort of commitment from you, external commitment from you or some sort of just reassurance that I'm okay in this and that you can provide that for me. Yeah. And that ends up backfiring a lot. Yeah. Right. I just finished up like a public speaking course that was doing to, to, for this, this was part of a mastery experience that I'm trying to do too. This is what I realized, you know, is that I wasn't super confident, uh, when we started doing this and, um, instead of just trying to be confident and get in here and puff my chest up and whatever, no, go find the skills that I need to do. Be competent. To be competent first. Yeah.

03:49:40But what's interesting, there's another little, little layer in that little inception in that too, is that in this course, they, a lot of it was just like, just start speaking. You will find your way. Yeah. Right. Like there's, it's not about confidence. It's just that it's already there. Yes. Right. It's already there for you. It's just a matter of accessing that. And you don't need to over-prepare a whole bunch of things. You don't need these external structures to grasp onto that I'm always grasping onto. I'm like, well, there's a framework here. Or there's a method that I need to be using. No, it's just, it's there. We all kind of have it, you know, it's really just courage and courage and trusting in yourself that you're going to be okay and not some external source. Yeah. So that whole uncertainty thing for me anyway, it was really, like I said, it was really eye opening and kind of just a new way for me to, that's something I really do have to work on, I think, because...

03:50:34I don't think about confidence a lot, no, but I also don't sit very well with uncertainty in a lot of situations. So I'm really learning how to sit with the uncertainty of things and just be okay with it and be more accepting, like you were saying. Like, whatever happens, happens. Come what may. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think what my takeaway... I mean, I definitely think the 80-20 of this episode is very... It's basically retard maxing. It's like, just do the thing. Stop thinking about it. Just do the fucking thing. We need a better name for that, but yeah, okay. Just doing the thing. You're right, though. It's like... It really is. I mean, it is... It's one of those concepts in psychology. It's like, it's so brain dead simple, but it is not pleasant. So people make it complicated so they can avoid it. And this happens with so many things, but I think particularly with around courage, anxiety, confidence, like people really do this a lot. Like it feels difficult. So they assume it must be difficult. Therefore, it must be complicated. Therefore, I must understand all these like frameworks and flow charts and all this stuff to just get off my ass and try a thing. Whereas it is difficult.

03:51:45in many cases, brain dead simple. You know, Alex Formosi talks about this thing that I like a lot, which, you know, I've seen him when he gets asked about confidence, his answer is just do so much volume that it would be irrational for you to not be confident, right? Like, and he uses the example of public speaking. You know, he says like, If you practice a talk a thousand times, if you're afraid of something, practice it so many times that it would be irrational to be afraid of it. If you're still afraid of it, that means you haven't practiced enough, which is in a nutshell, like self-efficacy. It's like, it's like, okay, don't pursue confidence, pursue competence because the competence will spit off confidence as a side effect. I think the fear thing is important. The fear and uncertainty thing is ultimately like kind of the philosophical bedrock of this topic. Um, yeah, It's interesting, we talked in the last episode about personality and I'm generally off the charts and openness to new experiences. I think because I am so open to new experiences and novelty, I'm generally very comfortable with uncertainty, which is generally, I think, made it easier for me to just try things and not really worry about if they go well or not.

03:53:07What I have noticed throughout my life is that the people around me have a perception that I am extremely confident about most things. And my internal experience is that I am like fucking white knuckling it and like screaming half the time. But you have a tolerance for that white knuckling. Exactly. But it's like, that is normal. Like, that is home base for me. So that's very interesting. Yeah. It comes up a lot, you know. I won't start going to analyze it too much. Um, so it has been interesting and I, and I do think a side effect of that is that I've kind of bled into some narcissistic overconfidence at times in my life, but it is at the end of the day, it is, it is just, it is simple. It is just doing hard things, showing like repeatedly building evidence that you are capable of doing hard things. That mastery experience. Yeah. And what I do like that came up in this episode, and I think it was in the section you talked about around uncertainty and tolerance, is how there does seem to be a couple like fundamental core categories that have just massive exponential or outside of outsized effects on other areas of your life. Yeah.

03:54:27The ability to deal with fear and discomfort or uncertainty and discomfort is one of them. Clearly relationships is another one of them. And then learning the ability to learn and grow, like learn from mistakes, accept negative feedback is another one of them. And to me, those just feel like very core foundational things. skills that if you build confidence around those skills, if you build confidence in your relationships, build confidence in your ability to learn from mistakes and build confidence in your ability to face fear, you're probably doing really, really well. Yeah. Those meta skills like that. Yeah. Yeah. Just bleed over into everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any final takeaways for you? Hmm. I think that's all I got, Mark. That's all you got? Yeah, man. You just want to get the fuck out of here? No. Go eat some sushi? Mark's treat. Yeah. Easy for you to say. All right, everybody, that is it for today's solved episode. Thank you for tuning in and sticking with us. Again, if you love the show, please leave us a comment, subscribe, follow us on whatever platform. As you probably noticed by now, this is a massive fallout.

03:55:43fucking show. And because it is massive and we don't put it out very often, we don't get aggregated into all of the feeds and the platforms as much as other podcasts do. So the best thing you can do to support us is to like us, subscribe, leave a comment, recommend us to somebody you know and care about, recommend us to somebody who needs a little bit of confidence in their life so that they can, uh, sit down with us for four and a half hours and realize that they actually don't need confidence in their life. And of course, we have PDF guides with all of our sources, citations, full summary of everything that we discussed in this episode. You can go to solvepodcast.com slash confidence to get that PDF guide and to get notified when new episodes come out. So we look forward to seeing you again next month with another exciting topic and more Drew Burney. We'll see you next time. See you next time.