the myth of confidence.

why the binary of confident vs. unconfident people does not exist

There is no such thing as confident vs. unconfident people. This sort of commonly used over-simplification does not serve us well in determining a person's social value, let alone their intrinsic worth. Yet, this false dichotomy is essentially the foundation of modern self-help ideology: the idea that every personal or professional shortcoming stems from a lack of confidence. It implies that confidence is some essential, observable trait, like consciousness, when in reality, it’s anything but.

The first problem is purely semantic.

Have you ever seen one of those cringey videos of a person walking around New York City, stopping and shamelessly asking strangers, “Why are you confident?” (a question that feels both intrusive and superficial).

Usually, the person answers with some cursory response about “being yourself” or “not caring what other people think,” (the latter being a curated aesthetic in itself, but that’s for another time).

The interviewer often chooses the person based on their self-assured gait, bold sense of fashion, and their apparent indifference to judgement.

But the question: “Why are you confident?”, posed like that, is intellectually unanswerable.

Confident in what? The question is asked presumptively, but what grounds are there for that presumption when you’ve only looked at someone and know nothing about them?

The word “confident” itself has become a proxy for charisma or aura, stripped of all nuance.

It’s used almost exclusively in the context of one’s ability to stand out in a room, to thrive socially. It does not take into account internal certainty, technical skill, or psychological resilience, for example.

It’s not unrealistic to imagine that the most confident person in a room could be someone who hasn’t made themselves known, or that the least confident person is also the most visible and the loudest. However, both can be true, and also untrue, which is why context and nuance matter.

In any group, you can often tell who the leaders are, who falls into step, and who stands apart. But this doesn’t reveal anything about their broader success or dominance in life and/or career. it simply reflects one aspect of animal-life: social dynamics. It means these “leaders” are masters over a particular domain — which is how the term should be used — instead of referring to it as the singular domain of what confidence is. Otherwise, It reduces a complex, multidimensional creature into a single-behavioral being.

Humans are animals, but only to a certain degree. Biologically, yes. In our primordial desires, yes. But other animals don’t possess the ability to break away from this sort of primal hierarchical structure.

In this, humans are wholly unique. In fact, we’ve evolved in such a way that has reversed this hierarchy. The smartest survive. Those who can create tools for survival are always more powerful than those who do not. Just look at polar bear hunters, or the poachers of big game predators.

Alpha vs beta is another cringey, oversimplified dichotomy that’s inapplicable, in a general sense, to the complexities of human beings. Popularized by the manosphere, this framework has bled into the cultural lexicon, both ironically and unironically. But, like most binaries, it assumes people can be sorted into fixed categories. And like confidence, this theory can only be useful in a very specific context (mainly where physical prowess, courage, and confrontation are concerned with one’s status among a group — athletes, for example, or monkeys), but when one’s whole worldview is filtered through this lens, you not only limit your own potential, but you lose the ability to accurately judge a room and its inhabitants. Even among athletes or those in fields requiring physical traits, there are plenty of top performers who are silent killers.

Hierarchy still exists among people as it does among animals, but it’s much more fragmented, and many more hierarchies exist simultaneously; it’s not just social. A person who commands a room might tremble at the thought of writing an articulate thesis, or coding a website, or competing in some sort of intellectual challenge — like chess. In the same way one who excels in those venues might fear the attention of the room. These fears certainly aren’t exclusive to each other. They’re not even exclusive to being perceived as confident. For example, one could excel in both social and intellectual fields while possessing a fear and anxiety about both, still succeeding in their domains. So, the appearance of being confident (in the social sense) and feeling confident are not always aligned.

I’m not aiming to divide the hierarchical structures of human beings into two simplified lineages myself, of physical vs intellectual, because that would also be false. Within both physical and intellectual realms, an unlimited amount of hierarchies also exist. Like a universe containing galaxies, containing solar systems, containing planets, containing countries and states and cities, etc. Simultaneously, all of us rank and operate both high and low on a varying amount of spectrums. It’s the ones you choose to focus on that creates self worth, or a lack of it. One doesn’t technically need to improve upon their social skills, though it certainly doesn't hurt in this world, if it doesn’t serve their realm of operations or where they choose to put their self-worth.

Also, my point of view and perspective is coming from someone who is considered “confident” in the traditional sense. My position is not one arguing to defend my introversion or subtlety — I don’t predominantly contain either of those things. If anything, I’m arguing against the fact I’d be considered a confident person because of social dynamics alone.

Confidence, in a specific realm (not the vague, overarching label), comes almost always from one of two things: naivety or repetition.

The first actually comes from a lack of experience or knowledge, which can easily spill over into arrogance. The guy, for example, who thinks he can fight just because he lifts weights, but has never actually stepped foot into a boxing or MMA gym (or at least trained seriously). For anyone who has trained in martial arts and sparred or competed regularly, you know that the learning curve is massive and it’s always widening. The more you learn, the less you realize you actually know and the more there is to know. This is true of all things. You might think you’d be a good actor because you perform a certain version of yourself to a group of friends, but it’s more the lack of experience in that realm — being in front of a camera, doing several takes, balancing the tension and dynamics between other actors — that creates that confidence.

We all know or have known someone who grossly overestimates their ability and skill. When you’ve never failed at something, because you’ve never tried, or you’ve tried in a very low stakes environment and succeeded, it reinforces the idea you’re good at it. One must be faced with a high stakes situation involving a person or community on the upper ends of a hierarchy to truly test their metal. And most people who are faced with it either quickly realize their folly and retreat with their tails between their legs, or they dedicate themselves to doing the work it actually takes to gain real success and therefore confidence in that realm.

I once had a phase of betting regularly on boxing matches. I had a ton of confidence going into it and, as luck would have it, I won my first ten bets in a row. I’d won a few thousand dollars doing this and thought I possessed a knowledge that others didn’t. Needless to say, my arrogance having won out, I lost all of the money on a massive losing streak shortly after.

The point is, we can only estimate ourselves and others based on what we already know. We can’t do it based on things we don’t know. That is how biting off more than you can chew happens. You never realize the fact until it’s already too late.

But it’s important for me to say that not everyone who approaches something new does so with overestimating their ability, but almost always a thing is more difficult and more complex than they imagined it would be, once they begin to engage meaningfully with it.

The second path to confidence, again, in a specific realm, comes from repetition. This is the most reliable form. But, it only comes after passing through the trials of naivety. You do something enough times: perform, write, pitch, fight, and you begin to develop a realistic sense of your abilities. You’ll fail at some and succeed at others, but it’s important to recognize that failure is not absolute, and that it is wholly necessary. On the same note, success also is not absolute. Too much repetition without evolution breeds stagnation, or even worse: regression. There are many real world examples of this. The hometown hero who’s capped by the constraints of their small town, moving to New York or Los Angelos, realizing they’re not as good as they thought they were. All those reps performing in small venues or competing against a limited pool of people gave them an unrealistic sense of their current ability, against the upper ends of the spectrum existing outside of their small bubble.

Confidence from experience also doesn’t guarantee long-term confidence in one's current abilities. A pro athlete or a world famous singer, for example, once at the top of their game, having lost ability due to age or injury and now a shadow of their former self, are unable to keep up with the new wave of fresh blood entering their domain. This can flip confidence on its head, but only if you tie the-current-version-of-you’s self-worth to a version of your past. All of us, in one way or another, lose ability, due to innumerable factors. All of us grow old.

So, confidence, in the way it’s typically used, does not exist. Underneath the surface of everyone is a core filled with both competence and deep insecurities of their incompetencies.

A better description for what’s known as common confidence would be avoidance. I don’t mean this pejoratively. A measure of avoidance is absolutely necessary to operate efficiently in this world, as long as it doesn’t spill over into arrogance. Avoidance of one’s flaws, I mean, in the reflexive sense, not in the reflective. One can’t simultaneously be aware of and analyze their deepest flaws while trying to appear charismatic to a crowd, for example. They must compartmentalize these feelings. They must save them for another time, or like some people, avoid them completely. But, hyper-avoidance makes one become like a ticking time bomb. The more avoidant a person is, the more harshly they might react against an insecurity being triggered when forced to face it. They’ve compartmentalized their lives so tightly that their fragility never gets touched — until it does. And when it does, they shatter. Because what we often call confidence is just armor. An armor, for some, that never gets tested.

Many of us live our lives trying to redeem our flaws by creating or improving our competencies in other fields.

One of my favorite examples of this is the boxer Mike Tyson. Most people who know nothing about him see him as simply a brute. But if you learned about his story, watched his early interviews, watched his interviews as an old man, you’ll notice he was and is an extremely sensitive and vulnerable person, both emotionally and mentally. He learned how to fight as a way to make up for the weakness that others exploited in him, bullying him and beating him up as a child for being too sweet. Most people saw him only as a savage who bit off a man’s ear, or an uncaged animal with boundless rage, both in and out of the boxing ring. Because of the media circus surrounding him, he was forced to face his insecurities regularly, and it wasn’t until he consciously confronted them as an older man that he could move past them. But if he was constantly dwelling on how weak he was as a person while another man stood across the ring from him ready to take his head off, that probably wouldn’t have gone well for him. In the moment, he had to compartmentalize his insecurities, relegating them to the subconscious, where it doesn’t confront the issue directly, but peripherally in the form of trying to correct that weakness — forced to create more competencies in the immediate (in his case, knocking people out) to make up for the pain of the past, still lingering, that haunts underneath.

This is true for all of us.

Avoidance. Compartmentalization. These are tools which are necessary for us to navigate life. To navigate social dynamics. But don’t call it confidence.