Self-confidence is all you need

When I write in a blog people will just wonder who am I and what I do in order to decide whether is it worth to read me or not. It is obvious that I’m not an English native speaker. I’m just a person who believes she sometimes figures out some interesting thoughts and likes to share such thoughts sometimes. I know this isn’t satisfying to you, but maybe if you read until the end you might get become satisfied.

In my life, like everyone else, I’ve tried hard to learn and understand what’s the secret of success and living a good life (for many people those two are synonyms). Work harder, learn harder, being smarter, make better choices? Well, the right answer is making better choices but making better choices is related to being smarter. But if you think that’s all the story, you’re wrong. There are other reasons that cause you to make the best choices that are far more important than being smart.

In fact, a very strange conclusion where I’m going to get in this essay is: self-confidence is not a consequence of intelligence. It’s rather the opposite: intelligence is a consequence of self-confidence. You are smart as much as you allow yourself to become thanks to your self-confidence. So if intelligence leads to better choices, and better choices lead to a better life, but it’s self-confidence what leads you to better intelligence then the conclusion is that the most important secret of success is self-confidence.

I’ve noticed that very successful people are quite always self-confident, most of them hide it to look humble but if you have noticed carefully or read about their beliefs and behaviors before becoming successful you will notice that they always behaved as becoming successful was trivial, it was just a matter of time. They had this strange strong self-confidence since the beginning. In the past I thought that their self-confidence was a consequence of their already knowing what other people don’t know: that they know they are smarter than quite everyone else who surrounds them and so becoming successful is just a matter of time. But no, one day I made the discovery that I’m sharing here: they became intelligent and successful out of their self-confidence. Self-confidence was not a result of their intelligence, rather the opposite: intelligence was a result of their self-confidence!

When you are self-confident you make choices that increase your intelligence, you give a sense of urgency to your self-improving aims. Before self-confident choices there was no sense of urgency, choices that do not come from self-confidence do not improve you, do not put you in a test. But choices that come from self-confidence put you on a treadmill: you cannot allow yourself to fail, failure would be fatal! You must try everything, work as hard as possible to not allow for your self-confidence to betray you! You must hold on, you cannot escape the treadmill, once you entered the treadmill you should stay there as long as possible! For example, if you make a choice of getting to a position of responsibility or starting an entrepreneurial activity or investing you know you cannot allow yourself to not be smart: stupidity would cost you too much and maybe it would cost even to the people who depend on you. You will have to undertake rules and habits that allow for you to increase your intelligence and not betray those rules. So, your position of responsibility towards yourself or towards the other people too is what improves your intelligence, and that afterwards improves your choices and your self-confidence more and more: a virtuous cycle.

I’m giving some examples you can choose to not read if you are not that interested.

I realized all this while I was thinking about discussions with some acquaintances who seem to not be very self-confident in real life: I will give 3 examples here:

1- While we were talking about choosing a job I heard a friend saying that if you don’t have a college degree in a particular specific profession we were talking about you cannot do the job. That is definitely wrong many successful people don’t have a college degree and were able to work on hard professions like scientific and engineering professions anyways. I realized they probably were self-confident: at a certain point in their lives they decided to not give a f* anymore, and once they made that choice they couldn’t turn back, they only needed to go forward. It’s not about intelligence, it’s self-confidence. If you make the choice work as an autodidact you have to hold on and not turn back. You will always try to learn more and more and maybe out of your insecurity you might even surpass your graduated colleagues who think they already know enough. I felt like getting a degree is like asking for permission: you want a credential because it makes you more self-confident, because without it you wouldn't feel self-confident enough: you feel like you are not allowed to work without a credential.

2- I was talking with a developer about making an app on his own, but he was on working in these big consultancy companies where there are teams of really so much people for doing a simple stuff. So his reaction to my suggestion was: I cannot do it on my own, I need a team, I need a lot of people. Well, of course, that’s wrong. Even if you don’t have all the knowledge to build a software product you can still look in the internet and find information. If you think deeply about it neither a team can have all the knowledge about building a software product or service, teams inside companies always need to search in the internet or ask for consultancy. So, at the end what’s the difference between building a product on your own and building it with a team? Well, it’s just a matter of time but not very much because teams often have mechanism that just slow down the work instead of accelerating it. So at that point I reminded of very good developers I knew that are always working solo. It’s not that they are more intelligent, they are just self-confident. They believe they can find all the information they need by searching in the internet and by asking friends. And they do it.

3- A former boss of mine (who unlike me has a CS degree) at a certain point complained about the way I had built some code. By his opinion it was unusual “this is not how programmers work, programmers do this stuff in another way, if you had a CS degree you wouldn’t built the code this way, you would built it in a standard typical way”. Nevertheless, I had made some innovations in that specific work, built a service I then realized nobody else had done before (at least according to Google). So I realized that if I had a CS degree I maybe wouldn’t be able to do that: because my mind would have worked in a conventional way thinking about how programmers code and try to code in a conventional way. Also, by having more knowledge about what other programmers have done and what they haven’t, I would have thought that the task I conceived is impossible to build because nobody else has done it. But I was ignorant. I didn’t know very much about what other programmers do and have done and this ignorance made me self-confident: I believe that the stuff was doable and I did it. It was not a matter of intelligence, just a matter of self-confidence.

These were small examples from fractions of my life but I believe the arguments I showed can be applied to many famous successful people we all know. I've noticed everybody says successful people are smarter that everyone else and that’s the reason of their success. Well, of course they are not stupid, but keep in mind people in important positions cannot allow themselves to make mistakes. They surround themselves with intelligent people, assistants and consultants. They constantly improve their intelligence because of their responsibility. Furthermore, you must think about the fact that there are so many smart and intelligent people out there. Just a few ones become really successful. Often very intelligent people tend to be depressed and social outcasts, that is the opposite of being successful! In fact, the most intelligent people I've met in my life are depressed social outcasts.

In conclusion, self-confidence is all you need.