Confidence and success go hand-in-hand.
Confidence is a critical, and often missing, component of success. This is partially a result of a legacy of serfdom, parental messages, and the encouragement of trust in institutions by our schools. Adults need to learn independence, a middle way between trust and naïveté, the acceptance of our shortcomings, and the realization that our lives are limited in duration.
Key Takeaways:
- Confidence is an underestimated ignored key to success.
- Questioning what we are told is vital to success, even if it feels wrong or like breaking the rules.
- The only fear we should truly have is of not trying to do anything more than we are doing now or have been doing.
“One of the most apparently trivial but in truth crucial ingredients behind success is the thing we call Confidence.”
Want to follow along with the video or take notes? Check out the transcription of this video below.
[00.01] What often distinguishes fulfilled from unfulfilled lives is an ingredient that’s not part of the educational curriculum, and that can sound vague, silly and Californian in the bad sense. Confidence, it’s humbling to realize just how many great achievements haven’t been the result of superior talent or technical know-how. Merely that strange buoyancy of the soul that we call confidence. Yes, confidence, so easy to lack. Partly it’s a hangover from the past for thousands of years. For most of us, there’s simply were no opportunities for hope. We were serfs and slaves, and the central psychological survival skill was to keep our heads down and our expectations low. Each of us still carries a little of the legacy from that past an attitude of inner serfdom that threatens our spirit deep into a democratic technological, modern age. Hope can feel dangerous. That might in addition have been parents who sent out subtle messages.
[01:01] People like us don’t. Who Do you take yourself for? We should feel compassionate about where those defensive parental messages came from. They were a protectionist survival strategy and an escape from humiliation. School didn’t necessarily help either. It wanted us to be good boys and girls and taught us to trust in established authority, but we may not easily have gone on too long. Putting too much faith in existing institutions and now suffer from doing whatever is asked of us a little too obediently. Part of becoming an adult seems to be to embrace the painful realization that grown ups don’t actually have all the answers and therefore that we have every right indeed a duty to break certain rules and think things through independently. We need to learn a calculated form of disrespect, which can be a surprising thing. After 20 years or so, have enforced obedience.
[01:56] We need to learn a constructive suspicion of authority, a path between turtle compliance on the one hand and solid skepticism on the other. In addition, confidence seems to involve a courage to accept imperfection. It’s tempting never to get going when everything has to be perfect, but that’s a recipe for remaining under the bed and yet how often socorro great lives have been riddled with errors, but nevertheless it didn’t sync them. Confidence begins with the capacity to forgive oneself. The horrors of the first go death isn’t necessarily thought too. We should use it not to further sadness, but to scare us fruitfully into taking some action. Our fear of messing up should give way to. The only real danger there is that have never crying. If you like our films, take a look at our shop, the school of life.com, forward slash shop. You’ll find lots of thoughtful books, games, stationary and more.