Know Less

There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Few have mastered the art of walking it, and fewer still have the wisdom to know when to step back. People with enough self awareness to recognize their infallibility are–in my experience–a rare breed.

I think a lot of the self-help advice about how we should love ourselves and be confident and yadda yadda tends to be correct on the surface, but in practice it gets deployed incorrectly. Confidence is great, but ignorance combined with too much confidence leads to arrogance.

I think people who are truly confident, self aware, and feel secure in their own selves are more likely to be humble. Generally the best example of this is how quickly they will say “I don’t know”, or simply be unsure of things. I know that I used to have great confidence in my own knowledge of various matters, and now I realize that my intellect and knowledge of all matters of the universe is quite limited. I feel like I’m more likely to be wrong than right in many instances. I generally am not afraid of saying “I don’t know”, and in cases where my confidence is low I will say “I’m not sure” and refuse to speculate on the matter.

Things like job interviews and dating tend to reward the ignorant and confident, or the arrogant, but I suppose that’s just the nature of humans. Personally I’m turned off by people who speak with unwavering confidence on subject matters I know they know less than they think they know about, but I also know many people become bedazzled and mesmerized by those with charm and confidence (i.e., the con artist, where ‘con’ is short for confidence).

I know that I do myself no favours by expressing my lack of confidence in various matters, particularly in the context of trying to impress others, but I think I’d rather stay authentic than fake it to make it.