Tag: humility

Experience = Overconfidence

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity GuyLeave a comment

Expertise is worth its weight in gold.

But overconfidence will kill you eventually.

Risky behaviour might pay off once or twice or even more, but eventually all of your chickens will come home to roost.

‘Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence.’ (Michael Lewis quoting Carter Mecher)

Or as Nassim Taleb puts it, when talking about the attribution bias, ‘You attribute your success to skills but your failures to randomness’.

Statistically, someone is bound to succeed through risk taking and luck, just as someone else is bound to fail miserably through taking the exact same risks and having bad luck.

We live in a wicked world with complex problems, and we behave as if we live in a kind world, with simple problems. Generally, it seems to work for us when things are stable, but stability is never guaranteed and there are occasions when everything gets disrupted. (They seem to be happening semi-often at the moment).

If you’re environment is telling you that you are great at something, and paying you handsomely to do that thing, you will begin to believe that you are great at it and deserve to be paid well for doing it. But what if you are not actually great at it? What if it is just a matter of luck that has landed you in a place that has made things fall in such a way that it doesn’t matter what you do everything works well for you…until it doesn’t?

The answer is humility. Recognising that you could be wrong about something. About anything. Entertaining that thought, even just for a moment is an act of generosity to you and those around you.

The Generosity of Confidence

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“Confidence is your ability to see yourself as flawed, as imperfect, but still hold yourself in high regard.” – Esther Perel, quoting a friend.

For some, confidence is all about bravado. About ‘faking it til you make it’. About focusing only on the good things and covering over anything that is bad so that no one sees it, and so it doesn’t exist. It is strength. It is power. It is arrogance.

They also would consider humility a weakness, and something to be avoided at all costs because you ‘cannot be strong and humble’.

I strongly disagree.

There is a strength that comes with being self-aware enough to know that you are flawed, and you are imperfect, but at the same time you can be confident in who you are and what you bring.

Failing to recognise your flaws and imperfections is not strength, or confidence. That is weakness. Everyone else can see it. Even if you think you are excellent at hiding it, it seeps out. Everyone knows you are flawed and imperfect. Don’t kid yourself, because you would be the only person you are kidding.

This humble strength is innately generous. It gives you space to recognise that you aren’t what you want to be yet, but even so, who you are right now is awesome. You can be confident in that.

Power Over Others is Weakness

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“Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.” Eckart Tolle

It’s obvious when it happens to other people. I can see it as clear as day, and I can’t figure out why they can’t.

A negative comment, a harsh opinion, and quite frankly, offensive words, from someone that is unknown to the individual. Someone that hasn’t earned the right to have any opinion that carries weight, but still it upsets. In that moment they are allowing this anonymous person to have power over them, and that anonymous person is stepping into that position of power by taking on a role of ‘expert’.

The truth is this: anything that is said or done, especially from someone whom you do not know, has nothing to do with you or your behaviour, and is all about the other person and their issues. Their pain and insecurity is overflowing and manifesting as judgement and outrage.

It is easy to see when it is happening to others, but when it happens to you, when someone judges you for something you say or do or write, it is a lot more challenging to not be swayed by ‘public opinion’. It can be difficult to not give someone power over how we feel.

It is even harder to spot when you are the perpetrator of that ‘public opinion’. When you are tearing someone down because of their ‘awful’ behaviour sometimes it is almost impossible to see that your pain and insecurity is overflowing on to others. That feeling of power and influence is intoxicating.

Power is an illusion. We seek it and wield it because it can help us feel strong, but ‘power over others is weakness disguised as strength’.

True strength comes from humility. It comes from generosity. It comes from lifting others up. It takes great strength to not be swayed by ‘public opinion’ and secure in your own identity.

If you are in a position of power, or a seeking a position of power, perhaps take a moment and discover what area of weakness you are trying to cover up.