Success beyond a certain point comes only with belief; self-belief, belief in people or belief in a theory. At the lower levels of any field, you can improve by just practicing by yourself and learning how to do things. You can learn how to play a sport or how to draw pictures or how to do simple math by just reading up and practising these things. But if you want to be among the best, as you climb up the ladder in each field, the importance of confidence keeps increasing. The possible reason I'll come to later, but first I'll try and give some examples.
In any field, after a certain point people will invariably question you and there will be phases of self doubt- these can be short phases where someone insults u and you feel bad or longer phases of failure and introspection that artists tend to have (artists are more susceptible since art is a more subjective field). Almost all sports consider the word 'form' to be important, and 'form' is all about self belief. Someone who has had recent success tends to believe more in himself/herself and will thus get more success. Although not exactly snowballing, this is an effect which further compounds snowballing (refer previous post). And the reason why form and self belief are so important is because of how the human brain works(performs better when confident) and how the society considers confidence. There's a saying 'If you don't believe in yourself, who will?' and this is a statement that all societies go by. They expect you to be fully confident about yourself in case you are capable. All humans are constantly expected to over-sell themselves and never be rational or realistic about themselves. If you really think about it, the statement does not make much sense. A great artist may not know that his work of art is great, but the society expects him to know, and thus only the confident artists who labour on in spite of self doubt and believe in themselves in spite of criticism will make it through.
Coming to why the society expects you to know you're good- it's partly branding. I'll probably have to write a separate piece about this. The idea is that human beings often do not have the time or resources to make a perfectly informed decision and thus they go by brands. We buy and Audi car knowing that the engineers at Audi are brilliant people compared to the engineers at Suzuki who are not as brilliant. Brilliant engineers at the same time who seek jobs know that Audi is the place to be, compared to Suzuki since Audi would have smarter colleagues, better technology and of course a better pay- which is due to the value that customers give them. Success leads to more success. We do not have the time to learn everything about car design, apparel design and the design of each and every thing that we buy. Personal branding is a relatively simple thing as compared to corporate branding. We project ourselves as people whom we wish to be perceived as, and this is called personal branding. Some people do not put in an effort to artificially portray things they are not and hence they brand themselves as .... themselves. On the other hand, successful people often portray themselves as larger than life. Narendra Modi, the Indian PM is one of the first names which come to my mind when thinking of branding.
So the society judges you by how confident you are. But is that all? Not really- after attaining a certain level of success, the recognition you get is based on how better you are compared to others. (the full reason I'll hopefully put in another write-up) Let me illustrate- the lead designer/engineer at Sony Walkman during the late 90s and 2000s, whoever it was, was most probably a brilliant man. During his initial days, he would've worked really hard and improved on himself by just being able to generate ideas and designs which are objectively amazing. But after becoming the head of Walkman products, he has to compete with Apple. And that is where he completely failed. He not only has to create a good product, he has to be confident about it (and thus spend marketing expenditure on it) and he has to compete with the personal charisma of Steve Jobs while coping with all the criticism that comes from the public. At high levels, people use all kinds of techniques to try and demotivate you. Professional gamers will make fun of that fact that your girlfriend is ugly compared to theirs and professional cricketers will make fun of your ethnicity and call you a monkey (ask Andrew Symonds). Without belief, you cannot survive the onslaught - and more importantly you cannot intimidate others to reign supreme. I'm not the kind of guy who would use these (seemingly) immoral ways to give a boost to my success, but I can definitely understand people who do- and given that we are human beings we will all have to have that extra bit of self-confidence to survive.
I've talked about professional gamers, sportspeople and managers. These are positions which involve a lot of public attention and thus people are expected to criticise each other that little bit more. Even in academics, self belief is all important. In economics we have Keynes, Friedman, Hayek and dozens of other economists come up with completely different schools of thought on the same subject and believe with all their life in their respective schools. Tesla believed fully in the power of Alternating Current (AC) while Edison did so in Direct Current (DC) even though there was no justification available at the time for the superiority of either. Thus, even in academics where objective truth is expected to prevail, there needs to be great self belief in the idea for the scientist/researcher to put in effort and to persist enough for it to be even considered by peers and the community at large- 'Why would the community believe in your research if you yourself do not?'.
Belief often leads to achievement, even if the belief is irrational. Overselling yourself is a risk which is generally worth taking. Failure obviously will make you look a little fake, but people generally understand the requirement of overselling and thus it's not a big deal even if you, say, claim to be good at presenting something and then mess it up. You will eventually mess it up enough times to be confident enough that you wont mess up- given that you've been there 10 times while the guy who is supposed to be your alternative choice has done it only once since he isn't confident enough about succeeding.
And the importance of belief is high in fields which are subjective in nature. For example, as an academician you need less confidence as opposed to an investment professional who has to pick stocks (yes, picking stocks is very subjective) .
This was a long post which I had to cut short at places and link to other articles (1 past,2 future) but probably the most sensible one I've written in some time :)
PS: Whenever I explain a cause-effect relationship, there would be obviously a huge number of causes and a huge number of effects in turn. I try to highlight the most important ones, since it's not possible to list everything (though the title of the blog is shandification).
In any field, after a certain point people will invariably question you and there will be phases of self doubt- these can be short phases where someone insults u and you feel bad or longer phases of failure and introspection that artists tend to have (artists are more susceptible since art is a more subjective field). Almost all sports consider the word 'form' to be important, and 'form' is all about self belief. Someone who has had recent success tends to believe more in himself/herself and will thus get more success. Although not exactly snowballing, this is an effect which further compounds snowballing (refer previous post). And the reason why form and self belief are so important is because of how the human brain works(performs better when confident) and how the society considers confidence. There's a saying 'If you don't believe in yourself, who will?' and this is a statement that all societies go by. They expect you to be fully confident about yourself in case you are capable. All humans are constantly expected to over-sell themselves and never be rational or realistic about themselves. If you really think about it, the statement does not make much sense. A great artist may not know that his work of art is great, but the society expects him to know, and thus only the confident artists who labour on in spite of self doubt and believe in themselves in spite of criticism will make it through.
Coming to why the society expects you to know you're good- it's partly branding. I'll probably have to write a separate piece about this. The idea is that human beings often do not have the time or resources to make a perfectly informed decision and thus they go by brands. We buy and Audi car knowing that the engineers at Audi are brilliant people compared to the engineers at Suzuki who are not as brilliant. Brilliant engineers at the same time who seek jobs know that Audi is the place to be, compared to Suzuki since Audi would have smarter colleagues, better technology and of course a better pay- which is due to the value that customers give them. Success leads to more success. We do not have the time to learn everything about car design, apparel design and the design of each and every thing that we buy. Personal branding is a relatively simple thing as compared to corporate branding. We project ourselves as people whom we wish to be perceived as, and this is called personal branding. Some people do not put in an effort to artificially portray things they are not and hence they brand themselves as .... themselves. On the other hand, successful people often portray themselves as larger than life. Narendra Modi, the Indian PM is one of the first names which come to my mind when thinking of branding.
So the society judges you by how confident you are. But is that all? Not really- after attaining a certain level of success, the recognition you get is based on how better you are compared to others. (the full reason I'll hopefully put in another write-up) Let me illustrate- the lead designer/engineer at Sony Walkman during the late 90s and 2000s, whoever it was, was most probably a brilliant man. During his initial days, he would've worked really hard and improved on himself by just being able to generate ideas and designs which are objectively amazing. But after becoming the head of Walkman products, he has to compete with Apple. And that is where he completely failed. He not only has to create a good product, he has to be confident about it (and thus spend marketing expenditure on it) and he has to compete with the personal charisma of Steve Jobs while coping with all the criticism that comes from the public. At high levels, people use all kinds of techniques to try and demotivate you. Professional gamers will make fun of that fact that your girlfriend is ugly compared to theirs and professional cricketers will make fun of your ethnicity and call you a monkey (ask Andrew Symonds). Without belief, you cannot survive the onslaught - and more importantly you cannot intimidate others to reign supreme. I'm not the kind of guy who would use these (seemingly) immoral ways to give a boost to my success, but I can definitely understand people who do- and given that we are human beings we will all have to have that extra bit of self-confidence to survive.
I've talked about professional gamers, sportspeople and managers. These are positions which involve a lot of public attention and thus people are expected to criticise each other that little bit more. Even in academics, self belief is all important. In economics we have Keynes, Friedman, Hayek and dozens of other economists come up with completely different schools of thought on the same subject and believe with all their life in their respective schools. Tesla believed fully in the power of Alternating Current (AC) while Edison did so in Direct Current (DC) even though there was no justification available at the time for the superiority of either. Thus, even in academics where objective truth is expected to prevail, there needs to be great self belief in the idea for the scientist/researcher to put in effort and to persist enough for it to be even considered by peers and the community at large- 'Why would the community believe in your research if you yourself do not?'.
Belief often leads to achievement, even if the belief is irrational. Overselling yourself is a risk which is generally worth taking. Failure obviously will make you look a little fake, but people generally understand the requirement of overselling and thus it's not a big deal even if you, say, claim to be good at presenting something and then mess it up. You will eventually mess it up enough times to be confident enough that you wont mess up- given that you've been there 10 times while the guy who is supposed to be your alternative choice has done it only once since he isn't confident enough about succeeding.
And the importance of belief is high in fields which are subjective in nature. For example, as an academician you need less confidence as opposed to an investment professional who has to pick stocks (yes, picking stocks is very subjective) .
This was a long post which I had to cut short at places and link to other articles (1 past,2 future) but probably the most sensible one I've written in some time :)
PS: Whenever I explain a cause-effect relationship, there would be obviously a huge number of causes and a huge number of effects in turn. I try to highlight the most important ones, since it's not possible to list everything (though the title of the blog is shandification).
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