By Manuel “Bobby” Orig, Consultant, Apo Agua

A surge of overconfidence can feel fantastic – offering a rush of energy, even a dazzling vision of the future. It can give us courage and bolster our determination when facing adversity. But if that self-assurance leads us to impossible goals, it can waste time, money, and energy. Self-help books and motivational speakers tell us that the more confident we are, the better. But this way of thinking can lead to enormous trouble; we often have an overinflated sense of self and are rarely as good as we believe.

Perfectly Confident is the first book that brings together the best psychological and economic research to explain exactly what confidence is, when it can be helpful, and when it can be destructive. Taking both personal feelings and hard facts into account, Don Moore identifies how confidence behaves in the wild and raises thought-provoking questions. How optimistic should you be about an uncertain future? What justifies your confidence in something amorphous and subjective such as your attractiveness or sense of humor?

Moore reminds us that the key to success is to find “the middle way” and to avoid being either over-or-underconfident. In this essential guide, he shows how to become perfectly confident – to strive for and maintain a well-calibrated, adaptive view that can elevate all areas of your life.

Praise for the book

In this eye-opening book, Don Moore unravels the mysteries of confidence. He shows that too much confidence produces blunders but too little leads to missed opportunities. So, he shows us how to chart a middle path – one rooted in honest and realistic self-assessment. If you want to make smarter decisions about the future – for yourself and your organization – Perfectly Confident is an essential read.
—DANIEL H. PINK, author of When and Drive

In every decision you make and every goal you set, there are two easy ways to fail: having too little confidence or having too much. Don Moore has spent his career studying how to find the sweet spot, and his book is full of evidence-based guidance for making more accurate assessments of your abilities and opportunities.
—ADAM GRANT, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take

About the author:

DON A. MOORE, PhD, is a professor of management of organizations at the University of California – Berkeley’s School of Business. He is the coauthor of Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, one of the bestselling textbooks in the field, and has penned columns for sources such as the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune and Harvard Business Review. His work has been  covered in the New York Times, Money, the Economist, the Financial Times, Forbes, and the Washington Post. He is occasionally overconfident.

INTRODUCTION

Confidence comes not from knowing you will be the best, but from knowing you will do your best.

Chances are you are thinking about confidence wrong. If you have spent any time reading self-help books, you could be forgiven for coming away thinking that more confidence is better. There are books with titles like Confidence: How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs and Achieve Your Goals and How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life. They make overconfidence sound inviting. Such books tell you that you should grow your confidence. They imply that your challenge in life is to keep your confidence up, bolstering it against the haters who would tear you down or the misfortunes that would make you doubt yourself. The message of these books push is that you should maximize your confidence.

You cannot be blamed if you suspect that overestimating your potential, maybe just a little bit, could be good. Plenty of coaches and gurus advocate precisely this. But there are many problems with this approach in practice, not the least of which is the problem of fooling yourself. It can be difficult to figure out exactly how much you ought to fool yourself. Believing that you are the messiah can lead to some obviously dysfunctional behavior. But most of the problems associated with such grand delusions also hold, at a smaller scale, for believing that you are slightly taller, richer, better looking, or more virtuous than you actually are.

On the other hand, if you have read books on decision making, you might be aware of your vulnerability to overconfidence. Decades of research demonstrates how often people have an overinflated sense of their own wisdom. In fact, our beliefs are rarely as correct or accurate as we think they are. If you suspect that you might be biased toward overconfidence, you might worry about how excessive faith in erroneous intuitive judgments can lead you to make mistakes. You might think you should bring your confidence down to earth, to reduce ego-gratifying self-enhancement and to become humbler.

But minimizing confidence is not the solution either. Underestimating your potential deters you from undertaking challenges at which you would be successful, dissuades you from approaching others with whom you would get along, and leads you to forego profitable opportunities. We have to consider how underconfidence puts you at risk of shortchanging yourself. While overconfidence prompts errors of action, in which you do something you later regret, underconfidence is more likely to lead to errors of inaction, in which you decline an opportunity that would have turned out well. But both are errors.

MANIFESTATIONS OF CONFIDENCE

You have to look to the truth and seek to avoid the dangers of delusion or bias. You have to let go of the wooly-headed thinking that characterizes so much of the advice on confidence. You have to be clear and specific in your assessments of yourself. In the interests of clarity, the author distinguish three forms of confidence:

• Estimation quantifies how good you think you are, how likely you are to succeed, or how quickly you will get things done.
• Placement compares yourself with others.
• Precision assesses the accuracy of your beliefs, or how sure you are that you are right.

If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.

—Marcus Gravey

Overestimation occurs when you overestimate how quickly you will get work done, committing yourself to more than what you can humanly accomplish. One of the lures that can draw you into overestimation is wishful thinking. Its flipside is underestimation. You will be prone to underestimating yourself when you get stuck in worry and rumination, exaggerating risks and failing to appreciate your virtues, strengths, and potential.

Overplacement occurs when you exaggerate the degree to which you are better than others. All of us are prone to overplacement for easy tasks and for common events. Most of us believe that we are better than average drivers. If you are usually kind, it is easy for you to believe that you are kinder than others. If you usually behave ethically, you probably think you are more ethical than others, and you wind up feeling morally superior. On the other hand, for difficult tasks and rare events, it is easy to believe that you are worse than others.

Overprecision occurs when you are excessively sure that you know the truth. It leads you to be too confident that your interpretation of the facts is the right one. It leads investors to be excessively sure they know what an investment is worth. It leads you to be too quick to disparage those who disagree with you as either evil or stupid.

CONFIDENCE CALIBRATION

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

—Ted Hughes

You have choices about how confident to be. Your interpretations of past performance and current abilities affect what you believe about your future potential. But choosing to be overconfident is rarely in your interest. Choosing overconfidence involves self-delusion and all the follies that follow from it. On the other side, being underconfident causes other problems, including missed opportunities and the failure to appreciate your virtues and strengths. The middle way between these two is a narrow path and is not always easy to find.

Confidence calibration is difficult. It is nevertheless worth striving for good calibration. In the words of US president Theodore Roosevelt: “I am just a little disposed to give way to undue pessimism as to undue and arrogant optimism. Both our virtues and our defects should be taken into account.”

WHAT IS CONFIDENCE

Confident people change the world. Consider Elon Musk, the South African immigrant to the US who, as a young man, helped create PayPal, transforming the way people pay online. When PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, Musk used the money to invest in Tesla, the electric car company that upended the automobile market. Tesla’s market capitalization now makes it worth almost as much as General Motors. At the same time, Musk created SpaceX and revolutionized the business of launching satellites into space. He has announced plans for SpaceX to send humans to Mars in 2024 and, from there, to colonize other planets. Musk does not lack for ambition.

Musk’s story is just one example of the close tie between confidence and success. More-confident entrepreneurs, like Musk, are often more successful. Confident applicants are more likely to get hired, and confident political candidates are more likely to get elected. All around us, we see confidence precede success. But focusing on those who wound up as winners is problematic, because it ignores two problems.

The first problem is that it risks confusing cause and effect. Is confidence really the cause, or is it possible that it is merely a consequence of something deeper – actual talent, financial advantage, or strategic positioning? For instance, strong job applicants with great credentials and a proven record of success have good reasons to be confident. Elon Musk is enormously intelligent and talented person with many impressive achievements to his credit. In many cases, both confidence and success share the same underlying cause.

The second problem with focusing on confident winners is that it overlooks the instances in which confidence has preceded failure. Plenty of confident people fail. It is the same confident Elon Musk  who has experienced great success and great failures. In 1996, he was ousted as CEO of Zip2. Four years later, he was ousted from PayPal. Tesla, too, had more than its share of trouble. In May 2016, Musk announced plans to produce 200,000 Model 3 sedans by the end of 2017. In fact, the company produced only a tenth of that number.

OVERCONFIDENCE

Overconfidence sits at the center of decision biases that lead to error and irrationality. Scott Plous wrote that “no problem in judgment and decision making is more prevalent and more potentially catastrophic than overconfidence.” Daniel Kahneman, who won a 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on cognitive biases, wrote that overconfidence is “the most significant of the cognitive biases.” These claims are built on a strong consensus among those who have studied overconfidence, underscoring the importance and pervasiveness of overconfidence in human judgment. It would not be an exaggeration to say that overconfidence is the mother of all psychological biases. The author mean this in two ways.

First, overconfidence is one of the largest and most ubiquitous of the many biases to which human judgment is vulnerable. “Perhaps the most robust finding in the psychology of judgment is that people are overconfident,” write Werner De Bondt and Richard Thaler. Overconfidence has been blamed for the sinking of the Titanic, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, and the loss of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia.

Overconfidence is a very serious problem. If you don't think it affects you, that's probably because you're overconfident.

—Carl Richards

If you were appropriately humble about your judgment, you would be better to protect yourself from the errors to which everyone is prone. The problem with intuition is that because it results from unconscious processes, you cannot audit it. It arrives, fully formed, in our conscious minds, and it just “feels right.” Some possibilities feel more likely, some people more charismatic, and some risks just give you a bad  feeling. Your confidence in these intuitions mean that you too often accept them and forget that intuitive judgment is not perfect.

UNDERCONFIDENCE

Given the risks of overconfidence, you might think that it would be wise to reduce your confidence. But by how much? Too little confidence is a recipe for self-doubt, inaction, and missing out on an awesome life. Every day you decline to strike a conversation with others, go rock climbing, or start a new company. Some of these failures to act are attributable to underconfidence, especially when taking a risk would actually pay off. These failures qualify as mistakes.

Underconfidence is rife, and in many cases it is the mirror image of overconfidence. The same students in the author’s classes who claim to be more honest than their classmates and more immune to self-serving bias are perfectly willing to rate themselves as below average.

Underconfidence breads underachievement.

—Lou Holtz

The psychologist Justin Kruger deserve credit for identifying the fact that people tend to believe that they are worse than others at difficult tasks for which success is rare. In his dissertation research at Cornell University, Kruger showed how easy it is for people to underplace themselves. Ask them about some difficult task on which most people perform poorly or fall short of some salient standard, and they will tell you they are worse than average.

THE RISKS OF OVERCONFIDENCE

There are many situations in which being too sure of yourself can indeed undermine the very success you envision, as the work of Jeffrey Vancouver shows. He examined  circumstances in which an increased sense of personal efficacy impairs future performance. Such experiments require manipulation of self-efficacy. If researchers had simply measured self-efficacy and performance, they would find many reasons why the two correlate had nothing to do with any causal effect of confidence. For instance, those who were capable at a given task because they had prior success would be both confident and successful.

Experimental evidence is required in order to answer the question of whether one should choose to be confident, since the question is about the causal effect of confidence. This is exactly what Vancouver and his colleagues did. In one study, research volunteers played the game Mastermind, which involves guessing the color and order of hidden pegs. Vancouver’s devious computer program rearranged the hidden pegs to make it easier or harder for participants to win the game. Those who easily won then become more confident in their own abilities, and they reported significantly higher feelings of self-efficacy. How did they do in subsequent rounds of play without the computer helping them out? They did worse than those who had lower feelings of self-efficacy. When performance depends on effort, being too sure of yourself can reduce your effort and undermine success.

CLARIFY

In March 2018, Kathleen Colby Dunn performed on the show American Idol under her name Koby. She delivered what is remembered as one of the “longest, loudest, and oddest vocal runs in ‘Idol’ history.” When she began belting out her song, the singer Katy Perry, one of the competition’s judges, covered an ear. As Koby continues, the judges cringed. When Koby was eliminated from contention, her reaction was, “I thought I sang really, really well. I’m sorry. I’m really good – I don’t know what happened.” Her assessment of her own performance was not diminished by the judges reactions: “I’m pretty sure I just nailed it. I don’t know … I guess they wanted mediocre singers?” Koby looked into the camera and offered an explanation: “I think Katy’s just a little jealous. She can’t hit those notes.”

Believing that you are better than others has powerful implications. On the plus side, it can help you feel good about yourself and give you the courage to enter competitions. But believing that you are a “really good” singer when you’re not can lead to public embarrassment on American Idol. Believing that your jokes are funnier than they are make you annoying. Faith in your superior virtue can prompt sanctimonious stances that are more costly than vindicating. Instead, the author want to help inoculate you against errors of self-aggrandizement in which you make an ass of yourself. He also want to help protect you from errors of self-criticism in which you are too critical of your shortcomings, or errors of underconfidence that discourage you from pursuing opportunities that would have been successful.

DRIVERS OF OVERCONFIDENCE

A large literature documents the many circumstances under which the average person thinks that she is better than average. The most frequently cited result comes from a 1981 paper published by the Swedish psychologist Ola Svenson. Svenson asked American drivers to compare their skills with those of other drivers. Svenson found that 93 percent of them claimed their skill put them in the top half of all drivers. This result features as exhibit A in a lineup of evidence showing that people exaggerate the degree to which they are better than others. But let’s consider what exactly Svenson’s respondents were telling him. The author see at least two possibilities.

The first possibility is that they knew they were exaggerating, but were nevertheless trying to impress. Their claims of superiority may have been like telling the person interviewing you that you have what it takes to do the job. Maybe Svenson’s respondents weren’t convinced that they were actually great drivers, but they were trying to give him a positive impression nonetheless. If this explains their overplacement, then clarifying for them that accuracy is the goal ought to reduce overconfidence.

A second possible explanation is that instead of trying to fool others, drivers are simply fooling themselves about how skilled they are. If such self-delusion is at work, then clarifying the standards shouldn’t matter. Delusional drivers will still be overconfident even if we explain how they ought to evaluate their own driving skill. In truth, however, clarifying the standards makes an enormous difference.

One study explored the consequences of clarifying the standards. In the general category of driving skill, participants claimed to be well above average. However, their overplacement reduced substantially when they rated themselves on specific driving skills such as alertness, patience, checking for blind spots, using car mirrors, braking, speeding, and signaling. The author and his colleagues have found, in related work, that although people will claim to be more intelligent than others, inaccurate claims of superiority disappear if the question is clearer. “How did you do, relative to the other participants in this study, on that intelligence test you all just took?” As the standards become clearer, people are less likely to believe that they are better than others. This result highlights the third dimension for Svenson’s overconfident drivers: different drivers have different definitions of skill.

Clarifying what it means to be smart, or honest, or a good driver substantially reduces overplacement, and people’s self-assessments become better calibrated. This implies a simple remedy for overplacement: clear definitions. Clarify what it takes to qualify as a safe driver, and fewer people will think they are better than everyone else. Clear definitions can help in situations as diverse as work performance and grade grubbing.

SUMMIT FEVER

If you are serious about clarifying and quantifying your self-assessments, what is the right way to calibrate your optimism? The author’s advice is that you should strive to believe the truth. This is not to say that you are no better than what you have accomplished. Each of us has an enormous amount of untapped potential. There are great things we have not yet accomplished but could, if we pursued them with committed determination.

Angela Duckworth studied grit – the tendency to persist in the face of setbacks and frustration and to keep trying even when it’s not easy. Her rigorous research has documented the many ways in which grit can contribute to success. Indeed, those who show the most tenacious grit are most likely to succeed at challenging tasks that require a great deal of effort, whether that is completing a difficult program of graduate study, finishing military training, or leading a startup firm. But dogged persistence does not always contribute to success. The advice to show greater persistence is good only for those who otherwise would have given up too quickly. It is terrible advice for those who might persist too much or who are at risk of escalating their commitment to a losing course of action.

Jeffrey Rubin was a professor at Tufts University who studied the escalation of commitment. He was also an avid mountain climber. He had set himself the ambitious goal of climbing all of the one hundred tallest peaks in New England. Rubin had already succeeded in summitting the other ninety-nine peaks, and Mount Katahdin was the only one left when he set out with a  fellow climber, Daniel Lieberfeld, on June 3, 1995. Achieving his goal energized Rubin as they set out. But as they climbed, a dense cloud rolled in. Soon it got bad enough that Lieberfeld recommended they turn around. Rubin was determined to press on. Eventually, Lieberfeld turned back and Rubin continued without him. By persisting, Rubin showed impressive grit. He persisted even though it meant violating the safety rule that recommends climbers never go it alone. He persisted even though it was dangerous.

Jeff Rubin never made it back. Search parties found his body the next day, dead of hypothermia and exposure. A contributing cause was what mountain climbers call “summit fever.” It is the unyielding commitment to reaching the top. The most persistent and tenacious mountain climbers are also the most likely to succumb to summit fever by showing a gritty escalation of commitment to reach the summit.

Mercifully, death is only sometimes the penalty for overconfident persistence. As Jeff Rubin’s research showed, we pay many other costs for escalating our commitment to a losing course of action. Escalation of commitment is an error when it neglects the opportunity costs of continued persistence. What else could you be doing with your investments and your life? Bidders are most likely to bid too much when they enter an auction without thinking ahead about their maximum bids and alternative use for money.

If you want to avoid irrational escalation, the first question you ought to ask yourself is, “What will happen if I persist?” In other words, what is the expected value of persistence? How good would success be, and how much would it cost you? The next question is even more important: “If I give up on pursuing this goal, what would I do instead?” Then determine the expected value of this fallback. You should choose the alternative with the highest expected value. Crucial to this logic is the choice of which alternative would you choose

OPTIMISM’S IMMEDIATE BENEFIT AND DELAYED COSTS

According to Merriam-Webster, optimism is the inclination to anticipate the best possible outcome. This definition is problematically vague, because it ties beliefs to reality. It allows you to be optimistic even when you are underconfident, such as when you believe there is a 95 percent chance you will live another day. In reality, however, that belief would make you underconfident, because you stand a better chance of seeing a new dawn. Conversely, you could be pessimistic by Webster’s definition if you expect only a 5 percent chance you will win the lottery.

We can clarify things by defining overconfident optimism as an exaggerated belief in the likelihood of a desirable outcome. This definition also clarifies the claim that optimistic beliefs make themselves come true. If confidence enables you to jump the chasm or win the race, then your beliefs are not overconfident: they are accurate. Insofar as beliefs can influence outcomes, then, you can enthusiastically endorse the empowering belief. Given the choice between enacting success and enacting failure, the author will go with success any day of the week. But self-fulfilling expectations of your success are not overconfident. They are accurate and they are wise.

It does not follow from this fact that more confidence is better. In fact, confidence can be a self-negating prophecy when performance depends on effort. The political candidates who are surest they are going to win, and who therefore think they do not need to campaign, can thereby decrease their chances. In October 2016, most pollsters gave Hillary Clinton a better chance than Donald Trump of winning the presidency. The forecaster Nate Silver was derided ahead of the election for giving Donald Trump even a 30 percent chance of winning. Sensing a victory at hand, Clinton modified her campaign strategy in the final weeks before the election. She turned her attention from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, states that she thought she had a good chance of winning, and instead campaigned in Arizona and North Carolina, hoping to expand her win into a powerful mandate that would serve as an effective rebuke to Trump’s vulgar and divisive campaign. Clinton lost not only Arizona and North Carolina, but also Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

In the fable of the tortoise and the hare, the hare is so confident that he is faster than the tortoise that he believes he can lollygag and still win. So he takes a break, relaxes, does a little shopping, goes for a massage, stops by his favorite bar for a drink, and takes a nap while the tortoise passes him.

CONSIDER OTHER PERSPECTIVES

Recognize that to gain the perspective that comes from seeing things through another's eyes, you must suspend judgment for a time – only by empathizing can you properly evaluate another point of view.

—@RayDalio

In November 1982, Ray Dalio bet that the US economy was going in the tank. He went on television and predicted an impending depression: “There will be no soft landing. I can say that with absolute certainty, because I know how the markets work.” His investments reflected his certainty. His young hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, bought gold. He expected gold would hold its value, especially when stock markets declined in the presence of inflation. Instead, the US economy experienced, in his words, “the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history.” Stocks went up, the price of gold fell, and Dalio was devastated: “Being so wrong – and especially so publicly wrong – was incredibly numbing and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view.”

Bridgewater lost so much money that it could not afford to meet payroll. Dalio had to let everyone else go, and he remained the company’s only employee. He sold his car and borrowed money from his parents. He came close to giving up and taking a job at a bank. Instead, he tried to learn from his failures in order to do better in the future. And he has. Dalio credits his subsequent success to the hard lessons he learned in 1982. “In retrospect, my crash was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” he wrote. He let go of his attachment to feeling right and sought critical reflection. “How do I know I am right?” he asked himself. Instead of just seeking confirmation of his views, he actively sought out the other independent thinkers who saw things differently. “By engaging them in thoughtful disagreement, I’d be able to understand their reasoning and have them stress-test mine. That way, we can all raise our probability of being right.”

He built a culture at Bridgewater that, in his words, sought to “embrace reality and deal with it.” It advocated radical transparency in the search for truth. His goal was to create an idea meritocracy in which the best ideas, supported by the best evidence, would rise to the top. Everyone, from the lowliest intern up, was encouraged to challenge others’ views using logic and evidence. In order to facilitate open communication and transparency, most meetings were videotaped and available to everyone in the company. Many at Bridgewater credit the company’s success to this unique culture. The company has made some extraordinarily successful investment decisions that have paid off handsomely. Today, Bridgewater is, by many measures, the world’s most successful hedge fund, with something like $160 billion under management.

The practices that Dalio has put in place at Bridgewater represent the sorts of things that research suggests ought to help reduce the natural human tendency toward overprecision. It’s easy to be too sure of your beliefs if you never encounter disagreement. When you confront a smart person who disagrees with you, you can’t both be right. What, exactly, is the heart of the issue on which you disagree? What are the assumptions underlying your differing beliefs? Considering others’ perspectives opens up your mind to consider the ways in which you might be wrong and to critically examine the evidence for your beliefs.

TAKE THE OUTSIDE VIEW

Taking the outside view helped Andy Grove make the most important decision of his career. Grove led Intel during some of its most successful years. It was a time when the company was at the forefront of stupendous improvements in computing technology and processing speed. A 1960s publicity campaign advertised Intel’s famous microprocessors with the tagline “Intel inside.” Some of the ads actually celebrated the microchip manufacturing facilities in which workers wear full-body suits to minimize dust.

Since its founding in 1968, Intel had already built a healthy business selling computer chips that stored data. But Intel’s profits had taken a beating from increased competition, and Grove described 1985 as “a grim and frustrating year.” Rival producers of memory chips were driving down prices and outcompeting Intel. Groove and his colleague Gordon Moore were wrestling with the difficult decision of whether the company should double down on its memory chip business and build a bigger, more efficient factory. Another alternative was to exit the memory business entirely and pivot to focus on building microprocessors. At one critical juncture Groove asked Moore, “If we got kicked out and the board brought a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Moore responded without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” In that instant, Groove and Moore saw what they had to do. Intel refocused its business on microprocessors, and the rest is history.

Taking the outside view is synonymous with considering other people handling a similar situation. It is a useful antidote to the planning fallacy that leads to build overly rosy forecasts of how quickly we will be able to get things done. Daniel Kahneman illustrates this with the story of a committee on which he served. The committee’s job was to design educational curriculum and write a textbook. When they considered the question of how long they should expect the project to take, each of the members of the committee wrote down an estimate. Then Kahneman took the outside view and asked how long it had taken other curriculum committees like theirs to complete their work. The answer: most others had given up in failure. Among the 40 percent that had actually finished, none finished in less than seven years.

By asking about other committees, Kahneman was taking the outside view. Doing so is useful in many circumstances. For instance, talented young athletes can focus on their own passion for the game when considering their prospects for making it in the major leagues. It would help them to take the outside view of their prospects: among all talented and passionate young athletes, only a miniscule minority actually earn a living playing sports. Step outside your first-person perspective and consider the rates of success among others like you. Before you decide to focus on playing football rather than studying for your chemical engineering exam, ask yourself how often others have succeeded at what you are trying to do.

Taking the outside view can also be a helpful antidote to underconfidence. Ask how many successful people experienced challenges early in their careers. How many of them harbored doubts about their ability to make it. Talk to a senior colleague about their early days on the job. You are likely to find that most of them also faced challenges and self-doubt. They may also have useful advice on how best to overcome those challenges.

Sometimes, taking the outside view is made more difficult by the fact that what you want to do has not been tried before. The Wright brothers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world’s first successful airplane,  had few relevant comparison cases when they put their new aircraft to the test in 1903. In situations like this, reason must inform our views with the perspective of an objective outsider. What are the reasons to expect that our project might succeed? What are the reasons to expect failure? Are the risks worth it, and what can you do to protect yourself from disaster? We can be grateful the Wright brothers took the risk, and we can also appreciate that they had the good sense  to do so over sand dunes, where a crash was less likely to kill them.

CONCLUSION

FIND THE MIDDLE WAY

On June 3, 2017, Alex Honnold completed what may be the most stupendous athletic achievement of all time. Honnold was thirty-one years old and already one of the world’s best rock climbers. He climbed some of the world’s most difficult routes, in Mexico, Canada, Chad, Borneo, and Argentina. But the ultimate climb, according to Honnold, is El Capitan – a granite monolith, three thousand feet tall, at the heart of Yosemite National Park. “El Cap” is famous among rock climbers for its size and difficulty. Its first ascent, in 1958, took a team of three expert climbers forty-seven days. Today, with better equipment and extensive knowledge of the route, expert climbers can ascend it in four or five days. When Honnold climbed El Cap, he did it in under four hours.

Rock climbing is a dangerous sport. Injuries and deaths are common. Some life insurers will refuse to cover people who rock climb. For most climbers, getting good at the sport is about getting good at using the protective gear, which includes helmets, ropes, harnesses, carabiners, and anchoring devices. Climbers must know how to tie the knots in ropes that will catch them if they fall. A long climb like El Cap requires hundreds of pounds of equipment that climbers have to haul up. A multiday climb also necessitates supply of food, sleeping platforms, and toilet facilities.

The middle way enables you to see the truth and understand all that you are capable of, and how to achieve it. It helps you steer clear of mistakes that can put you at risk for missed opportunities, embarrassment, and pain.

—Don A. Moore

Alex Honnold is different. What he does is known as free soloing. He leaves behind all the safety gear and climbs alone, without so much as a harness. That means any slip in his four hours climbing El Cap would have cost Honnold his life. Fortunately, he does not slip. His perfect climb was documented in the film Free Solo, which won the academy award for the best documentary of 2018. The film’s most arresting moments are shot from above Honnold with the spectacularly beautiful Yosemite Valley thousands of feet below. Those gorgeous images are tinged with more than a little terror. In the movie, the filmmakers talk about whether their work could possibly distract Honnold at some crucial moment. They imagine the film rolling as they watch their friend fall to his death. There are long stretches in which the cameraman were afraid to look through their lenses.

It is easy to imagine that it must take enormous confidence for Alex Honnold to do what he does. He agrees that confidence is important but disagrees that more confidence is necessarily better. He sees risks for both overestimation and underestimation. “The best energy is a deep and well-founded confidence that you can indeed do the thing that you’re trying to do,” says Honnold. “It’s not enough to think that you can, you have to absolutely know on a  physical and rational level that the free solo you’re attempting is well within your abilities.” Overconfident climbers will take on challenges for which they are not ready. Underconfidence can produce counterproductive risk aversion, such as when climbers tire themselves out by clinging too tightly to a handhold.

You may not be climbing to a narrow ledge thousands of feet up, but you undertake risky activities each and every day. Whether that is driving your car in heavy traffic, making high-stakes investment decisions, or navigating complex relationships, you need to be able to calibrate your confidence. Well-calibrated confidence is the map that can guide your life choices about what to undertake, how to direct your efforts, and what risks might get you killed.

BECOMING PERFECTLY CONFIDENT

The way to wisdom treads the line between overconfidence and underconfidence. It accepts the truth of who we are and what we can achieve. This path of self-acceptance has been described in rich spiritual terms by Buddhists and meditators. It comes with a peace and equanimity that grow from acknowledging the world and our place within it with open eyes and a warm heart. You can regard both yourself and your fellow human beings with loving kindness, even as you see them with clear eyes. This acceptance is entirely compatible with an honest assessment and well-calibrated confidence.

In greatest humility, the author would like to offer a guide to finding the middle way, at least when it comes to calibrating one’s confidence. He cannot tell you how much vodka you should drink, but when it comes to confidence, the middle way is clear, simple, and unambiguous: You should believe the truth. You should believe in yourself insofar as that belief increases your chances of success. If believing that you can leap the chasm, win the race, or wow the crowd allows you to achieve these things, then you absolutely should believe. On the other hand, to believe that you can jump the Grand Canyon is simple fantasy, and no amount of confidence will change that fact.

Well-calibrated confidence will prompt you to act boldly when your actions are most likely to produce a beneficial result, and to act cautiously when the risks are too great.

The author has endeavored to bust the myth that confidence is a matter of gut feelings or self-esteem. Instead, it is a practice to be mastered. He offer research based tools that can help you develop your ability to calibrate and perfect your confidence. With each prediction that you make well, your confidence builds a more solid foundation. This will lead you to the middle way – that Goldilocks zone in which your confidence is just right. The middle way – the only way that is consistent with the wonderful, inspiring truth – balances between excessive and insufficient confidence. And it steers the perilous cliff of overconfidence and the quicksand of underconfidence. It is not easy to find, for it takes honest self-reflection, levelheaded analysis, and the courage to resist wishful thinking. But it is a valiant and rewarding way to live.

Good calibration is also good for your relationships, both professional and intimate. Research by Elizabeth Tenney and Simine Vazire suggests that the healthiest relationships with friends, family members, and romantic partners are supported by accurate self-knowledge. Eli Finkel has studied what makes marriages successful. His advice is to invest in developing an accurate understanding: “Learn about yourself, learn about your partner, learn about the dynamics between the two of you, and then calibrate your expectations accordingly.” This sort of accurate self-knowledge is a cornerstone of good confidence calibration.

Well-calibrated confidence is also good for the broader society. The most dysfunctional and destructive societies are built on lies, delusions, and unquestioning loyalty to dogmatic ideologies. In the words of the historian Yuval Noah Harari: “Modern history has demonstrated that a society of courageous people willing to admit ignorance and raise difficult questions is usually not just more prosperous but also more peaceful than societies in which everyone must unquestionably accept a single answer.”

Pluralistic democracies deserve credit for impressive social, economic, and scientific progress. Democracies with market economies have, over the long term, become more tolerant, prosperous, healthy and peaceful, even as they have endured vigorous public debates and energetic disagreements about optimal public policies and the nature of a good society.

For societies, organizations, groups, and individuals, perfection is unattainable. Nevertheless, it will always be a goal worth striving toward. Seeking the middle way strives toward perfectibility. It takes courage, because the truth is not always easy to uncover, nor is it always pleasing to behold.

Well-calibrated confidence is exceptionally rare. It requires that you understand yourself and what you are capable of achieving. It requires that you know your limitations and what opportunities are not worth pursuing. It requires that you act confidently based on what you know, even if it means taking a stand, making a bet, or speaking up for a view that is unpopular. But it also requires the willingness to consider the possibility that you are wrong, to listen to evidence, and to change your mind. It requires an uncommon combination of courage and humility. It takes the perfect amount of confidence.

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